Parental responsibility

“ Parental responsibility is consequently much greater than most parents suppose; but so is parental opportunity. This book accordingly is addressed primarily to parents in the hope that it may be of some assistance to them in avoiding the pitfalls, and developing the possibilities, of that most important of all human activities—the training of the next generation. ”

“ The first step to ensuring them is certainly to do all we can to discourage reckless parentage, and to render it improbable and difficult. We must make sure that whatever we do for the children, the burden of parental responsibility must not be lightened a feather-weight. ”

“ The parental relation strengthens from hour to hour the habit of postponing immediate ease and egoistic pleasure to the altruistic pleasure obtained by furthering the welfare of offspring. There is a frequent subordination of the claims of self to the claims of fellow-beings; and by no other agency can the practice of this subordination be so effectually secured. Not, then, by a decreased, but by an increased, sense of parental responsibility is self-control to be made greater and recklessness to be checked. ”

“ The children are the paramount consideration.... In a great many cases the parents are already demoralised owing to having themselves been insufficiently nourished in their youth. Because they suffer from those conditions there is no reason why we should inflict similar conditions on the children.... Experience in this matter shows us that the sense of parental responsibility will be increased rather than decreased. ”

“ Parents who give their children only things must face the fact that they make themselves quite dispensable, seeing that they are not things. For things and the wherewithal to secure them are alone indispensable according to the parental standards. The ultimate responsibility? Any possibility of change involves the re-education of parents. Parents must learn long before parenthood what are the values in life for which it is worth while to toil and to contend. ”

“ Multitudes of parents there are who during their lifetime should be made conscious of the lives they are suffering to go to wreck, theirs the major responsibility. Happily for some parents, most children who survey the ruin of their lives fail to fix the responsibility where it properly belongs,—in parental neglect of the obligation to bring to children moral stimulus and spiritual guidance. ”

“ In fact, the importance and necessity of care and watchfulness in the rearing of children on the part of parents, has been recognized from time immemorial. Among all nations, the parent is expected to instruct, restrain and correct his boy, to the end that he may grow up to be a useful and honest man. And parental control is today, as it always has been, the most important factor in the proper bringing up of children. ”

“ So long as responsibility for the care and support of children continues to be vested in the parents, so long, for the sake of the child, will it be the duty of society to insist that parents shall not neglect this responsibility. ”

“ The avoidance of the evils consequent upon the insufficient Means of avoiding insufficient parental re-adjustment readjustment of the parents attitude towards their children is one of the most pressing tasks of an enlightened hygiene of family life. ”

“ The father and mother have joint control of the children, but during the father's lifetime his rule is paramount. When he is dead or incapacitated parental authority remains in the mother's hands. It is her right and duty to care for the child's person, to decide where it shall live, and to superintend its education. ”

“ Duty Of Parents To Children. Great are the responsibilities of the husband. Great are the responsibilities of the wife, but greater are the responsibilities of parents. Father and mother, God lays a responsibility upon you as you receive your new-born child. A precious little immortal soul, whose eternal destiny depends largely upon you. The proper training of children is attended with many difficulties, and every parent certainly needs instruction from God. ”

“ Not only throughout the lower creatures do we find the responsibilities of parenthood increasing as we go up the scale towards the higher, but, even in the various grades of highly [209] civilized man, the responsibility for the children is ever greater in proportion with the general culture and position of the parents. ”

“ The position of parent is one of serious responsibility, both morally and physically, and the edict has gone forth that ‘the sins of the parent shall be visited on the children.’ If we could ensure good mothers, we could vastly improve the race of men. ”

“ It is opposed to everything like unseemly familiarity, discourtesy of treatment, insolence in reply, or deliberate defiance. It implies respect for age and experience, and a sense of the great sacrifices a parent has made for his children's welfare. It is said that in our time the bonds of parental authority are being loosened, and that young men do not regard their parents with the deference that once was invariably shown towards them ”

“ By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
Parenthood is among the most difficult and most rewarding responsibilities in life. Balancing countless demands, parents must be firm yet loving, protective yet liberating. They are the nurturers of our dreams and the soothers of our fears. They instill in their children, by word and example, the importance of family and community involvement, the value of education and hard work.
Parenting is a serious responsibility. All parents have an obligation to provide for the children they bring into the world. ”

“ Some of these duties are obviously contingent on the parent's ability; others are absolute and imperative. The judicious parent will, on the one hand, retain his parental authority as long as he is legally responsible for his child; but, on the other hand, will train him gradually to self-help and self-dependence, and will concede to him, as he approaches years of maturity, such freedom of choice and action as is consistent with his permanent well-being. ”

“ The child, on the other hand, ought to remember the rightful authority of his parents, consider their greater experience, take for granted their benignant intention, cultivate a grateful sense of dependence and duty towards them, and foster the habit of prompt and hearty submission to their wishes. It is a safe rule, in general, for a boy or girl to respect and obey the father and mother, and not to think, when they oppose the thoughtless spirit of self-indulgence, that this parental opposition is unreasonable or unkind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand, the interference of the parent should be persuasive, and the obedience of the child, voluntary. The parent should reason with and counsel the child; and seek by mild and affectionate means to secure obedience to his advice. And if the child then persist in his own course, the parent, we think, has discharged his duty, and the responsibility will rest upon the child. ”

“ Principle 6 The child, for the full and harmonious development of his/her personality, needs love and understanding. He/she shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his/her parents, and, in any case, in an atmosphere of affection and of moral and material security; a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his/her mother. Society and the public authorities shall have the duty to extend particular care to children without a family and to those without adequate means of support. ”

“ The parent who from any cause is prevented from taking charge of the superintendence of her offspring at this period, incurs a serious responsibility in the choice of her assistant; for if these qualifications be awanting, or, if they be not exercised by the nurse or the keeper, the happiness and moral welfare of the child during life are in imminent danger. ”

“ It is a grave responsibility to take the parent's place even for a time and with their consent. We ought to feel it an unnatural position, and to endeavour to remedy the evil of it as far as possible by continually referring the child back to the wishes and authority of its father or mother. ”

“ In following the modern tendency of opinion we have lost sight of the due responsibility of parents, and our legislation has thrown upon some parents the responsibility, not only of their own children, but of those of others. ”

“ With much parental fondness, there is sometimes in family government a want of seriousness and steady principle, an absence in father or mother of the sense that they are dealing with moral and responsible beings in their little ones, and not with toys, which is reflected in the caprice and self-indulgence of the children’s maturer life. ”

“ Consequently, the earlier the physical possibility of becoming a parent in the boy or girl, the more carefully law and education should protect this important parental function from early abuse and ruinous exercise. ”

“ Because of their fuller years and the circumstance of protective parenthood, parents are conservators, maintainers, perpetuators. Because of their uninstructed years and freedom from responsibility, children often become radical, uprooters and destroyers at the imperious behest of the future. ”

“ The children are, in truth, to be regarded less as personal property than as public trusts, put into the hands of parents that they may make the very most of them for the good of society. And this responsibility is not equally divided between the parents: it is upon the mothers of the present that the future of the world depends, in even a greater degree than upon the fathers, because it is the mothers who have the sole direction of the children's early, most impressible years. ”

“ Reverence thy son and thy daughter lest thy days seem too long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. One of the elements making for conflict between parent and child is the desire of parents who ask for love, taking respect for granted, and the insistence of children, taking love for granted, that parental respect be yielded them. There are many causes that make mutual respect in any real sense difficult between parent and child, parents asking love for themselves as parents, children seeking respect for themselves as persons. ”

“ I would by no means free parents from responsibility in this matter. They, if any class, may be said to be "alone responsible;" but, in fact, all who are intrusted with the care of children share in the responsibility. ”

“ This means that we are consciously to determine the apparently indeterminable atmosphere of our children's life and home. That this involves care of the bodily side of child-being goes without saying, but, as we have in another chapter pointed out, this stress seems to be needless. The primary and serious responsibility of parents is bound up with the education of a child. And the first truth to be enunciated is that parents can no more leave to schools the intellectual than to priest and church the moral training of a child. ”

“ But the more difficult a duty is, the greater is the need of parental authority in forming a habit which will make that duty easy.
In order to secure this, some parents turn their earliest efforts to this object. They require the young child always to offer to others a part of every thing which it receives; always to comply with all reasonable requests of others for service; and often to practice little acts of self-denial, in order to secure some enjoyment for others. ”

“ Caring for children is the primary responsibility of a parent. It is the task around which family life is organized, a major factor in every decision parents make about their own and their family's future, from choice of jobs and schools and neighborhoods to the selection of books, films, and every other form of instructional material or entertainment that will influence the development of the child's character and personality. ”

“ Parenthood is a privilege and a great joy that comes with great responsibility. Mothers and fathers play the vital roles of provider, nurturer, disciplinarian, counselor, advocate, educator, and motivator. ”

“ The authority of the parent being thus fully established in regard to all those things which, being of paramount importance in respect to the child's present and future welfare, ought to be regulated by the comparative far-seeing wisdom of the parent, with little regard to the evanescent fancies of the child, it is on every account best, in respect to all other things, to allow to the children the largest possible indulgence. ”

“ We are tempted to forget that parental duties are positive as well as negative, that it is not enough for parents not to hurt a child, not to do injury to his moral and spiritual well-being. For of all beings parents must, paraphrasing the word of the German poet, be aggressively and resistlessly good, pervasively beneficent, throughout their contact with a child. ”

“ One of the commonest forms of pernicious intervention is the attempt to mitigate parental severity, to soften parental asperity, on the part of nice, soft, respectable kinsmen and kinswomen, who regard a child under twenty years or even under twenty-five in some cases as a little lap-dog to be caressed and fondled, but in no wise to be dealt with as a human to whom much may be given and from whom more must be asked. ”