The American Child | Page 6

to meet all three of them near a tearoom. I asked them--perforce all of them--to go in with me and partake of ice cream. As we sat around the table, the oldest of the three glanced at the other two with a friendly smile. "It is nice--all of us having ice cream with you at the same time," she remarked, and her younger sisters enthusiastically agreed.
To be sure, they are nearer the same age and they are more alike in their tastes than their mother and her sister, or their father and his brother. Perhaps their parents needed to take their pleasures singly; they seem able quite happily to take theirs in company.
I have another friend, who was brought up in a household in which, as she says, "individuality" was the keynote. In her own home the keynote is "the family." She encourages her children to "do things together." Furthermore, she and her husband habitually participate in their children's occupations to a greater degree than any other parents I have ever seen.
[Illustration: THREE SMALL GIRLS]
Their friends usually entertain these children "as a family"; but not long ago, happening to have only two tickets to a concert, I asked one, and just one, of the little girls of this household to attend it with me. She accepted eagerly. During an intermission she looked up at me and said, confidingly, "It is nice sometimes to do things not 'as a family,' but just as one's self!"
Then, for the first time, it occurred to me that she was the "odd one" of her family. All its pleasures, all its interests, were not equally hers. She needed sometimes to do things as herself.
In matters of discipline, too, we find the same theory at work. Parents who were severely punished as children do not punish their children at all; and the most austere of parents are those who, when children, were "spoiled." Almost regardless of the natures of their children, parents deal with them, so far as discipline is concerned, as they themselves were not dealt with.
This implies no lack of love, no lack of respect, for the older generation. On the contrary, it is the sign and symbol of a love, a respect, so great as to permit of divergences of opinion and procedure, in spite of differences of age.
"I am not going to bring up the baby in the way I was brought up, mamma, darling," I once heard a mother of a month-old baby (her first child) say to the baby's grandmother.
"Aren't you, dear?" replied the older lady, with a smile. "Why not?"
"Oh," returned the daughter, "I want her to be better than I am. I think if you'd brought me up conversely from the way you did, I'd have been a much more worth-while person."
She spoke very solemnly, but her mother only laughed, and then fondly kissed her daughter and her granddaughter. "That is what I said to my mother when you were a month old!" she said whimsically.
Children in American homes, it might be supposed, would be affected by such diversity in the theories of their parents and their grandparents concerning their rearing. They might naturally be expected to "take sides" with the one or the other; or, at any rate, to be puzzled or disturbed by the principle of "contrariwiseness" governing their lives. From their earliest years they are aware of it. The small girl very soon learns that the real reason why she finds a gold bracelet in her Christmas stocking is that mother "always wanted one, but grandma did not approve of jewelry for children." The little boy quickly discovers that his dog sleeps on the foot of his bed mainly because "father's dog was never allowed even to come into the house. Grandpa was a doctor, and thought dogs were not clean."
This knowledge, so soon acquired, would seem to be a menace to family unity; but it is not--even in homes in which the three generations are living together. The children know what their grandparents wished for their parents; they know what their parents wish for them; but, most of all and best of all, they know what they wish for themselves. It is not what their parents had, nor what their parents try to give them; it is "what other children have."
Perhaps all children are conventional; certainly American children are. They wish to have what the other children of their acquaintance have, they wish to do what those other children do. It is not because mother wanted a bracelet, and never had it, that the little girl would have a bracelet; it is because "the other girls have bracelets." Not on account of the rules that forbade father's dog the house is the small boy happy in the nightly companionship of his dog; he takes