“To know a child is to love it, and the more we know it, the better we love it.

“To know, love, and serve childhood is the most satisfying, soul-filling of all human activities.

“It rests on the oldest and strongest and sanest of all instincts.

“It gives to our lives a rounded-out completeness as does no other service.

“No other object is so worthy of service and sacrifice; and the fullness of the measure in which this is rendered is the very best test of a nation and race and a civilization.”

—G. Stanley Hall.

Mothercraft is the skilful, practical doing of all that is involved in the nourishing and training of children, in a sympathetic, happy, religious spirit. It is not merely the care of the little baby; that is a very small, though significant, part. Its practice is not dependent upon physical parenthood, but is part of the responsibility of every woman who has to do with children as teacher, nurse, friend, or household associate. It is no more an instinct than is gardening or building. It is not merely being with children. Its requisite is vital working knowledge of the fundamental principles of biology, hygiene, economics, psychology, education, arts. It is mothering—that oldest, steadiest, most satisfactory vocation to women always and everywhere—made intelligent and efficient and joyous.

Mothercraft cannot be learned simply from books any more than can music, agriculture, carpentry, dentistry. The most important factor in the learning of mothercraft is the daily intelligent association with the children in their natural environment of home. A hospital with sick children is a place to learn its pathological phases.

No one of intelligence will dispute the theory that the most important period in the child’s life is the first seven years. It is in these years that the foundation of his physical life is settled (or unsettled); that the lifelong habits are formed; that the prejudices and the bases of his spiritual and social life are laid. The “gates of gifts”—his potentialities—are closed at birth, possibly when his parents are chosen. Whether one is an advocate of heredity or of environment as the most influential factor in the life of the individual, none will now gainsay that both the heredity and the environment of every individual can be controlled, and that each of these factors may be made vastly more efficient through the high ideals, the intelligence, and the foresight of parents present and potential.

In these days of radical change in the activities and education of women, mothercraft has not kept pace with the other vocations open to women. In a society where marriage is no longer an economic, domestic, or conventional necessity, there has developed a tacit assumption that youth would not marry, and therefore special preparation for home-making (and especially for child care) would be presumptuous and a waste of time. The school has left this part of a girl’s training for the home to give, and in a large proportion of homes there has not been the time or the intelligence or the foresight to give it. Girls have gone from elementary school directly into industry, or to high school and college, or to finishing school and society. Educators and vocational guides have frequently overlooked it in educational and vocational conferences, exhibits, and guidebooks.

And yet to-day in America, the care and training of young children is chiefly in the hands of women. Seventy-five per cent. of women in America are married, and presumably most of them have the responsibility of children in their own homes.

There are ten million children under six years of age whose care and training is naturally in the entire control of their homes. There are fourteen million children between five and fifteen years of age who, on the average, spend thirty hours a week, for forty weeks a year, in school, while all the rest of their life—about seventy per cent. of their waking hours, as well as all their sleeping hours—is in the control of their mothers and fathers.

Nursing, within fifty years, has become a profession, and to-day it is almost impossible for a woman to find employment as a nurse unless she has had a special training for three years. Yet nursing has only to do with sick folk, usually in a hospital, which is still a far cry from the daily care, hygiene, and training of the normal child in a home. For an equal period, teachers of young children have been expected to take a special normal course of two to four years. Yet this training has had little to do, until recently in some quarters, with hygiene, biology, or the psychology of the child, but has concerned itself chiefly with subjects in the curriculum and with masses of children in an artificial grouping and environment, foreign to their native interests and inimical to their physical needs.

Only within the last twenty-five years has medicine developed pediatrics—the special study of children’s treatment. Child-hygiene is still later as an exact science. Child-study, as an exact science, dates back to Froebel and the early nineteenth century, and is still a new field.

The mother in her home, herself with slight special preparation, busy with her children, could scarcely have been expected to keep pace with these developments and to teach them to her daughters, even had she the foresight. The higher institutions of learning, naturally among the most conservative forces of society, have not yet begun to perceive the significance of such a subject as mothercraft in the curriculum, although the beginnings of some phases are being made. The secondary and elementary schools, bound by the fetish of college requirements, are only beginning to show here and there indications of efforts to prepare for living instead of simply for college.

And the young woman—still immature, inexperienced, and therefore not appreciative of life’s values and impending responsibilities—has had neither the guidance of school and home, nor the educational opportunity, nor the personal foresight to prepare adequately for this vocation.

What is the consequence? A generation of women, the majority of whom are notoriously (and sometimes shamelessly) ignorant and unskilled in the most vital and significant human responsibilities. In millions of homes women are wasting their time and energy, losing the joy of their motherhood (and too often their little ones), perplexed, harassed, over-burdened, because they are bungling, stumbling blindly, groping at their vocation. And those they love most dearly are paying the penalty, in less happy homes, less efficient lives. Hundreds of thousands of self-supporting young women every year are going into industrial or commercial work or school teaching, not because they prefer it, but because opportunities for acquiring the requisite skill are at hand, and conditions of work have been standardized. Hundreds of thousands of mothers with young children are seeking in vain for assistants of desirable personality and efficient training. For such workers there has been no adequate opportunity for training and no standardizing of working conditions. In all this, America is far behind both Germany and England.

What does mothercraft require in its practitioners? First, personality: love of children and sympathy with child-nature, responsibility, patience, thoroughness in the minute details day in and day out, self-control, good judgment, adaptability, the play spirit. Fundamental also are open-mindedness, spiritual vision, and the poise that results from a well-regulated physical régime and a firm apprehension of eternal verities.

Then knowledge: a sound foundation in the fundamental principles and vital facts of applied biology, psychology, sociology, ethics, economics, natural sciences, play, arts, as they relate to the home, the family, and childhood. Equally important is the scientific mind that knows how to approach new problems and receive new principles.

Then technique: the actual doing and practice of mothercraft. Knowledge is of no value until it is translated into efficient action. There must be little children to care for, tend, play with, educate.

What of fathercraft? Every child has two parents, equal in responsibility for his heredity and likewise for his rearing. Fathers could hardly be expected ordinarily to be versed in the intricacies of clothing, feeding, and bathing the baby. But why should not every man understand the principles of hygiene and foods as a matter of his general knowledge quite as much as for coöperation with the mother in the children’s régime? Why should he not with equal zest make a study of growth and development during childhood? Even more, why should he not be intimately acquainted with child psychology and the fundamental principles of child training and education, that he may understand his own children and coöperate sympathetically in their upbringing? Is there any valid reason why he should not be equally acquainted with the sociology of the home, the meaning and principles of eugenics, the psychology of harmony in home life?

There is no profession open to either men or women that offers such opportunities for personal culture, individual expression, technical skill, scientific research, social contribution and welfare, as mothercraft. Perhaps the very comprehensiveness of it and its humanness have presented a problem so complex that it has baffled the educators and delayed its admission to academic dignity.

Through the channels of child welfare, eugenics, and pediatrics, a keener sense of responsibility toward the child unborn is developing. Through the increasing knowledge of heredity, child psychology, and education, a clearer vision is appearing to young men and young women of what they themselves might have been, and of what they may yet create and develop by combining wisdom with their great love. Philanthropists are realizing the futility of simply relieving immediate suffering, crime, inefficiency, for generation after generation. They are looking to the elimination of the causes: ignorance of the rudiments of living, poor heredity, neglect in childhood, unsanitary, ugly, unspiritual living conditions. “There is no wealth but life,” we are realizing with Ruskin. Statesmen and legislators are beginning to see that the stability of society and the State demand that the organizing of homes, the founding of families, the spending of family incomes, shall not be intrusted to novices and unskilled workers. As indications of this, we have the recently established Children’s Bureau, and the Smith-Lever Bill with its appropriation for education that includes home-making.

In America, clubs, reading courses, and special correspondence for parents have been developed in the last quarter century by the International Congress of Mothers, Parent-Teachers’ Association, Home and School League, American Institute of Child Life. This is good and is helping many parents in meeting their perplexities, but as a national means of vocational training, its psychology and pedagogy is shortsighted and inefficient.

What banker would trust his ledgers to a youth just out of school, whose only special preparation for bookkeeping was a current reading course in business methods? What woman would permit a man to experiment on her garden if he was just beginning a correspondence course in agriculture? What business man wants to intrust his correspondence to a stenographer just out of a business course, even after months of such vocational training? All this is recognized as inefficient, wasteful, expensive in business; how much more so is it in the home, where precious human lives are the factors to be dealt with.

Slowly, but certainly, there is coming a new ideal in education. Children and young people are to be prepared for living. They are to know how to develop physical vitality and mental ability and spiritual power. They are to be prepared in spirit and intelligence, in skill and in science, in personality and technique for the responsibilities that most of them will assume, for the greatest responsibility any of them can assume—home-making and family rearing.

Both the school and the home are responsible for the preparation of these future parents. They must apply to this vocational problem all their knowledge of psychology and pedagogy. Right habits of regularity, responsibility, self-control, must be carefully trained in those babyhood and early childhood stages; the manual phases of household work are to be taught in the manual stage before the teens; boys and girls are to be imbued with a wholesome, responsible spirit toward motherhood and fatherhood and the home which they are taught to look forward to as the goal for themselves; girls in their teens are to have companionship and experience with little children, learning the essential details and the significant guiding principles of their high calling in a practical, human, motherly way, under wise and sympathetic teachers. Girls, and boys likewise, will be encouraged to foresee the significance and values and responsibility of home and family, and to conduct themselves worthily of such a mission.

Secondary and elementary schools are beginning to give school credit for assistance at home. Domestic science and art are now taught in hundreds of schools. Their field as yet is narrowly restricted to the mechanics of the household, usually taught in an academic way. This, however, is an entering wedge for more practical, comprehensive, and human phases of home-making education whenever school administrators, teachers, and parents shall see that vision. The day seems not distant when colleges generally will give credit for all home-making branches, as a few do now for some phases. We may even yet see universities granting M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mothercraft and fathercraft, as well as in philology, astronomy, history, or other more consequential branches of learning. College alumnæ themselves are making earnest appeals to their Alma Maters to prepare their students for home-making responsibilities. It is not unthinkable that the colleges, before many decades, might even include the preparatory work in these subjects among their entrance requirements, as they now do algebra and Latin. In that day “applied science” will be esteemed more worthy than “pure science”, and ability to utilize more honorable than ability to memorize. By the next century, a mothercraft course may become as conventional a part of the curriculum of a finishing school as French or vocal training or æsthetic dancing; and its rudiments as requisite as a certificate of age for working papers; and preparedness in fathercraft as stringent a requirement for a marriage license as a medical certificate. Why not?