On the Training of Parents
- Author:
Ernest Hamlin Abbott. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1908. Pp. 140.
It is a thankless task not unaccompanied by danger to animadvert on the subject of parents. The reader is in all likelihood an actual, prospective, or would-be parent himself, with the pride and acute sensitiveness of that large class. Mr. Abbott in his book “On the Training of Parents,” treats the subject with humor and tact and on the whole lets the parent down not ungently. His book does not cover so broad a range as its title might lead one to suppose. He confines himself to pointing out the attitude toward the child which he considers brings the best results and causes the least unnecessary friction. “The theory of total depravity, by which our forefathers explained the unpleasant doings of youngsters, is,” he concludes, “a doctrine which parents devised in order to shift the burden of their own failures to the shoulders of their offspring.” And he ventures to doubt whether it is really just to lay the Fifth Commandment upon all American children without pointing out the reciprocal duty therein implied. He might go furREVIEWS AND CRITICISM 177 ther and challenge the idea that life is an inestimable gift bestowed upon us by our1 parents, receiving which we immediately incur a lasting obligation. “Sue for a Debt we never did contract, And cannot answer?Oh the sorry trade!”
If at birth the baby is willing to cry “quits” with his parents, he should be considered by any fair-minded person a generous infant. As children are brought into the world for every reason except for their own interest and pleasure, the debt cannot be fairly said to start on their side. In the attitude of some parents toward their offspring, we are reminded of Mr. Pumblechook’s exhortation to poor Pip,? “Especially be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand.” Whether the credit side, after much shifting, rests finally with the parent or child must depend on the individual case.
Mr. Abbott in his first chapter points out two methods of governing children, one by collision, “wait till the child does wrong, then collide with him,” unfortunately only too popular; the other, governing by habit. He draws a pretty distinction between governing them and interfering with them, and urges the patent to cultivate the habit of non-interference, another name for the habit of self-restraint. He believes that the process of training children is the process of forming habits and that to provide children with a contented acquiescence in a regular life and an habitual disposition to obedience requires in the parents no unusual qualities of mind.
Mr. Abbott lays great emphasis on the necessity for parents respecting their children. He says, “No one who respects another will lie to him, or visit him with empty threats, or make to him vain promises; yet fathers and mothers in all parts of the country are at this moment lying to their children, threatening them with punishments they do not mean to inflict, and making promises they do not intend to fulfill.” Mr. Abbott does not believe in administering corporal punishment in the jaunty spirit of the Chinese proverb: “A cloudy day?leisure to beat the children.” At the same time to the question, “Do you believe in spanking a child?” he thinks the only possible answer is, “What child?” Many parents knowing how worse than useless a slippering has proved, will yet recognize the truth of the statement: “With some temperaments in some moods the rod is like the wand of a magician.” The child “responds to it with renewed affection and restored sweetness of temper.”
Mr Abbott gives some convincing examples to prove that a trained imagination is a necessary quality in the parent who would develop in a child the spirit of obedience. Against the modern complicated mechanical toys Mr. Abbott’s face is sternly set. “Simple food, simple occupations, simple toys, simple surroundings?there are no riches like these to the child?or the adult?who has not been robbed of his imagination.” To mothers, Mr. Abbott says, “There are two ways in which you can act. You can either adjust your children to their environment, or their environment to them.” It does not need the forceful examples offered to convince us of the paramount value of the first of these two methods.
Instead of looking upon children’s quarrels as deplorable, Mr. Abbott sees in them an educational implement made ready to the parents’ hand. He considers it a parental duty to teach children how to quarrel and what to quarrel about, and thinks an only child’s indisputable misfortune lies in the fact that there is no one in the family he can really quarrel with.
Intelligent parents who read Mr. Abbott’s interesting book will discover that the principal part in the training of their children is the training of themselves, and that “the art of being a parent is an art of give and take.” E. R. W.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.