PARENTS AND CHILDREN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23213, 10 June 1937, Page 19

PARENTS AND CHILDREN

THE DUTY OF THE HOME MAKER TO SOCIETY Dear Phillida— Sometimes there is an urge in a person to say something so loudly that everybody will hear it because it seems so very important. Soap-box oratory is one way of doing it, and a letter to a newspaper is another. As I am shy of publicity, I choose the latter, and hide my identity behind a nom de plume. , It is a recognised fact that a cure for much of our present social ills would be more friendship; but does everybody realise that friendship should begin first of all in the home? The beauty of friendship is being able to unburden oneself; to say what one wants to say; and to know that it is absolutely safe to do so. Someone said in an interview once: "The test of friendship is that it should be comfortable "—which means that anything can be expressed; that there never have to be any poses; that everything will be accepted in the spirit in which it is given; and that., no matter what happens, the friendship will persist, just because it is friendship. Now should that not be the sort of relationship existing between parents and children? Some people demand that parents should understand their children; but to be able to do that, parents would have to be gods. Yet I do think that they have a definite duty towards their children, and that it has nothing whatever to do with clothing, feeding, and educating them. It has to do with loVe.

I think that, first, two people who marry should love each other so much that they want to create children in each other's likeness and not merely to satisfy their own paternal or maternal instincts or because they happen to be living together; and that, after their children are born, they should love them as dearly—though differently of course—as they love each other. If those two simple but tremendous duties could be fulfilled, the whole tone of family life —and consequently social life—would be altered.

A child asks nothing of its parents but love—not sentimental, demonstrative love, but love that is a neverfailing fount of affection, no matter what happens, to which it may go as often as it will. Parents too often think that all they have to do is " bring up their children properly." But that is really only secondary. To love them is what comes foremost. Where there is such love there is also friendship: Friends may criticise and even fight each other, but it makes no difference if they are really friends. And a child should know that, though its parents may punish it, underneath there is not the slightest question whether or not they still love it. Life is difficult enough for anybody, but especially so for a child starting out on it. A child's nature demands love and friendship from its parents, as a plant demands light and warmth from the sun; and if it does not receive them its outlook will, to some extent, always be warped. The root cause of the lack of friendship between parents and children is marrying without real love, and that opens up wide vistas, for love has so many names that all who marry think they do so for love, though, as time often shows, it was not love at all. But if they do not love each other, they will never know how to love their children. For the best parental love is less active than passive; a still, deep pool of never-alter-ing solace to which the child, struggling to find its bearings in a strange and often hostile universe, may go for succour and wisdom.

A child wants to be able to regard its father as the moit trustworthy of men who will answer all questions truthfully and talk over all problems sensibly; to see its mothe. as the most loving of women, never molly-coddling or over-powering, but always there in the background, unobtrusively suggesting and guiding; and to feel that in each it has a perfect friend. If a child can do this, it will be able to devote its energies to growing up naturally. Otherwise there will be mental and emotional strain far too acute for one of its tender years and very much unhappiness. Unfairly handicapped, the child will find that growing up is a. ghastly struggle instead of something so easy that it can be accomplished ■ unconsciously, and its whole attitude to life will be suspicious, fearful, and unfriendly as a result of its home environment. I am not blaming parents. They have their own troubles to face, and do their best, I am sure. When they err in their duty it is because of not knowing any better. But I do think that people who intend to marry and have children should know some of the psychological results of ignorance and realise that the best Christian attitude that can be presented to a family is a realisation of that oldest o p all sayings: "God is love." In this world we seem to get what we ask for and be repaid in our own coin. From friendlv homes come friendly people, and friendly people make other people friendly and awaken a natural* feeling of goodwill and fellowship—those two elements so necessary, but so lacking at present in national and international society. Could not those founders of society, the home-makers, do something towards fostering the idea?—l am, etc., Practical Idealist.