Childlessness

“ On the other hand, however, they are frequently able, owing to this very lack of natural passion, to endure for a lifetime matrimonial unions which would be intolerable to the positive type for a month, and this accounts for the fact that, in England particularly, there are so many peaceful lifelong unions of couples who are childless and doomed to childlessness. ”

“ Children must be sent home after a certain age, not only on account of health and education but because the moral atmosphere is bad for them, and to my mind the children should be considered before the husband. ”

“ Why, Lor’s, you know if my poor, dear husband had lived we should have had a large family of children by this time, most like. But as I haven’t got none of my own, I feel as if I ought to take care of other people’s orphans. Seems to me that people without children should take care of children without parents, so far as they can. ”

“ Is it a mistake in this study of child life to pay so much attention to the subjects of fatherhood and motherhood? Nowhere can we find the real remedy for the evils that degrade and debase and oppress and crush the sweet innocence and dependence of childhood unless we go back of the child to the very foundations of family life. ”

“ And besides these considerations, who can afford to ignore or belittle the fact that those who desert their offspring and send them away from themselves, and make them over to others to nurse, cut, or at least loosen and weaken that chain and connection of mind and affection by which Nature attaches children to their parents. For when the child, sent elsewhere, is away from sight, the vigour of maternal solicitude little by little dies away, and the call of motherly instinct grows silent, and forgetfulness of a child sent away to nurse is not much less complete than that of one lost by death. ”

“ It was a pity that no babies came to soften our hearts, my step-mother's and mine, and to draw us nearer together as only the presence of children can. A household without children is always hard and angular, even when surrounded by all the softening influences of refinement and education. ”

“ Well, child, having so many fatherless children of my own, it came natural to me to try to make a motherless girl comfortable; for, as I often says to myself, suppose my children had been motherless, for though it is bad enough to be fatherless, it is ten thousand times worse to be motherless, as every orphan child knows. So now, my dear, I think, as you are determined to finish your book before you go to bed, the sooner I go and leave you to do it the better. ”

“ Seriously, is it not an astonishing fact, that though on the treatment of offspring depend their lives or deaths, and their moral welfare or ruin; yet not one word of instruction on the treatment of offspring is ever given to those who will by and by be parents? Is it not monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to the chances of unreasoning custom, impulse, fancy—joined with the suggestions of ignorant nurses and the prejudiced counsel of grandmothers? ”

“ How many, through ill-treatment and neglect in childhood, carry the marks to their dying day in weak and sickly constitutions! how many more in a distorted body and crippled limbs! These are but the too sure consequences of the neglect of a mother, and, consequent upon that, the neglect of servants, who, feeling the child a burden, lessen their own trouble; and many a mother who, perhaps, now that her child has grown up, weeps bitter tears over his infirmities, might have saved his pain and her own sorrow by attending to his wants in infancy. ”

“ The helplessness of childhood, which presses upon it every moment, the sense of inability to avoid or resist danger, which makes the child run continually to his nurse or to his mother for protection, cannot but diminish, by the mere growth of the bodily powers. ”

“ The call of peace, and may it be heeded as the facts of inheritance are better known by all, is, Keep Fit for Parenthood. The sins of youth, so often sins of ignorance, carelessness, and unbridled passion, which doom childhood to blindness, to congenital deficiency of all kinds, to permanent twist of mental powers, or to lack of ability to meet life's demands—these sins of youth will be less in evidence when education is fitted to life's full responsibilities of choice instead of being side-tracked in narrow lines of scholarly acquirement alone. ”

“ There seems something incomprehensible in a state of society that should admit of the {Pg 259} propriety, or, rather, enforce the necessity, of a boy of nine being separated from all maternal care, and left to struggle as he might, during the precarious season of childhood and of adolescence, without a parent's eye to watch over his well-being, and administer to his health and happiness. ”

“ The child brought into the world, unwanted, undesired, unprepared for, and unprovided for before and after birth, is handicapped from the very start of its existence upon earth. The present state of affairs works a terrible injustice upon countless children brought into the world in such conditions. ”

“ The proportion of mentally and morally deficient children that come to us absolutely demonstrates this fact; and the love needed to see such children through to the end is more comprehensive than the mere sentiment of having a child in the home, and infinitely more than the desire to have the help which he can bring. ”

“ What we see in all our thousand homes is "my child." What the doll-taught mother sees is a sweet pretty dressable object; far more time and effort being given—even before its birth—to the making of clothing, than to the making of its constitution or character.
Then we see children as "a care," and a care they are to our worldwide incompetence. How pathetic is the inadequacy of the young mother! She would never dare to undertake to run a racing stable with no more knowledge and experience than she brings to run a family. ”

“ Why few children are well-born.—Where married people have been falsely educated in the idea that marriage means unrestricted indulgence, and under this delusion have created unnatural demand, a horde of evils will follow. If this unfortunate class care only for a selfish pleasure, the children will follow each other closely and will receive a poor heredity.{447} If they use preventive means to restrict the size of the family, the few children born into the homes will be far more unfortunately born. ”

“ This disproportionate concentration of feeling on the individual child, and neglect of the child in general, produces a world full of people with a congested family life, full of morbid sensitiveness and potential difficulty and suffering, and a weak, anæmic social life, full of mutual neglect and dereliction of duty. ”

“ BEARING THE FIRST CHILD they may, by proper care and attention, lay the foundation for their future health and that of their offspring; while by neglect and imprudence in this matter, they may not only enfeeble their constitution, but entail upon their children an inheritance of infirmity and disease. ”

“ It is safe to say that no child, no boy at least in these days of excitement and unrest, reaches the age of ten years without getting some idea of nature's laws regarding parenthood. And ninety-nine chances to one, those ideas will be vile and pernicious unless they come from a wise, loving and pure parent. Now, we entreat you, parents, mothers! do not wait; begin before a false notion has had chance to find lodgment in the childish mind. But remember this is a lesson of life, it cannot be told in one chapter, it is as important as the lessons of love and duty. ”

“ Every time we get children, we bless Providence, and so seek to hide from ourselves the wickedness of our acts. Should we not rather deem it a sign of God's anger to have children who are weak, sensual, crippled and impotent? Is it a matter for joy that mere boys and girls should have children? ”

“ LUCIE. I! No, indeed. Most likely you have said as much to my husband. Won’t he believe you?
HOURTIN. You must make him realize that the responsibility of having a child, great as it always is, becomes terrible when, so far from its being born into normal circumstances, it runs the risk of going into the world worse equipped than usual. To give birth to a child doomed to unhappiness or likely to be an invalid or incapable of growing up is like crippling someone. It is as much a crime as robbery or murder. ”

“ Orphaned children and neglected children of profligate parents, too, were bound out—as they called it—to live and serve in some respectable home, boys until the age of twenty, girls until the age of eighteen or until marriage. ”

“ We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as something so common and easy that everyone can go through it without harm or suffering and rear her children competently and well. ”

“ When old enough to walk, they are permitted to run where they please, characterized chiefly by the scanty clothing they wear, and inattention they receive. These neglected infants rarely cry or complain, learning early in life that such demonstrations of dissatisfaction with their lot avails nothing. The mothers of these children are not cruel or inhuman in the treatment of their offspring, except from neglect and lack of care through ignorance. ”

“ In a cold and selfish world, without guardians, without a home, without parental restraint and tenderness, each young child would go into the common herd, to grow up selfish, unhappy, unloving and unloved. ”

“ But what hope is there for these poor, diseased, suffering little ones, the offspring of a loathed and hated maternity, whose very existence, ere they were born, was made accursed by the mothers that bore them, and by the fathers, whose only thought or aim in the act in which they originated was mere sensual gratification? ”

“ I wonder, by the way, why most babies find existence so miserable? Convicts working on roadways, stout ladies in tight shoes and corsets, teachers of the French language—none of these suffering souls wail in public; they don't go around with puckered-up faces, distorted and screaming, and beating the air with clenched fists. ”

“ With all my heart I despise those married people in full possession of health and strength who deliberately elect to remain childless. With all my heart I pity the celibate and those to whom children are denied. Yet they have compensations—though they lose the rapture, they miss also the infinite anxieties, the innumerable worries, the constant self-denial, the often bitter disappointments. Children bring many other pains than those of birth. ”

“ Pale mothers were struggling with fretful babies, or trying to keep their older offspring from the fascination of the track; girls and their “fellows” were giggling and shoving, and passing about candy in sticky bags, and older men, collarless and perspiring, were shifting heavy children from one arm to the other, and keeping a haggard eye on the scattered members of their families. ”

“ Imagine a mother not feeding or taking care of her infant, and yet counting on its thriving! or, fondly and diligently tending, taking care of her infant, and continuing to do so year after year, yet perfectly satisfied though it gained no strength, did not grow, nor walk, nor speak, nor show the slightest sign of getting out of babyhood! ”

“ He don't smile on those suicidal mothers, who run breathlessly round and round the nursery treadmill, thinking they are doing God service, till they drop dead in the harness, and leave eight or nine children motherless, at an age when they most need maternal guidance. ”

“ Another girl, sixth in the family, was carried and nursed by her mother through times of financial stress, when one more mouth to fill was a hardship. As soon as the child could toddle, she developed a passion for running away. She grew up absolutely devoid of family instinct, filial affection and womanly sense of responsibility. ”

“ Great principles, you hold, are sacrificed to shifts and expedients. I agree with you. What more sacred law of nature, for instance, than that the mother should educate her child? yet we felicitate ourselves upon the establishment of infant-schools, which is in direct opposition to it. Nay, we interfere with the maternal instinct before the child is born, by furnishing, in cases where there is no necessity, the mother with baby-linen for her unborn child. ”

“ One would think, though, that motherhood would give them more experience,—that they would know how to care for children better. But, then, they wouldn't want to leave their own children to take care of ours. ”

“ Should a child be born into such an unnatural home, it would receive an unfortunate heredity and a still more unfortunate environment. The initial of its life was accidental, its prenatal rights were not regarded, its advent was not welcomed, it is now turned over to a hired nurse. Such a child is more unfortunate than an orphan. In no true sense has it a father or mother. This child, when visitors are about, or when the family is making a public display, may be petted, pampered and spoiled by its parents and on all occasions lavishly supplied with dress and toys ”

“ Children may indeed be a burthen to private families; and yet for the sweetness of it, how chearfully is it oftenest born, or with very few extraordinary exceptions to the general rule? But to a nation, or what is the same thing, to the lawful representative of the nation, a parish, what can be on earth a falser light to view children in, than that of a burthen? ”

“ She is now but twenty-four years old. She has one living child, and this must suffer for life, from the outrages perpetrated upon it by the mother, ere its birth. She says she cannot, and will not, have any more children yet. ”

“ It is ignorance of this truth which has led to the dishonouring and befouling of pure and beautiful youth, which is the original source of the greater part of all the social troubles and the sex difficulties of adolescence.
The tiny child of two or three years old, just beginning to perceive and piece together the psychological impressions stamped upon it by its environment and the mind-states of those around it, is the weakest link in the chain of our social consciousness. ”