LXIV
A FATHER’S INFLUENCE
There is no subject under the sun of which men take such a distorted view as they do of a mother’s influence. Romancers have glorified it, poets have idealized it, musicians have sung it until men have honestly come to think that mothers have a practical monopoly of their children and the sole duty and privilege of shaping their lives. Even fathers seem to think that fathers count for nothing and that all they are good for is paying the bills. In the family circle they take a back seat and let mother run the show. It is Mother’s Day that is celebrated with pomp and flowers and beating the cymbals. Nobody notices Father’s Day—perhaps because the first of the month is always Father’s Day and it comes around so often.
No one would belittle mother’s influence. For good or evil it is all powerful. But it is all powerful because father is so often too stupid or too lazy or too careless or too much absorbed in his business to do his duty to his children by helping to mold their characters. He dodges his responsibility. He passes the buck to mother and salves his conscience with a platitude about a mother’s sacred influence, which in his innermost self he recognizes for the hokum it is. For mother’s influence does not always work for righteousness. Motherhood works no miracles. Bearing a baby does not put brains and wisdom in a hen-minded woman’s head. It does not give a shallow woman depth. It does not make a narrow, prejudiced woman broad and tolerant. It does not make a fool woman wise.
Yet all around us we see men who would not trust their wives’ judgment about anything else on earth, turning over to them their children’s immortal souls. They know their wives to be silly and ignorant—without vision, without the ability to see or understand anything beyond their own little circle—yet they let these morons shape their children’s lives. They let them form their children’s ideals and set their standards. They let them decide on the schools their children shall attend, the churches they shall join, the people with whom they associate.
Yet the very men who trust their children to weak and incompetent and unintelligent wives to rear would not dream of permitting a weak, incompetent, unintelligent partner to run their business. They are too well aware of the value of their personal advice and supervision and of the need of their strong and expert hands on the wheel. Men blindly subscribe to the faith that a mother’s influence is bound to be good, especially upon her daughters, yet a moment’s thought would show them how fallacious such a belief is.
A woman can only give out what she has. She can only try to make her daughters what she is. And unless a man wants his daughters to be just the sort of woman their mother is, he cannot safely leave them in her hands.
It is true that there are not many women who deliberately bring up their girls to be immoral and start their feet on the downward path. But there are thousands upon thousands of mothers whose influence upon their daughters is vicious, because they inculcate in them their own low ideals of honor and honesty. They teach them by precept and example to evade every duty of wifehood and motherhood, and from their very infancy up they instil into them a greed and selfishness that wrecks the happiness of all who come in contact with them. Such are the mothers who teach their daughters how to lie and cheat, how to buy on credit the finery they cannot afford, how to kill a man with their extravagance. Such mothers are those whose favorite maxim is that what a husband doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him. Such a mother is the one who, not long ago, I heard say to her young daughter who was getting married: “Don’t tie yourself down with babies. Go about and amuse yourself and have a good time, and if your husband doesn’t like it he can lump it.”
When a man has that kind of a wife—and no man can be so afflicted without knowing it—he does a criminal thing when he leaves his girls to their mother’s influence. It is his bounden duty to use his influence to correct hers as far as possible. Little as men seem to realize it, children nearly always listen with far more respect to what their fathers say than they do to what their mothers say. For the child knows intuitively that the father has had a broader experience of life than the mother has. It knows that the father goes out into the world and does battle with it every day and that he knows from experience the things about which mother vaguely theorizes. It knows that father knows the rules and how to play the game.
Hence when a man really makes any attempt to develop his children’s characters he finds them as clay in his hands, ready to respond to his slightest touch. It is only when father merely uses his influence as a veto power that it is negligible. That a boy needs his father’s hand in directing and controlling him at the critical time of his life and a father’s wisdom to steer him along the right course is universally recognized, but I often think that a girl needs it even more. For a girl needs to be taught the things that life teaches a man. She needs to be taught to be straightforward and honest and to live up to her contracts, that she must give as well as take in life and that she must have the courage and the grit to carry on when things are hard instead of turning quitter and to make the best of a bad bargain. Many a divorce would have been avoided and many a home that is now broken up, kept intact if a father’s influence over his little girl had made her a good sport, instead of mother’s influence developing a yellow streak in her.
A mother’s influence is a great thing, but it needs to be backed up by father’s. That is why God gave every child two parents instead of one.