Evidently the drift of modern life is away from this state of things. The decay of settled traditions, embracing not only those relating directly to the family but also the religious and economic ideas by which these were supported, has thrown us back upon the unschooled impulses of human nature. In entering upon marriage the personal tastes of the couple demand gratification, and, right or wrong, there is no authority strong enough to hold them in check. Nor, if upon experience it turns out that personal tastes are not gratified, is there commonly any insuperable obstacle to a dissolution of the tie. Being married, they have children so long as they find it, on the whole, agreeable to their inclinations to do so, but when this point is reached they proceed to exercise choice by refusing to bear and rear any more. And as the spirit of choice is in the air, the children are not slow to inhale it and to exercise their own wills in accordance with the same law of impulse their elders seem to follow. “Do as you please so long as you do not evidently harm others” is the only rule of ethics that has much life; there is little regard for any higher discipline, for the slowly built traditions of a deeper right and wrong which cannot be justified to the feelings of the moment.
Among the phases of this domestic “individualism” or relapse to impulse are a declining birth-rate among the comfortable classes, some lack of discipline and respect in children, a growing independence of women accompanied by alleged neglect of the family, and an increase of divorce.
The causes of decline in the birth-rate are clearly psychological, being, in general, that people prefer ambition and luxury to the large families that would interfere with them.
Freedom of opportunity diffuses a restless desire to rise in the world, beneficent from many points of view but by no means favorable to natural increase. Men demand more of life in the way of personal self-realization than in the past, and it takes a longer time and more energy to get it, the consequence being that marriage is postponed and the birth-rate in marriage deliberately restricted. The young people of the well-to-do classes, among whom ambition is most developed, commonly feel poorer in regard to this matter than the hand-workers, so that we find in England, for instance, that the professional men marry at an average age of thirty-one, while miners marry at twenty-four. Moreover, while the hand-working classes, both on the farms and in towns, expect to make their children more than pay for themselves after they are fourteen years old, a large family thus becoming an investment for future profit, the well-to-do, on the contrary, see in their children a source of indefinitely continuous expense. And the trend of things is bringing an ever larger proportion of the people within the ambitious classes and subject to this sort of checks.
The spread of luxury, or even comfort, works in the same direction by creating tastes and habits unfavorable to the bearing and rearing of many children. Among those whose life, in general, is hard these things are not harder than the rest, and a certain callousness of mind that is apt to result from monotonous physical labor renders people less subject to anxiety, as a rule, than those who might appear to have less occasion for it. The joy of children, the “luxury of the poor,” may also appear brighter from the dulness and hardship against which it is relieved. But as people acquire the habit, or at least the hope, of comfort they become aware that additional children mean a sacrifice which they often refuse to make.
These influences go hand-in-hand with that general tendency to rebel against trouble which is involved in the spirit of choice. In former days women accepted the bearing of children and the accompanying cares and privations as a matter of course; it did not occur to them that anything else was possible. Now, being accustomed to choose their life, they demand a reason why they should undergo hardships; and since the advantages which are to follow are doubtful and remote, and the suffering near and obvious, they are not unlikely to refuse. Too commonly they have no inwrought principles and training that dispose them to submit.
The distraction of choice grievously increases the actual burden and stress upon women, for it is comparatively easy to put up with the inevitable. What with moral strain of this sort and the anxious selection among conflicting methods of nurture and education it possibly costs the mother of to-day more psychical energy to raise four children than it did her grandmother to raise eight.
It would be strange if children were not hospitable to the modern sentiment that one will is as good as another, except as the other may be demonstrably wiser in regard to the matter in hand. Willing submission to authority as such, or sense of the value of discipline as a condition of the larger and less obvious well-being of society, is hardly to be expected from childish reasoning, and must come, if at all, as the unconscious result of a training which reflects general sentiment and custom. It is institutional in its nature, not visibly reasonable.
But the child, in our day, finds no such institution, no general state of sentiment such as exists in Japan and existed in our own past, which fills the mind from infancy with suggestions that parents are to be reverenced and obeyed; nor do parents ordinarily do much to instil this by training. Probably, so great is the power of general opinion even in childhood, they would hardly succeed if they tried, but as a rule they do not seriously try. Being themselves accustomed to the view that authority must appeal to the reason of the subject, they see nothing strange in the fact that their children treat them as equals and demand to know “Why?”
The fond attention which parents give to their children is often of a sort to overstimulate their self-consequence. This constantly asking them, What would you like? Shall we do this or that? Where do you want to go? and so on, though amiable on our part, does the child little good. The old practice of keeping children at a distance, whatever its evils, was more apt to foster reverence.