SUGGESTED FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN Lawson G. Lowrey, M.D., Director, Child Guidance To make intelligent suggestions for further developments in education for parenthood it is first of all essential to determine, if possible, which are the more important problems of parenthood and which of them can be reached by education. Not only must the problems to be reached be determined, but ways and means of reaching them must be considered. In general, it seems that at present we are not in position to give very final answers to most of the questions which emerge in such a discussion, but it will be profitable if we can agree that certain questions are those first to be attacked, and that certain methods offer the most profitable approach. I Parenthood involves a series of complicated relationships and adjustments: those within the individual, between parents, between parent and child or children, between adult and the social order at large, etc.; and it is further complicated by such problems as work, income, expenditure, and other types of economic-social problems. It would appear, from various commentaries on past conditions, that the complexity of the job of being a parent has paralleled the increasing complexity of our social life, and for that reason some type of education for the assumption of the parental function has become increasingly important. Many factors have contributed to this, among them the general trend to urban life, with the decrease in production by the individual family unit of foodstuffs, etc., necessary for the maintenance of life; the increase in the cost of living necessitated by an urban existence; the greater cramping and lessened opportunity for normal discharge of energy. There is also the change pointed out by Professor Burgess, from the older type of family in which a wide kinship group of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were definitely related to the smaller immediate family of parents and children in matters of unity and control, to our modern type of family where father, mother, and children have become a small group emancipated from the control of this larger group. As is true of so many other types of occupation, in the older days the then available solutions for the problems of parenthood were passed along from generation to generation; practically speaking, by word of mouth. For the most part these families seem to have been of the type which Burgess calls "highly integrated families," having some one of the following traits: an elaborate ritual, rigorous discipline, sentimental interdependence, or stimulating cooperative activities or objectives. So long as the family, in all its ramifications, occupied a certain section of the country-perhaps one or several townships of a rural county—integration of this sort could be maintained, and with its maintenance the various Ernest W. Burgess, "The Family as a Unity of Interacting Personalities," The Family, March, 1926. must be trained in what Plato called the "harmonious life," or they have no right to the presence of their own children. The third type of training for parents is found in the wider comradeship which they must make for their children. Froebel said, "Come let us with our children live." Emerson insisted that all life is shown by the wider circles that it makes. Very many parents, as the mind expands, are able to do this. The business man gets narrower in his interests. His conversation is pitifully limited both in subject and in appropriateness. The mother lives in a little world of her own, more and more filled by details. This is particularly true if she is dissatisfied and her thwarted desires of all kinds meet her morning, noon, and night. The children are going to make their own circles. Will the parents stand on the edge with them? This is one reason why case work is looking more and more at the horizons of a family to discover what its recreations are, to find out if it has any higher values and practices them in religion and culture. It would be well if, in between thirty and forty-five, parents could go to a school of life in which they would learn these things for their children's sake if for no other reason. One other training for parenthood is necessary: the training for the emancipation of their children. That period begins at the age of twelve in the life of a child, and is then a progressive science of responsibility to the very end. But in parenthood at this point how much failure has been recorded? The mother holds back her daughter from life. The father is afraid to give his son responsibility. There is often a shrinking on the part of the children themselves to plunge into the world of reality. If the emancipation takes a wrong form, chasms of misunderstanding are created that are sometimes never filled. An old man who had raised four sons confessed that at the ages of from twelve to fourteen he lost every one of them. He did not understand them, and the years had to go before they could appreciate him. If he had had a proper training for these years another family story would have been told. A definite training for parents during this time, before the onset of the years makes it too late, would save us from the inverted personality which thinks only in terms of its own short circuits, the past interest and relationship of the perverted mind and life with all that it means biologically today; the delinquent and the criminal who did not know where to take their circles from the vast beginnings of life and make them sweep the good, the beautiful, and the true; the bigot and the fanatic who regiment all life into terms of narrow discipline and develop the cruelty and the intolerance of all narrow idealism. Plato was the first to suggest that parents must be trained exactly and definitely and must be deprived of their children if they would not take the training to prepare them for the state. Jesus said that the unsympathetic guardian or parent would be judged at last by the product of the child, and if he offended against any of the least of these it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck and he be cast into the midst of the sea! SUGGESTED FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN Lawson G. Lowrey, M.D., Director, Child Guidance To make intelligent suggestions for further developments in education for parenthood it is first of all essential to determine, if possible, which are the more important problems of parenthood and which of them can be reached by education. Not only must the problems to be reached be determined, but ways and means of reaching them must be considered. In general, it seems that at present we are not in position to give very final answers to most of the questions which emerge in such a discussion, but it will be profitable if we can agree that certain questions are those first to be attacked, and that certain methods offer the most profitable approach. Parenthood involves a series of complicated relationships and adjustments: those within the individual, between parents, between parent and child or children, between adult and the social order at large, etc.; and it is further complicated by such problems as work, income, expenditure, and other types of economic-social problems. It would appear, from various commentaries on past conditions, that the complexity of the job of being a parent has paralleled the increasing complexity of our social life, and for that reason some type of education for the assumption of the parental function has become increasingly important. Many factors have contributed to this, among them the general trend to urban life, with the decrease in production by the individual family unit of foodstuffs, etc., necessary for the maintenance of life; the increase in the cost of living necessitated by an urban existence; the greater cramping and lessened opportunity for normal discharge of energy. There is also the change pointed out by Professor Burgess,' from the older type of family in which a wide kinship group of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were definitely related to the smaller immediate family of parents and children in matters of unity and control, to our modern type of family where father, mother, and children have become a small group emancipated from the control of this larger group. As is true of so many other types of occupation, in the older days the then available solutions for the problems of parenthood were passed along from generation to generation; practically speaking, by word of mouth. For the most part these families seem to have been of the type which Burgess calls "highly integrated families," having some one of the following traits: an elaborate ritual, rigorous discipline, sentimental interdependence, or stimulating cooperative activities or objectives. So long as the family, in all its ramifications, occupied a certain section of the country-perhaps one or several townships of a rural county-integration of this sort could be maintained, and with its maintenance the various Ernest W. Burgess, "The Family as a Unity of Interacting Personalities," The Family, March, 1926. problems involved in parental functioning could be met on the basis of the family standards. An important factor here was the definite carry-over from the previous family patterns, that is to say, from the patterns established during childhood by the antecedent generations. On the whole, then, and despite many weaknesses that could be pointed out, there was a fairly adequate, and yet less formal, recognition of the problems with which parents are faced. It is probably true that for the majority of families such integration does not exist today. There is more complete isolation of the small family group of parents and children in our modern type of life. Other factors are: the entrance of the woman into economic fields and her emergence from her traditional position; the fewer needs that now exist for heavy muscular work as a means of maintenance of life; the development (which has been most marked in this country in the past four decades) of the notion that "parents are people," and as such may continue to have an expressive social life. Oftentimes, with the added economic ease and the greater facilities offered the family for amusements of various sorts, this idea leads to a degree of recreation seeking outside the home which is in and of itself inimical to proper functioning as parents. But the outstanding feature of the present situation seems to me to be the increasing feeling of helplessness which the modern parent has, and the increasing recognition of the fact that there are principles of parenthood which can be learned and practiced as one may learn and practice any other profession. I hasten to add that the profession of parenthood differs from any other profession because of its extreme personalness and because of the emotional bonds that exist between parent and child. These bonds are always ambivalent, not only for the parent, but also for the child, so that the emotional attitude of parent and child between each other is composed of acceptances and rejections, or likes and dislikes, or loves and hates, or sympathies and envies, or dominances and submissions. It should be added that very few parents recognize clearly the ambivalence of their attitudes toward their children or the ambivalence of their hopes, wishes, and aspirations for their children. Indeed, I suspect that many people would emphatically deny the statement I have just made. In its defense I can only say that practical clinical experience demonstrates this ambivalence of attitude, and that one needs only to talk for a while to a parent, or needs only consider the matter for a while for himself, to find that so far as the children are concerned the parent always finds some things to praise and love and some things to reject and dislike in the child, and these are only the superficial indicators of a deeper and more significant ambivalence, so that the statement is not so farfetched as at first sight it may appear to be. It seems to me wise that we speak of the profession of parenthood as a means of correcting the universal tendency to regard parenthood as just something that happens, something for which people are instinctively ready, something concerning which nothing need be learned, because when an individual becomes a parent he will, by virtue of his inborn instincts, become an adequate parent. This seems to represent the most common viewpoint concerning parenthood, and in many instances is merely a defensive protection from the realization of personal inadequacies in parenthood. The profession of parenthood, then, has many angles, and it becomes quite necessary to decide which ones can be reached by education and how we shall reach them, and that those educating for parenthood have a clear understanding of them all. We have, of course, parenthood as a physiological function of the human species. Here a large amount of work has been done in relation to prenatal care of expectant mothers, the development of obstetrical and nursing service, the care of mothers after the time of birth, and a certain amount of work has been done in the difficult field of sex education as a preparation for the assumption of the physiological functions involved. There is the angle of the physical and health care of the child, and here, through milk stations, educational and clinical work relating to infant welfare and infant mortality, health examinations of babies and school children, public health work in the field of contagious diseases, etc., a great deal has been accomplished. For the most part the elements of education for parents in this field are well known, and for the most part they are being put fairly adequately into effect. The parent has also a relation to the education of the children, and we are beginning to get now some backfire from the almost universal tendency of parents to put the education of their children entirely into the hands of the schools. Not only schools but other interested groups are pointing out many ways in which education is a home function as well as a school function. A great deal of work is being done in this field of developing the importance of the home as an educational center. Parenthood involves the understanding of family relationships, relationships between parent and parent, between each parent and the family of the other, between parent and children. Here so far as I know, no very definite type of educational effort has been developed. And yet, as I shall try to show later, there is no more important zone of the whole problem of parenthood than this one of the emotional and other relationships that exist between these living personalities in the family circle, each of whom, life being a continuous process of adjustment, is called upon constantly for adjustment and readjustment to the others, to the physical aspects of the home, to the social order, etc. Parenthood involves very definite economic problems from the standpoint of income and outgo, proper budgeting of the family income, meeting the increased economic load which children cause, etc. Here we clearly have some types of educational work going on, not perhaps very well integrated, because so many of the problems are approached from the personal angle; but it would be in education. for this aspect of parenthood that vocational guidance on the one side, budgeting and purchasing on the other, would become important elements in education for life as life must be lived. Parenthood involves certain social aspects, thinking in terms of the grouping and regrouping of individuals which is the outstanding characteristic of our |