Religious Education in the Family Part 27

-- 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES

All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers, save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and, besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of fathers.

There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood wholly in physiological terms, imagining--if they think about it at all--that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only they know how to bear, feed, and clothe children properly. True, such duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good provider" who provides only _things_ for his family, no matter with what generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves first of all.

He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best business in the world, the development of children's characters.

Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them those social advantages which he missed in youth.

But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality.

It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home is left headless and soon heartless. If we at all desire the fruits of character in the home we must give ourselves personally.

It is not alone the habitue of the saloon or the idler in clubs and fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of being worse than an infidel. _A father belongs to his home more than he belongs to his church._ There have been men, though probably their number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy task of being G.o.dly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.

-- 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE

The father owes it to his family _to give himself at his best_, that is, as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children, time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith, did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public propaganda.

Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families.

Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while so readily granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we should a.s.sume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge?

There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but they are not willing to learn how to grow them.

-- 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK

It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you.

Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in real touch with the boy's world.

Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.

Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.

Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.

All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of home-making, is a man's chance to become G.o.dlike. The race has come upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to happiness which men have called the way of pain and G.o.d calls the way of peace.

Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about divine fatherhood if we ill.u.s.trate its meaning only degradingly or misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of our children.

The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The cla.s.ses in the home have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious person to them.

I. References for Study

Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. vii. Appleton, $1.50.

K.G. Busby, _Home Life in America_, chaps. i, ii. Macmillan, $2.00.

II. Further Reading

E.A. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.

Allen, _Making the Most of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each.

Wilm, _The Culture of Religion_, chap. ii. Pilgrim Press, $0.75

III. Topics for Discussion

1. Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons? Why?

2. Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of personality?

3. Are these influences greater or less with parents on children?

4. What are the causes that separate parents and children?

5. How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the family?

6. Under what circ.u.mstances is one justified in refusing time to the church for the sake of the family?

7. What are the best times and opportunities for the strengthening of the personal bonds between children and parents?

8. How shall we overcome the apparent difficulty of maintaining the confidence of children?

CHAPTER XXIV

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can determine the character of the family life of the future. The homes of tomorrow are being determined today. The children who swing their feet in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very soon. We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do everything to determine the new. When the mountain sides have been made bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare for new growths. Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine the ideals of our children. Today we can determine that they shall not suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that, first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of things, of materialism.

-- 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER

The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we pa.s.sively acquiesce in the popular att.i.tude of indifference or derision, but we voice it ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary, culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that you can lie on a folding bed, press a b.u.t.ton to light the grate fire, turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and start out from for real living. They are private hotels.

If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life.

More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in school and church and home count first of all for character. And that broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his fellows, and to the making of a new world.

We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into the founding of families. Those motives begin to develop early. They are in the making in childhood. Somehow we must plan the education of youths so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms. Possibly the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the bare physical facts of s.e.xual purity, but will teach new ideals of family life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country. It can set so clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater purposes than garish social display.

-- 2. THE CHURCH AIDING

Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must worry less about a "home over there," and show how truly heavenly homes may be made here. It must not only get youth ready to die, it must prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms. It will do this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special instruction in cla.s.ses. No church has a clear conscience in regard to any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not directly instructed in the duties of that life.