Only child

“ The position of an only child, or of only son or daughter, usually results in childhood in great selfishness, while in later years, on the other hand, it produces frequently a heavy burden of duty, and thus, in both cases, brings danger to harmonious development. ”

“ If it is unnatural for a multitude of children of the same age to herd together in an Infant school, it is at least as much so for a little creature to live alone among people with full-grown brains, and all occupied with the pursuits and interests of mature life. It is very well for the father to romp with his child at spare times, and for the mother to love it with her whole heart, and sympathise with it, with all the sympathy that such love can inspire. ”

“ Parents know what an only child, a beloved child, is, and what to believing parents an only child, a believing child, must be. Well, the Father in heaven said, as it were, by this his dispensation, Art thou willing to give up this child to me? ”

“ Poor little baby-sentinel!—left with a human life in its sole charge at four—neglected and overlooked: what will its girl-life be, when it grows old enough to think? I should like some of the little ones whose every wish is gratified, who have but to whimper to have, and who live surrounded by loving, smiling faces, and tendered by gentle hands, to see the little child in the bare garret sitting sentinel over the sleeping baby on the floor, and budging never an inch throughout the weary day from the place that her mother had bidden her stay in. ”

“ My theories on child training! Alas and alack! not one of them, not a theory of all my original theories, has worked out! Even those that still are academically correct have failed when put to the test against that most immutable and uncontrollable fact of human development, child nature. Not a single one, mind you!
There is the matter of whipping. I don't believe in whipping children. Neither does the psychiatrist who advised me to lift the fear of corporal punishment from my older child, at once and finally. I did so, firmly convinced that a child could be ruled by love alone. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But even if happiness alone be considered, the childless home is not the most cheerful, and it often happens that parents who have sinfully limited their parenthood will lose an only child and be left sterile and desolate. ”

“ How dare you, how dare any husband, commit the destiny of his child into the hands of one, who, as he knows, thus loathes the thought of its existence? How can you subject your child to the possibility of such a gestational organization and development; such an ante-natal education; or force upon your wife the suffering and anguish of a loathed and hated maternity, or the necessity of doing a deed from which the soul of every 63noble woman must shrink with sickening horror? You could not do this wrong to your wife and child, till your manhood was sunk in the mire of disgusting sensualism. ”

“ In what direction, it might be asked, could the child be more appropriately drawn by ties of deep and permanent affection than to one to whom it owes its very existence, to whom it is indebted for the care, nourishment, and protection that were necessary to it in its early years and who is responsible for the first awakening and the first reciprocation of its love? We now know, however, that the maintenance of such a tie when the biological causes that bind child to parent have ceased to act, is liable to be achieved at the cost of some grave failure of development. ”

“ She had less sense of motherhood—in anticipation, at all events—than has the natural child that nurses its doll, and pretends it is her child. All she knew was that a physical trial, more or less severe, was in front of her, and when that was over, if all went well, there would be a child the more in the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, I believe my child is reserved for a more durable existence, then should I not, out of the very love I bear to him, prepare his childhood for the struggle of life, according to that station in which he is born, giving many a toil, many a pain, to the infant, in order to rear and strengthen him for his duties as man? ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had been confined of her poor idiot-child, and for some time had subsisted upon charity; but this existence was repugnant to her spirit, and as her calamity became more apparent with the infant’s growth, she had shunned the intercourse of her neighbours, and had resolved to retire to some solitary spot where she might work for her bread and that of her boy.
As is always the case with natural ties, he had become dearer to her in proportion to his helplessness, and she determined to live and to employ her health, strength, and time for him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He begins with the newborn infant, and demands that, if possible, it shall not be taken from its mother. He sets his face strongly against the custom of committing the child during the tenderest and most impressible period of its whole life to the care and companionship of an ignorant nursemaid, or of servants who have not the mother’s instinct, or the knowledge that can tell them how to behave in its presence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. ”

“ More than once "the mother, with her boys and girls, and perhaps even a little child in her arms, were immolated together,"—for sometimes the wretched children, instead of being immediately sacrificed, were allowed to live until they had offspring whose sad fate was determined ere their birth. ”

“ Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant, are never, as it were, without an infant child. ”

“ HAROLD'S SISTER—AND ANOTHER.
The next saddest thing to having no children is having only one. Parental sorrows are to be classified as follows. First, and greatest, if you haven't any; second, if you have only one. For there is no loneliness like the forlornness of a solitary bairn, to use a term of which Gordon was very fond; born to play, yet having none to play with; in need of chastening, yet denied the discipline of other children; hungry for fellowship, yet starving among its seniors. There is no desert so waste and weary as the Sahara that surrounds a solitary child. ”

“ But in the very beginning a great difficulty meets the mother of the girl who seeks to train her up into glad, free acceptance of life, for instead of general rejoicing in the birth of her child, too often there is a wail of discontent over the hapless infant who is “not a boy.” ”

“ He explained that the child was now in the custody of its father, and she would have to show cause why it should be removed therefrom. He hinted that she would not find that easy to do.
“Now, then, my dear young woman,” said he, “you mustn't be selfish. ”

“ And this is the atmosphere in which the wholly home-bred, mother-taught child grows up. Why should not food and clothes and the comforts of his own people stand first in his young mind? Does he not see his mother, the all-loved, all-perfect one, peacefully spending her days in the arrangement of these things which his father’s ceaseless labor has procured? Why should he not grow up to 279care for his own, to the neglect and willing injury of all the rest, when his earliest, deepest impressions are formed under such exclusive devotion? ”

“ You may grievously wrong your child, and subject it to physical and mental tendencies that may deeply affect its character and happiness, during its earthly existence, by subjecting it to the liability of inheriting the unhealthy and imbecile conditions in which you and the mother may be, at the time the relation was held in which it originated. ”

“ Somehow and for the most part unhappily, the child's insistence upon absolute self-possession and self-existence comes at a time,—it may be evocative rather than synchronous—when parents most desire or feel the need to be parents. This craving for a maximum of parenthood, not in the interest of filial possession, is evoked by the normal, adolescent child, as it begins to find its main interests and absorptions outside of the home, with the consequent loosening of what seemed to be irrefragably close and intimate ties. ”

“ Why don't they?'
'For various reasons which a real love to child nature would blow to the winds—all comprised in this, that such a child would not be their own child. As if ever a child could be their own! That a child is God's is of rather more consequence than whether it is born of this or that couple. ”

“ If none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or a woman secured; and it will easily be conceived what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. ”

“ As soon as the child enters school the latter will become known among its playmates and will be the subject of many cruel taunts. It is not fair to the innocent child to give it such a heritage. But think how the mothers must feel to have to give up their babies! ”

“ I'm so lonely without a little child—and I thought perhaps you'd let me adopt one....It's at the hospital...its mother is dead...and I could...pet it, and dress it, and do things for it...and it's such a good baby...you can ask any of the nurses...it would never, never bother you by crying... ”