The Mother : Part 6

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 8 of 22)

They have had to give every little child the start toward that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art.

In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts. Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his throne defeats this end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many children in the family for the father to properly support, or the mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the development of either.

The coming of new members to the family, however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together.

Special Responsibility of the Average Mother. - The burden of this preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers, although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all their younger children in the hands of the mother.

What teachers can do in school comes later in life than the period of which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family table and the intimate association with father and mother and brother and sister. These make a school of preëminent importance to the later training.

Women's Relation to More Formal Education. - The fifth obligation which the modern mother inherits from the ages is that relating to the more formal education of all girls and of all little boys in the folk-lore, the vocational skill, and the methods of social arrangement which set moral fashions and demand personal obedience to the social order into which one is born. This obligation is so largely shared to-day that many see in it no special burden for the modern mother. The school training once so largely within the home, or for the older boys so definitely obtained in fraternities or war-groups of men, is now a separate institution.

The customs, tribal or national, that once ruled the family-training are now solidified and definitely outlined in laws written on statute books. The illiterate parent cannot, if he would, disobey the compulsory school law. The poverty-stricken parent must either starve himself to feed his children according to the demands of the health board or he must accept public or private charity for their sustenance according to modern demands. The ignorant parent must submit to treatment of his children by public nurse or doctor of whom he may be afraid. The parent not ignorant, but differing from the majority as to what will prevent disease or cure it, must accept the public rule.

The decay of domestic industry and the growth of the factory system have given rise to so many and serious social dangers that laws are now passed forbidding home manufacture on grounds of need to abolish sweatshop conditions, although to many such prohibition seems, and to some may be, the denial of parental moral protection to children and youth in families of the very poor. The training for self-supporting work, which came about so naturally from within the household in the handicraft stage of industry, now requires many public agencies of education. The new social "mores" accepted by the majority and supported by law and court may be directly opposed to the inherited ideal of right living of large numbers of people in any given locality, especially in the United States with our large immigrant population.

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.