There are still not a few parents who are possessed of the old-fashioned idea that their children belong to them, that they have a proprietary right in their own sons and daughters. Just now there is thought of a father who is intelligent, in many ways above the average man, but who seems to regard his twenty-three-year-old daughter as a sort of chattel. Being a widower, he needs her services, so he would employ her at the least possible wages, or none, to take charge of the home, rear the two or three smaller children, and cook and keep house for himself and three or four hired men. The best excuse that may be offered for this man’s attitude toward his daughter is sheer ignorance of the true meaning of the situation. But such treatment of a mature daughter is little short of cruelty. This young woman should have every possible opportunity just now to prepare herself for the future. Her conduct for the present may even have the appearance of being somewhat selfish in order that her future well-being and that of those dependent upon her may be safe-guarded.
Further details of the foregoing case need not be given. The issue to be made out of it is this: The parent who is doing the fair and square thing by his daughter not only trains her to work and then safeguards her life against an over-amount of work, but he also sees to it that the labor she performs is contributive to her enjoyment, to the strengthening of her character, and to the perfection of her life for the future. Parents are justified in using every possible means as contributory to the future well-being of their growing daughters, and all this for the sake of the generations yet unborn. Thus, perhaps without realizing the fact at all, the former may return to the race life that measure of assistance which they themselves received.
Difficult to make a schedule
It is difficult to make out a schedule of hours for the growing girl as we did for the boy, but the former chapter may be taken as a general guide. As with the boy, so with the girl, the first step in discipline is that of securing a willing obedience. Then the tasks may be assigned in accordance with the girl’s age and strength. There is no good reason for attempting to get work out of the child through a make-believe policy of play. Children had better be made to understand from the first that the world we live in is constructed largely through work; and that labor is honorable and may even be made pleasurable.
“I should rather do the work myself than be bothered with trying to get the children to do it,” is a very common expression, and one which indicates an erroneous idea of the problem we are considering. So long as parents put their children at the tasks merely for the sake of getting the tasks done, the children will suffer as a consequence. But if the thought of the child’s need of the discipline coming from work be uppermost, then, the results are likely to be wholesome.
Teach the girl self-supremacy
One of the greatest problems of the future of the race is involved in the fact that many thousands of the best young women in the land—young women who are well fitted to be the mothers of a better race of human beings than we now have—are choosing an independent calling for themselves. It is the author’s belief that one of the most tragic experiences known to any considerable portion of the American people is this gradual starvation of the maternal instinct usually necessary in the case of the well-sexed young woman of the class just mentioned.
Plate XXII.
