Child-rearing

“ The children who have to think of their clothes before playing with the dogs, digging in the sand, helping the stableman, working in the shed, building a bridge, or weeding the garden, never get half their legitimate enjoyment out of life. And unhappy fate, do not many of us have to bring up children without a vestige of a dog, or a sand heap, or a stable, or a shed, or a brook, or a garden! Conceive, if you can, a more difficult problem than giving a child his rights in a city flat. ”

“ I have sometimes thought that an orphan asylum ought to be erected for the benefit of the worse than [Pg 10] orphaned children of some notoriously corrupt, even when not multi-divorced, heads of society. Such a protectory for the unorphaned, though not fatherless and motherless, might serve a more useful purpose than do such orphanages as, having captured a child, yield it up reluctantly even to the care of a normal home. ”

“ Domestic Relations Courts.—When the history of cases coming before either Children's Courts or Domestic Relations Courts is studied, certain facts of social condition stand out prominently as causes for juvenile delinquency. First of all, the broken family, one in which there has been separation of father and mother, is a cause of child-neglect and consequent wrong-doing. ”

“ Let us now for a few moments consider how great a blessing an infant school is, even when regarded as a mere asylum to take charge of the child's bodily welfare. I have mentioned before, that the poor are unable to take that care of their children which their tender age requires, on account of their occupations; and have shewn, that it is almost certain, that the children of such persons will learn every species of vice. But there are other kinds of dangers which more immediately affect the body, and are the cause of more accidents than people in general imagine. ”

“ I cried wrathfully. “Your folks are responsible! Damn them bringing kids into the world and thinking 288they’ve done their whole duty by simply giving them food for their bodies and clothes for their backs! Damn the assumption that parents are under no obligation to supply as much protection and training for a child’s mind and spirit as the law demands shall be supplied to its body!”
“I’m groping, Bill! Groping, groping groping! Will I ever find my way out? I wonder? It’s too late now to damn father and mother. ”

“ They injure the house when old enough to run about, and squall objectionably when babies." All this is true enough. Most babies are a source of distress to their immediate neighbours because of their painful wailing, and most little children continue to cause distress by their noise in play and shrieks under punishment. Is all this outcry necessary? Must the poor baby suffer by night and day; must the small child bang and yell, and must it be punished so frequently? Why is the process of getting acclimated to the world so difficult and agonising? ”

“ I have shown, also, how it wrongs the child, by depriving it of a mother’s loving sympathy, by forcing it into an existence that is detested by father and mother, by stamping on it, before birth, disease and crime, and tendencies to all that is evil, and thus subjecting it to the detestation of its fellow-beings, in its future manhood or womanhood. The father perpetrates the deepest crime against the child, by committing its ante-natal education to the hands of one to whom its very existence is her abhorrence and loathing. ”

“ Much more enlightened care will, no doubt, be bestowed upon the welfare of the infant than is done at present. How many crimes are unwittingly committed against a child’s mentality by ignorant parents and nurses! Lies and prevarications and evasions are always reprehensible, but with children they are of fatal and life-long effect. ”

“ Now, as we have seen, the normal conditions of family life necessarily give rise to some extent to the situations which arouse these emotions. Through the mere exercise of ordinary parental authority and care, and more especially through the process of elementary moral training and education, the parent invariably interferes in some ways with the primitive desires and tendencies of the child, and threatens the child with punishment in the event of his transgressing the parental prohibitions ”

“ The only points in which infancy created a defect in civil status were that infants were subject to the restraints on complete freedom of action involved in their being in the legal custody of the father, and that it was and is lawful for parents, guardians, employers and teachers to inflict corporal punishment proportioned in amount and severity to the nature of the fault committed and the age and mental capacity of the child punished. ”

“ The following description of the manner in which parents may defeat the work of the juvenile reformatory or industrial school was given by Senator Roussel at the Fourth International Prison Congress:—"The pernicious influence of parents relative to minors is manifest in two ways and at two periods of the child's life. First in extreme youth, when he is only a burden, his parents neglect him. He is left without proper care, often without proper food and subjected to all the hazards of the streets ”

“ Tension in the household, separation of the parents, lack of training for parenthood, the absence of a parental sense of responsibility or poor discipline all help to create an unsatisfactory home environment; the child of such a home often feels unwanted or unloved. ”

“ People have said, and still say, a great deal against asylums for the neglected rising generation; and certainly it would be well if they were not required, if the careful training of the child could be safely left to families, or to the private home; but are there not times, in most countries, where, through former neglect, the number of innocent, friendless children, becomes frightfully great? ”

“ But when they escape, and are neither destroyed by unnatural negligence nor blind fondness, how few are managed properly with respect to the infant mind! So that to break the spirit, allowed to become vicious at home, a child is sent to school; and the methods taken there, which must be taken to keep a number of children in order, scatter the seeds of almost every vice in the soil thus forcibly torn up. ”

“ Some people may think that the rights of children are safe enough in the care of the fathers and mothers.
Are they indeed! How many children are sent out, day after day, in charge of nurses? Who protects the children against careless and cruel nurses? Anxious mother, answer me that.
Many cases of gross neglect have come under my eye. I will mention one case that took place last summer at the seaside.
I was out in my yacht at the time. Scanning the shore with my spy-glass, this is what I saw:—
A good-looking young woman was pushing a baby-carriage before her. In the carriage was a little child. ”

“ I should also mention that our Society works hand in hand with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which, as is well known, has no permanent homes of its own, and therefore has to depend upon the Waifs and Strays Society, and similar organisations, when it requires a permanent home for a child whose legal custody has been transferred from its cruel parents to others. ”

“ To remove this difficulty, children are taught to look down on their nurses, to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; ”

“ The most recent reports from State child welfare agencies, however, confirm that one million cases of substantiated child abuse or neglect occur in our Nation every year. Of these cases, more than a thousand children-many under the age of four-do not survive; and most die at the hands of a parent or other family member. ”

“ There may be cases in which the parents are quite blameless, and yet in the interests of the child it may be absolutely necessary to abrogate the parental authority; or, in similar cases, it may be necessary, for educational purposes, to remove the child from its home. ”

“ The result of the new method of boy-control now used by children’s courts is to reduce the number of commitments to industrial schools, reform schools, and other similar agencies of detention and correction from seventy-five to approximately ten in each hundred. Where the environment of home life is bad, the court does not hesitate to remove the child from his home to a place in which he will not be handicapped by such influence. ”

“ Time would fail us in attempting a complete exposition of the manifold evils of this system, and we will therefore confine ourselves to its influence on the education of destitute children. Now it is plain that whatever depraves the parent injures the child. ”

“ Here, then, was one of those fatal family quarrels, where the child is forced to disobey parental authority, or to throw herself away into irredeemable wretchedness and ruin. It is certainly a fearful responsibility for a parent to assume of forcing a child to such alternatives. ”

“ This would bring relief to both of us from much of the deadly monotony of sordid, every-day affairs, if the girl could go on just the same as the man, she being allowed to have a child legally, which she could either take care of herself or delegate to the State’s care. ”

“ How is it possible for the average unmarried mother to find the sum asked by the foster-parents? Those who, as foster-parents, assume the charge of an illegitimate child, cannot reckon on the child’s remaining permanently in their care, and ultimately becoming a useful member of the family. ”

“ Without doubt this moral function of the family has centered about the children. The conditions of modern urban life, however, tend to make the moral training of the child by the home increasingly difficult. The city dwelling does not offer the child a normal opportunity for his play. The school and other institutions have to take over service formerly rendered the child in the home. In a large number of cases the urban home regards the child as merely a burden and therefore in such homes every effort is made to have no children born. ”

“ It is seen that the standpoint of the existing law, by which only the gravest offences, such as the abduction of a child, or the infliction upon a child of grievous bodily harm, are specified as punishable, is inadequate. Ever more general becomes the demand that parental neglect of the proper maintenance or education of a child should be constituted an offence per se, and dealt with as such. ”

“ The provisions of the acts as to procedure and custody extend not only to the offence of cruelty but also to all offences involving bodily injury to a child under sixteen, such as abandonment, assault, kidnapping and illegally engaging a child in a dangerous public performance. ”

“ It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent. ”

“ Why do parents so live that in order to have a simple, wholesome life for their children, it is necessary to send them off to the woods in so-called [Pg 21] camps the charm of which lies in their maximum difference from hotels and in their parentlessness? The unreasoned haste with which children flocked in multitudes to the camps is a testimony to the failure of parents to live in normal, intimate contact with their children, and a prophecy, I have no doubt, of the conflict certain to develop out of the stimulated difference in tastes between child and parents. ”

“ All have some laws recognizing the claims of children to have their home conditions scrutinized—though they may have no express juvenile-court law, all recognize to some extent the separate existence of the married women—though only twenty-one have given the mother substantial rights as against the father over their children, and they all recognize the parent's duty to secure the child's attendance at school, and have imposed some limitation on the parent's right to set his young child to work. ”

“ It is a matter for question whether loss of the parent is the cause of the child’s leaving school and going to work early and of the ultimate unsocial conduct in the case of the Bedford group, or whether loss of parent, retardation, misconduct, etc., are not for the most part but manifestations of the same thing—irresponsibility, mental, physical and social inferiority on the part of both parents and child. ”

“ It is true, the kindergartner has the child in her care but three or four hours a day; it is true, in most instances, that the home influences are all against her; it is true that the very people for whom she is working do not always appreciate her efforts; it is true that in many cases the child has been "born wrong," and to accomplish any radical reform she ought to have begun with his grandfather ”

“ But having considered those cases, in which wilful neglect and bad example may be charged upon the parents, we should not forget to tell those who object to our interference in the duty of a child's natural protectors, that it is not, in every instance, from wilful neglect on their part, that their children are left unprotected in the streets. The circumstances of the labouring classes are such, in many cases, that they are compelled to leave their children either wholly unprotected, or in the charge of some one who frequently becomes a betrayer instead of a defender. ”