IV
TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER
Are you teaching your children to love and admire their father? Do you ceaselessly point out to your children their father’s good qualities? Do you hold their father up as a hero before your children’s eyes? Do you teach your children to appreciate their father? If you do not, you are not giving your husband a fair deal, nor a run for his money. Fatherhood calls for just as many sacrifices as motherhood does. The only coin in which these can be repaid is affection and gratitude, and if he is defrauded of these he is poor indeed.
From the time the first baby is born the average man becomes literally the slave of his family. He sells himself into bondage so that his children may live soft; that they may have advantages that he never had in his youth; that they may enjoy luxuries he never knew. He works overtime and grows prematurely old and bent, that his boys may go to college and belong to smart clubs and have automobiles, and that his daughters may attend fashionable schools, and dress like fashion plates, and go in the right circles.
It is father who stays at home and works through hot summers and cold winters, when the family goes to Europe. It is father who wears the shabbiest clothes. It is father who has the worst room and the smallest closet space in the home. The percentage of money that father spends on himself and in gratifying his own personal tastes and desires is negligible. Virtually all the money he has earned by a lifetime of hard toil has been lavished on his family.
Whether this pays or not, whether all of this labor and anxiety and self-denial have been worthless or not, depends altogether on his children’s attitude toward him. If they love him; if they are grateful to him; if they appreciate what he has done for them, it is the best investment that a man ever made, and it makes him richer than any millionaire. But if his children are indifferent and callous; if they take all that he has done for them as no more than their due, and without even a “thank you”; if they see in him nothing but a shabby little man who hasn’t been particularly successful as a moneymaker, then all his life work goes for nothing. His sacrifices are without reward. He is bankrupt in heart.
Now, the attitude of children toward their father is almost entirely determined by their mother; and whether they look upon him as a superior being to be adored and worshiped, or merely as a cash register that they can punch whenever they want any money, depends altogether upon what she has taught them. There are women who teach their children to hate and fear their father by making him an ogre to them. When the children are bad the little culprits are always threatened with what their father will do to them. The mother thus makes the father the hanging judge who inflicts punishment on the small sinners.
In this way the mother fills the child’s imagination with a picture of its father as of some dread creature who is always lying in wait to chastise him, and who could never have any sympathy or understanding with him, and with whom he could never have any possible companionship.
“I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home,” is the curse that millions of women lay between their children and their husbands, and that seals the children’s hearts forever against the fathers who have given them their very life blood.
There are other women who teach their children to regard their fathers simply as money-making machines that exist solely for their own use and benefit. What the children want they must have at any cost to father, and mother undertakes to nag it out of him. The children see that mother has no consideration for father and they grow up to have none.
She never tells them that they must not even ask for something they desire because business is bad and their father is harassed and worried about money. She never tells them that they must stay at home and let father have a little trip, because he is sick and nerve-worn. She lets them wring the last penny out of him with no more feeling for him than if he were some sort of automatic device worked by her for supplying their desires and needs.
Other women teach their children to despise their fathers by always criticizing them and calling attention to their faults. They are forever telling the children that their fathers are lacking in enterprise, that they are poor business men, that they are too easy and let people take advantage of them, that they are high-tempered and hard to get along with, that they have this and that weakness, until the child’s mind is thoroughly poisoned with the idea that his father amounts to nothing and his opinions are not to be respected.
Very few women ever deliberately set themselves to teach their children to love and appreciate their fathers. Very few women ever try to make their children see their fathers as heroes who, for their sakes, are fighting the battle of life as bravely and gallantly as any knight of old. Very few women teach their children to show any gratitude to the fathers who have sacrificed so much for them. Why so many women fail in this important duty is partly through carelessness and a lack of thought, but mostly because of an unconscious mother jealousy. They want to be first with their children and monopolize their love. But it is a cruel thing to the child, and to the father. It robs them both of so much joy in each other that they miss.