Too Much Parent

IN these days of strenuous parentage, may not be amiss to suggest mildly that there may be, in the constitution of a family, such a thing as too much parent. Time was when being a parent was incidental to other business in life. Our grandfathers brought up children, a dozen at a time, with a careless familiarity that takes away the modern breath. Each of the dozen was disciplined and duly chastened. They were whipped when they told lies, and occasionally when they did not. They learned to read at four ; were put to work at five, as a matter of course ; and developed, in due time, the stuff that men are made of. There was never any particular fuss about it. The larger the family, the more whippings it took. But there were always enough to go around, and no one the worse for it. The advertisement, “ Boy missing. Run away from home,” was not an uncommon feature of the weekly newspaper. But of the remnant who had the courage to stay at home and grow up, it may be said that they made admirable citizens. They had the rare privilege of passing their childhood and youth in the presence of men and women who had other and more important business in life than that of being parent to offspring. They grew up with a chastened sense of their own unimportance in the scheme of being, and a philosophic expectation of taking the hard knocks of life as they came.

We have changed all that. We have listened to the voice of Froebel, “ Let us play with our children and to the educational moralist, “ A father should be his boy’p best friend ; ” and to our most famous and most unpractical poet, " The child is father to the man : ” and the whole business of child-raising is turned other end to. We no longer raise them by the dozen. One or two at a time is as much as we dare venture, and very cautiously at that. We study the development and take notes on the bumps, phrenological; the other kind the modern child is never allowed to have. We agonize over our relation to his moral growth, and drop tentative, trembling seeds into the ground of his being, and exchange specimens if anything comes of it. The result, as a whole, is not, it must be admitted, altogether unpleasing. There is something about the well-born, well-bred, wholesome child of to-day that makes glad the eye and the heart. But the poor parent! We protest that he has never had a chance in life. Ten to one his own parents belonged to the old school, and disciplined him within an inch of life. And now his children belong to the new. He is ground between the upper and the nether stone. Only in scattered, precious moments does he dare call himself his own. Late in the evening, perhaps, when the all-important child has been adequately played with and encouraged and developed and put to bed on his hygienic pillow, there comes a moment when the exhausted parent may sit down before the fire and draw a comfortable, grown-up breath, and gather strength and wisdom for the morrow.

As we watch him, we are reminded of the pleasant old gentleman who, across the reception plate, is accosted by the genial young girl: “ After all, sir, there’s nothing so delicious as the wing of a chicken, is there ? ” And the old gentleman : “ I don’t know, my dear. When I was young the old people always ate the wings, and now I am old the young people eat them. I have never tasted the wing of a chicken.”