Study of Child Life

by Marion Foster Washburne

FATHERS

And now comes the editor of these lessons and accuses me of neglecting the fathers! Nothing in this world could be farther from my thoughts. Not only do I agree with him that "all ordinary children have fathers, and it might be well to put in a paragraph;" but I am cheerfully willing to write a whole book on the subject, provided that a mere modicum of readers can be assured me. I fairly ache to talk to fathers, having a really great ideal of them, and whenever a class of them can be induced to take up a correspondence course I shall be glad to conduct it.

Joking aside, however, I truly feel that the saddest lack many of our children have to suffer is the lack of fathers; and the saddest lack our men have to suffer is the lack of children. So little are most men awake to this subject that I am perfectly convinced that much of the prevalent "race suicide" is due to their objections to a large family, rather than to their wives'. Upon them comes the burden of support. They get few of the joys which belong to children, and nearly all of the woes. Seldom do they share the games of their offspring, or their happy times; and almost always the worst difficulties are thrust upon them for solution. Not that they often solve them! How can we expect it?

There is Edgar growing very untruthful and defiant. We have concealed all the first stages of the disease for fear of bothering poor tired papa. At last it reaches such a height that we can conceal it no longer. We fling the desperate boy at the very head of the bewildered father, and then have turns of bitter disappointment because the remedies that are applied may be so much cruder, even, than our own. Here is a boy who gets close to his father only to find the proximity very uncomfortable; and a father who becomes acquainted with his son only through the ugly revelations of his worst faults.

Not but that the fathers are somewhat to blame, too. Without urging by us, they ought, of course to take a spontaneous interest in the lives for which they are responsible. They ought to, and they often do; but the interest is sometimes ill-advised, and consequently unwelcome. There are fathers whose interest is a most inconvenient thing. When they are at home, they run everything, growl at everything, upset, as like as not, all that the mother has been trying to do during the day. I know wives who are distinctly glad to encourage their husbands in the habit of lunching down-town, so that they can have a little room for their own peculiar form of activity. And maybe we all have times of sympathizing with the woman in this familiar story: There was a man once who never left the house without a list of directions to his wife as to how she should manage things during his absence.

"Better have the children carry umbrellas this morning; it's going to rain," said he, as he went out of the door. "Be sure to put on their rubbers. And since the baby is so croupy I'd get out his winter flannels, if I were you."

"Yes, dear," said the patient wife. "Make your mind easy. I'll take just as good care of them as if they were my own children." Of course this is an extreme case.

There are other fathers whose whole idea of the parental relation seems to be indulgence. No system of discipline, however mild, can be carried out when such a man wins the children's hearts and ruins their dispositions. It is he, isn't it? (I don't quite recollect the tale) who was sent, after death, to the warm regions, there to expiate his many sins of omission. And his adoring children, who had been hauled to heaven by the main strength, let us say, of their mother, found that the only thing they could do for him was to call out celestial hose company number one and ask them to play awhile upon the overheated apartments of poor tired papa.

The truth is—sit close and let no man hear what we say!—that these fathers are much what we, the mothers, make them. If, under the mistaken idea of saving father from all the worries of the children, we hurry the youngsters off to bed before he comes home in the evening, conceal our heart-burnings over them, do our correspondence-school work in secret and solitude, meditate in the same fashion over plans for their upbringing, talk to our neighbors but never to him about the daily troubles, how can we expect any man on earth, no matter how susceptible of later angelic growth, to become a wise and devoted father? Tired or not, he is a father, not a mere bread-winner. Whether he likes it at the moment or not, it is for his soul's health for him to enter into the full life of his family, including those problems which are at the very heart of it, after his day of grinding, and very likely unloving, work at the office. Here love enters to interpret, to soften, to make all principles live. Here alone he can give himself to those gentler forms of judgment which are necessary as much to the completion of his own character as to the happiness and welfare of his wife and children. Someone has said that we wrong our friends when we ask nothing of them; and certainly it is true that we wrong our husbands when we do not demand big and splendid things of them.

That word demand troubles me a little. So many women demand—and demand terribly! But what they demand is indulgence, sympathy, interest—I think sometimes that they crave a man's utter absorption in themselves much as a man craves strong drink. It is their form of intoxication. Such demanding is not, of course, what I mean. Demand nothing for yourself, beyond simple justice. Not love, for that flies at the very sound of demand, and dies before nagging. But demand for the man himself, call upon his nobler qualities, and don't let him palm off on you his second-best. Many a man is loved and honored by his business associates whose wife and children never catch a glimpse of the finer side of him. Demand the exercise of these fine traits in the home. Demand that he be a fine man in the eyes of his children as in the eyes of his friends. Be sure that he will rise to the occasion with a splendid sense of having, now, a home that is a home, of having a wife who is wived to the man he likes best to be.