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    Child Versus Parent Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home
    Child Versus Parent Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home
    Child Versus Parent Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home
    Ebook163 pages1 hour

    Child Versus Parent Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home

    By Stephen Wise

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    Child Versus Parent Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home
    Author

    Stephen Wise

    Stephen Wise was born in Michigan. At age eight, friends of his invited him to participate in a “home movie” they were making. This set him on a course of filmmaking where he wrote and directed his own films on Super 8 through his teen years. His family moved to Texas and then to Oklahoma, where he earned an Associate’s Degree in Broadcasting. He then relocated to Orlando, where he was one of the first 30 students inducted into the inaugural class of the University of Central Florida’s film program and graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree cum laude.With a love of writing, Stephen focused on screenwriting. He received accolades from Creative Screenwriting Magazine, Writer’s Digest, and the Screenwriting Expo. He co-wrote a script for a proposed Batman film that was in consideration at Warner Bros., but was eventually passed over in favor of the reboot “Batman Begins.” IFC listed his effort as one of the seven best unproduced Batman screenplays.He has had a varied career in film production and in the private sector. Among the dozen short films he wrote, directed, and/or produced, several played in film festivals around the world. He has worked on video projects for Walt Disney World and Lockheed Martin, as well as winning three Addy Awards for commercials he produced and directed. He has worked in theater, both onstage and behind the scenes as director and technical director, and lent his screenwriting skills to the Blue Cat Screenwriting Competition as a contest judge. Most recently, he appeared as a background performer in the feature films Jurassic World and The Fantastic Four. If you don’t blink, you might see him. Since 2013, he has also served as the programming director for Pensacon: Pensacola Comic Con, where he also coordinates the Pensacon Short Film Festival.Short stories have always been a creative outlet for him, so he finally decided to publish an anthology of stories he wrote entitled “Portals of the Mind.” He has plans for another collection and possibly some novels. His favorite genres are adventure, science fiction, horror, fantasy, and suspense–basically anything that sparks his imagination. His favorite authors are Stephen King, Piers Anthony, Orson Scott Card, Alan Dean Foster, Tad Williams, Caleb Carr, Ray Bradbury, and Agatha Christie.

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      Child Versus Parent Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home - Stephen Wise

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Child Versus Parent, by Stephen Wise

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Child Versus Parent

      Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home

      Author: Stephen Wise

      Release Date: April 24, 2010 [EBook #32118]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILD VERSUS PARENT ***

      Produced by Larry B. Harrison and the Online Distributed

      Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      CHILD vs. PARENT

      THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

      NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS

      ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

      MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

      LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA

      MELBOURNE

      THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

      TORONTO

      Child versus Parent

      Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict

      in the Home

      BY

      STEPHEN S. WISE

      RABBI OF THE FREE SYNAGOGUE

      Author of The Ethics of Ibn Gabirol, How to Face Life,

      Free Synagogue Pulpit, etc.

      New York

      THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

      1922

      All rights reserved

      PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

      Copyright, 1922,

      By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

      Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1922.

      BROWN BROTHERS, LINOTYPERS

      NEW YORK

      TO THE MEMORY

      OF

      MY MOTHER,

      SABINE de FISCHER WISE

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER I

      FACING THE PROBLEM

      One way of averting what I have called the irrepressible conflict is to insist that, in view of the fundamental change of attitude toward the whole problem, the family is doomed. Even if the family were doomed, some time would elapse before its doom would utterly have overtaken the home. In truth, the family is not doomed quite yet, though certain views with respect to the family are,—and long ought to have been,—extinct. Canon Barnett[A] was nearer the truth when he declared: Family life, it may be said, is not 'going out' any more than nationalities are going out; both are 'going on' to a higher level. To urge that the problem of parental-filial contact need not longer be considered, seeing that the family is on the verge of dissolution, is almost as simple as the proposal of the seven-year-old colored boy in the children's court, in answer to the kindly inquiry of the Judge: You have heard what your parents have to say about you. Now, what can you say for yourself? Mistah Judge, I'se only got dis here to say: I'd be all right if I jes had another set of parents.

      For the problem persists and is bound to persist as long as the relationships of the family-home obtain. The social changes which have so markedly affected marriage have no more elided marriage than the vast changes which have come over the home portend its dissolution. It is as true as it ever was that the private home is the public hope. A nation is what its homes are. With these it rises and falls, and it can rise no higher than the level of its home-life. Marriage, said Goethe, is the origin and summit of civilization; and Saleeby[B] offers the wise amendment: It would be more accurate to say 'the family' rather than marriage. Assuming that the family which is the cellular unit of civilization will, however modified, survive modern conditions, the question to be considered is what burdens can the home be made to assume which properly rest upon it, if it is to remain worth while as well as be saved?

      Nothing can be more important than to seek to bring to the home some of the responsibilities with which other agencies such as school and church are today unfitly burdened. False is the charge that school and church fail to co-operate with the home. Truer is the suggestion that church and school have vainly undertaken to do that which the home must largely do. The teacher in church and school may supplement the effort of the parent but cannot and may not be asked to perform the work of parents. The school is overburdened to distraction, the church tinkers at tasks which in the nature of things must fall to parents or be left undone. And the school is attempting to become an agency for the universal relief of the home, which cannot be freed of its particular responsibilities even by the best-intentioned school or church.

      Another quite obvious thesis is that conflicts arise between parents and children not during the time of the latter's infancy or early childhood but in the days of adolescence and early adulthood. The real differences—rather than the easily quelled near-rebellions of childhood—come to pass when child and parent meet on terms and conditions which seem to indicate physical and intellectual equality or its approach. I do not say that the processes of parental guidance are to be postponed until the stage of bodily and mental equivalence has been reached but that the conflicts are not begun until what is or is imagined to be the maturity of the child raises the whole problem of self-determination. The latter is a problem not of infants and juveniles but of the mature and maturing.

      It may be worth while briefly to indicate the various stages or phases of the relationship of parents and children. In the earliest period, parents are for the most part youngish and children are helpless. This period usually resolves itself into nothing more than a riot of coddling. In the next stage, parents begin to approach such maturity as they are to attain, while children are half-grown reaching ten or twelve years. This is the term of unlessened filial dependence, though punctuated by an ever-increasing number of don't. In the third stage parents at last attain such maturity as is to be their own,—years and maturity not being interchangeable terms,—for, despite mounting years some parents remain infantile in mind and vision and conduct. Children now touch the outermost fringe or border of maturity in this time of adolescence, and the stage of friction, whether due to refractory children or to undeflectible parents, begins. Coddling has ended, or ought to have ended, though it may persist in slightly disguised and sometimes wholly nauseous forms. Dependence for the most part is ended, save of course for that economic dependence which does not greatly alter the problem.

      The conflict now arises between what might roughly be styled the parental demand of dutifulness and the equally vague and amorphous filial demand for justice—justice to the demands of a new self-affirmation, of a crescent self-reliance. And after the storm and fire of clashing, happily there supervenes a still, small period of peace and conciliation unless in the meantime parents have passed, or the conflict have been followed by the disaster of cureless misunderstanding. It may be well, though futile, to remind some children that it is not really the purpose of their parents to thwart their will and to stunt their lives and that the love of parents does not at filial adolescence, despite some Freudian intimations, necessarily transform itself into bitter and implacable hostility. To such as survive, parents aging or aged and children maturing or mature, this ofttimes becomes the period most beauteous of all when children at last have ceased to make demands and are bent chiefly upon crowning the aging brows of parents with the wreath of loving-tenderness.

      One further reservation it becomes needful to make. I must need limits myself more or less to parental-filial relations as these develop in homes in which it becomes possible for parents consciously to influence the lives of their children, not such in which the whole problem of life revolves around bread-winning. I do not consider the latter type of home a free home. It is verily one of the severest indictments of the social order that in our land as in all lands bread-winning is almost the sole calling of the vast majority of its homes. I do not

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