From Kitchen to Garret: Hints for young householders

by J. E. Panton

Now, granted that this is not an isolated case—and, judging from a large personal experience of ‘other folks’ children,’ I venture boldly to state that this is the rule and not the exception—I as boldly remark that the present manner of dealing with the genus homo as expressed in the schoolboy is entirely a wrong one, and, waxing bolder yet, I say that the grown-up youth evolved from such an education as most lads obtain nowadays is so emphatically unsatisfactory that I am quite sure some radical change should be made in the way we bring up our boys.

Born into a home where their sisters are sheltered and cared for until they leave it for one of their own, from their very birth they are treated in an entirely different manner. As little mites they govern the house, because they are of the superior sex, and they are finally sent away from home into the great world of school, where, neither by age nor experience, can they be in the least fitted for the warfare, or enabled by careful and judicious training to hold their own, or to choose between the good and evil that is so freely offered them there. Small boys are herded with big ones, who alternately bully and confide in them; tender and sentimental fancies are derided; and the word ‘manly’ is made to express ferocity, cruelty, uncleanness, and a thousand and one awful things that, when we discover our children are aware of, we wonder feebly when and how they have acquired their knowledge.

What wonder the return of the boys is dreaded, when they come as strangers into a home where God placed them for the careful training, the unceasing supervision, of body and mind? How can a boy join in and make part of a circle that for half or even three parts of the year is complete without him? How can he respect and appreciate laws and routine that are entirely different to all he has been accustomed to more than two thirds of his time? And how can he help being spoiled, selfish, and tyrannical, when the very shortness of his residence under the home-roof is made an excuse for pampering him and making every one, man, woman, and child, give way to him, because, poor dear lad, he is only at home for the holidays, while the others are always there?

There is no doubt in my mind that boys ought to go more into the world and see more of human nature than girls need do; but with all my strength I would maintain that the ordinary boarding-school plan is a great and hideous mistake. By all means let them go to school all day; but let them at night return home, where the mother’s eye can see how they are, and how they progress with their lessons, and to insure them that best of all feeling for any one—the certain knowledge that home is home to them in the fullest sense of the word; and that, far from being outsiders or honoured guests, feared as well as honoured, they are part and parcel of the family, and bound to give and take, sharing the rough with the smooth, and helping in every way they can to aid the weaker vessels of the family, and becoming gentlemen in the widest sense of the word.

Of course, parents who keep their boys at home have little time for rest, and cannot be incessantly in the very middle of society’s whirl; but is any price too large to pay for the souls of our children—any sacrifice too great to insure that one’s boys are to the fullest degree given the benefit of our knowledge and our shielding care? And shall we not be repaid for anything it may cost us in the wear-and-tear of our brain-power if, instead of the stage-door-haunting, toothpick-gnawing ‘masher’ of the present day, we rear a race of manly, God-fearing, home-loving youths, who may restore the age of chivalry and the strong, pure, tender-hearted men that were once England’s boast?

Like most problems presented to our minds as we go through the world, there are here other sides to contemplate beyond the one we have just attempted to sketch. For there are homes where the boy’s one chance of salvation is given by a good training at school; where the vanity of the mother and the evil example of the father are worse than anything else can possibly be; and where the atmosphere is so pernicious that an honest and true-hearted schoolmaster dreads to send his pupils home, for they may once more acquire habits that he is only just beginning really to eradicate. There are also intensely weak and foolish parents who, not able to refuse themselves any gratification, cannot debar their children from having their own way, and who, not having been trained themselves, cannot train others; and there are yet others who send off their children to rid themselves of the clear-eyed tormentors who ask such tiresome questions, and will follow the example of their parents, not content to be put off with the trite remark that grown-up folks can do and say things little people would be severely punished and reprimanded for doing and saying.

Still, notwithstanding these sides to the picture, we can boldly state that if boys were invariably part of a household, if their parents accept their responsibilities and see they have no right to pay some careless person—any one, in fact, who wants to make money by teaching—to take their responsibilities off their hands, we should very soon have a different state of things as regards the male sex as a whole; and at all events we should cease to dread the holidays and speak of our sons as ‘those dreadful boys.’

But the selfishness of the ordinary parent, and the cupidity of the orthodox schoolmaster, whose real profits are made from the boarders, and who, therefore, discourages to the best of his power the idea of home-boarders, are twin giants in the way of those who only ask to be allowed to bring up their own children in their own way, and I can but look forward and hope for other mothers all that I have only been able to demand for myself in part, and that a very small part of all I would have wished for the boys, who, once given over to school, only return for good for a few moments, as it were, on their way to the real battle of life, which soon engulfs them entirely, and so we never really have our boys our own, nor are allowed to train them for ourselves at a time when we alone should be able to do it satisfactorily, because we alone should understand them best and know what they inherit mentally and bodily; in fact, the nursery and schoolroom once passed through, we have lost our children, and have only now to think how we can make home happy for them until they leave us for their own homes, which will depend on our early training whether they are happy ones or not.

And indeed one of the most abstruse of all our numerous domestic problems is shadowed forth in the words ‘quite grown-up,’ for there are few fathers and mothers who realise, it seems to me, that their children have actually passed through nursery and schoolroom, and are in deed and truth quite grown-up, and in consequence of this the domestic relations become strained, and home ceases to be the pleasant retreat it used to be from the throng and turmoils of the outside world.

There are most certainly households where the relations are more than strained, where open hostility replaces the old-time affection, and from whence sons rush to ‘the bad,’ and daughters marry the first man that asks them, simply because they wish for freedom and to be able to do as they like.