Is the Family DOOMED? Part 3

It may be worth while briefly to indicate the various stages or phases of the relationship of parents and children.

1. In the earliest period, parents are for the most part youngish and children are helpless. 
2. In the next stage, parents begin to approach such maturity as they are to attain, while children are half-grown reaching ten or twelve years. This is the term punctuated by an ever-increasing number of "don't."
3. In the third stage parents at last attain such maturity as is to be their own,—years and maturity not being interchangeable terms,—for, despite mounting years some parents remain infantile in mind and vision and conduct. Children now touch the outermost fringe or border of maturity in this time of adolescence, and the stage of friction, whether due to refractory children or to undeflectible parents, begins. Coddling has ended, or ought to have ended, though it may persist in slightly disguised and sometimes wholly nauseous forms. Dependence for the most part is ended, save of course for that economic dependence which does not greatly alter the problem.

The conflict now arises between what might roughly be styled the parental demand of dutifulness and  for justice—justice to the demands of a new self-affirmation, of a crescent self-reliance. And after the storm and fire of clashing, happily there supervenes a still, small period of peace and conciliation unless in the meantime parents have passed, or the conflict have been followed by the disaster of cureless misunderstanding. It may be well to remind some children that it is not really the purpose of their parents to stunt their lives and that the love of parents does not at adolescence, necessarily transform itself into bitter and implacable hostility. To such as survive, parents aging or aged and children maturing or mature, this ofttimes becomes the period most beauteous of all when children at last have ceased to make demands and are bent chiefly upon crowning the aging brows of parents with the wreath of loving-tenderness.

One further reservation it becomes needful to make. I must need limits myself more or less to parental relations as these develop in homes in which it becomes possible for parents consciously to influence the lives of their children, not such in which the whole problem of life revolves around bread-winning. I do not consider the latter type of home a free home. It is verily one of the severest indictments of the social order that in our land as in all lands bread-winning is almost the sole calling of the vast majority of its homes. I do not maintain that all problems are resolved when this problem is ended, but the fixation respectively of parental and filial responsibilities hardly becomes possible under social-industrial conditions which deny leisure and freedom from grinding material concern to its occupants.

The miracle of high nurture of childhood is enacted in countless homes of poverty and stress, but the miracle may not be exacted. It was hard to resist a bitter smile during the days of war, when the millions were bidden to battle for their homes. Under the stress of war-conditions, some degree of sufficiency, rarely of plenty, fell to the lot of the homes of toil and poverty—the customary juxtaposition is not without interest. But now that the war is ended, the last concern of the masters of industry is to maintain the better and juster order of the war days, and the primary purpose seems to be to penalize "the over-rewarded and greedy toilers" of the war-days, selfishly bent upon extorting all the standards of decent living out of industry.