The Mother : Part 5

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 7 of 22)

Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate if she would hand on the torch of life the brighter for her handling. Doctor Devine has well said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health. So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare. That person may be a "hired expert," it is true, but the successful nurse must have the mother-feeling. Moreover, it is now agreed that the best physical stamina is secured by mothers breast-feeding their own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are being used to lead women to this personal office.

If mothers thus nurse their babies they must come close to them in affectional contact, and it is through affectional contact more than in any other way that babies seem to thrive. No one can claim that ability to care for and bring up children "comes by nature." The affectional tie does, however, give an added earnestness to the desire to learn how to minister wisely and well to the needs of the child. That same affectional tie on the part of the mother is shown in a return of affection from the child. Such personal ministrations of the mother to the child have also a great effect in forming the whole character in later life. One may worship from a distance, and the capacity to justly estimate excellence grows with maturity. But the child knows best those who serve his needs most intimately and gives his love to that person.

The Mother's Compensation for Personal Service. - There is much compensation, therefore, for the woman who gives herself to her child in old-fashioned ways of personal service. She gets the charm and the allurement of the growing bud on life's tree. If she misses that she loses something of her birthright and some "substitute-mother" gets something of satisfaction from the child that she does not.

Early Drill in Personal Habits. - The third essential of the inherited obligation of mothers to their children is the early drill in personal habits that are required for health and decency and propriety in any given time and place. For this it is an absolute necessity that either the mother so serve herself or that she secure some substitute-mother of refinement, knowledge, affection and devotion which make her an equal in the family circle. How many nurses fulfil that demand? Many, even of those least recognized by their employers as entitled to special gratitude and appreciation.

The point to be noted is, however, that even if experts for "hour-service" as nursery governess could be had in sufficient numbers and even if the majority of families could financially meet the expense of those fully competent, such service would not, as a rule, meet the needs of children under three or four years. It is a constant task, not, indeed, requiring every minute of time, but requiring constant readiness to serve at need both day and night to start an infant along the required rules of daily habit. And that task does not lend itself to the conditions of group-teaching or to the schedule of shared service of visiting experts. Some one must be on the job all the time or it is not accomplished with success, although skilled personal care-takers can get fine results in gradually lessened attention by the time the baby becomes the child.

If there are several children in a family, however, the most competent mother, or substitute-mother, has the process to repeat with each newcomer, so that for every child we may reckon at least two years of very constant attention if the bodily habits of health and propriety and the first steps in social training for agreeable membership in the family are to be well taken. The public school is full of children for whom the teachers heroically try to make up for lacks in this intimate home-training. It may be that some people view with pleasure a "movie picture" in which large numbers of children go through a "toothbrush drill," but to some of us it is a sorry exhibit. When Booker Washington opened Tuskegee he required only a toothbrush as entrance fee and equipment, and the use of that implement had to be explained and almost all other agencies for personal neatness and physical care of the body to be offered and their use enforced. This was the step of a whole race toward civilization, a step which the slave condition had not made possible before for the field-hands of the South.

The people coming to us from all the peasant classes of Europe and the East have many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by lowering their standards, even while it helps upward those who need the school baths and the school treatment of heads and throats and teeth and all manner of personal care. It is not easy to get what children require in these particulars in the crowded tenement. It may be impossible in the congested quarters of a great city. But the need thus pathetically shown in the children of many social strata in the United States indicates that not only should there be own mothers or substitute-mothers for every little child to start each aright along the way of life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable living-place into which to put every home.

Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation. - The fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of talking.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.