XXVI
THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN
The most overdressed and overindulged children are those whose parents were poor in their youth. The most undisciplined and uncontrolled children are those whose parents were reared in strict and stern households. When you see a little girl playing around in a befrilled lace and embroidered dress and silk stockings, you do not need to be told that at her age her mother wore gingham and went barefooted. When you see a young boy splitting the road open in an imported car you know that when his father was a lad he trudged on foot to the factory with his dinner pail on his arm. When you see ill-mannered young people who smoke and drink and carouse and recognize no law but their own pleasure; who run roughshod over the rights of others; who have no respect for age, and who either patronize their parents or treat them with contempt, you know that they are the offspring of fathers and mothers who were given few privileges when they were young and who were coerced by determined and strong-handed parents into walking the straight and narrow path.
Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “I don’t want my children to be denied things as I was in my childhood”; “I don’t want my children to have to work as I did when I was a child”; “I don’t want my children to be suppressed and tyrannized over as I was when I was young.”
Indeed, so common is this feeling that sometimes it seems that the present generation is being brought up by the rule of contraries, and that the only fixed idea that many parents have is to rear their sons and daughters exactly opposite from the way they were reared; to give them everything they didn’t have and to let them do everything they were not permitted to do.
There is something very pathetic in this. It speaks so eloquently of the ungratified cravings of childhood, of the weariness of little hands that never knew any playtime; of the thwarted desires for pleasure at the time of life when one is mad for amusement, and it is easy to understand why parents whose own childhood was stinted and dull should want to lap their children in luxury and give them all the fun they missed. But in trying to save their children the hardships they have gone through, they are also cutting their sons and daughters off from the experiences that make such men and women as they are themselves—the kind of men and women who rise from poverty to fortune and from obscurity to fame. For it is not in the lap of ease that successes are made. It takes struggle and self-denial and discipline to form character.
That is why we have the proverb that it is three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. The poor man by energy and industry piles up a fortune, but because he has had to work and save in his youth he teaches his children to be idlers and wasters and spenders, and they run through their fortune and their children must go to work again at the bottom of the wheel. Probably the children of the self-made man have naturally just as much ability as he has, but they nearly always amount to nothing, because their foolish father has denied them all the advantages he had when he was young and he has enervated them with indulgences.
People who have been brought up in puritanic homes almost invariably let their children run wild. They put no restraints upon them. They demand nothing of them. They resent the lack of liberty they had in their youth, and so they give their children license. They do not seem to realize that the system at which they rail made good citizens, instead of the hoodlums which they are turning out. They do not reflect that they owe their health and strength to clean living; that because they were made to do things they formed habits of industry; that because they were made to do hard things just because it was a duty to do them they developed the grit which keeps men and women from being quitters; that because they were taught obedience and self-control they became captains of their own souls and masters of their fate, instead of being the playthings of their passions and emotions.
They must know, if they stop to think at all, how much better fitted they were to meet life, how much more secure they were of happiness than are their children, who have never been taught to do anything they do not want to do, or to deny themselves the gratification of any appetite or desire.
For life doesn’t change. The world does not alter and no matter how much we would like to soft-pad existence for our children and stand between them and every hardship and sorrow, we cannot do it. At the last, in one way or another, they must come to grips with fate, and when they do the weak and dissolute will perish. The spendthrifts will come to want. The self-seekers will have their hearts broken.
Of course, it is a great temptation for parents to lavish upon their children everything that money will buy, and it is much easier to give strong-willed youngsters their heads and let them go their own gait than it is to hold them in check, but that way destruction lies for the child. And this is something that parents, who are denying their children the struggle of life that made them what they are, might well reflect upon.