“Well, you’ve always overruled me,” Mrs. Dodge returned, defensively. “What mistake do you think you’ve made?”
“I think we’ve probably been wrong from the start,” he said. “Looking back over all our struggles with Lily, it’s begun to seem to me that we never once accomplished anything whatever by opposing her.”
“What! Don’t you realize that she’s still a child, and that children have to be opposed for their own good?”
“Not when they’re nineteen, and it’s opposition about their love affairs or their friendships,” he returned, frowning; and he continued to walk up and down the room, his hands clasped behind him. “I mean open opposition, of course. I’ve begun to believe it never does the slightest good.”
“Why doesn’t it?” she asked, challengingly. “Are mothers and fathers supposed to sit aside with folded hands and calmly watch their children ruin their lives?”
He shook his head again, and sighed. “Sometimes it seems to me that fathers and mothers might just as well do that very thing. Certainly you and I could have saved ourselves a great waste of voice and gesticulation ever since Lily’s babyhood if we’d never opposed her. And so far as I can see, results would have been just the same. Suppose we go on struggling with her about this Gleason nuisance; trying to keep him away from her, arguing with her, and all the rest of it. Will it change her in the slightest? Will it do any good to anybody?”
“You mean to say that we have no effect whatever upon our own child?”
“No,” he answered. “We might have an effect. That’s just what I’m afraid of.”
“You mean we shouldn’t keep on telling Lily the truth about Price Gleason?” his wife cried, incredulously.
“Yes; I’ve almost come to that conclusion. It doesn’t seem to her to be the truth about him when we tell it. She only sees it as an attack on him. We spoil our own cause by making her his defender, and a defender can’t help idealizing what he defends. I’ve come to believe that’s where we parents make a lot of our worst mistakes—we’re always throwing our children into the camp of our enemies. And in particular, when a girl is showing signs of being in love with a worthless young poseur, like this Gleason, I believe that all our denouncing and arguing and bossing only puts a glamour about the fellow in the girl’s eyes, and makes her more certain she’s in love with him and wants to marry him.”