The Abdication of the Parent by F. M. W.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 7, 1910

The Abdication of the Parent

By F. M. W.

Is the parent abdicating in favor of the child in the matter of family government? This is not an untimely question. The last decade has witnessed a great lessening of parental responsibility, and a marked increase of precociousness on the part of children and youth. W. C. Gannett, a clergyman of Rochester, N. Y., discusses, in Unity, this family relationship. He charges that during the last fifty years “a change has been taking place in this country in the relation between parent and child, which amounts to nothing less than a gradual abdication of the parent.” This change vitally affects the mental and religious training, and the choice of companions. The mental training has been surrendered to the teachers of the day-school. The child’s religious training, Mr. Gannett believes, has been surrendered to the Sunday-school teachers, who often, instead of being persons of mature years, are earnest but inexperienced girls. He says:—

Time was when these things were not so. Time was, indeed, and not so very far back, when there was no Sunday-school in existence, endeavoring to better the home. Time was when prayer, hymn, Bible-reading, grace at the table, churchgoing as the elders’ Sunday habit, were parts of the household life, the practise and the expression of the religious sense pervading it,—each and all having influence, half unconscious, half conscious, on the children’s heart and life; and when the parents felt responsibility for the religiousness—call it the “reverence”—as well as for the honesty and kindness and courtesy and the reading and writing and arithmetic of those children. For good or for ill, or for both, these old-time customs have all but died out, and nothing yet in the modern home has risen to take their place. The parents have abdicated.

Of the abdication of the parent in allowing the child to choose his own companions, Mr. Gannett says:—

Are the little school-friendships watched, guided, taken in charge, by the two trustees at home,—to be discouraged and checked perhaps, to be welcomed and fostered perhaps, as they deem it best for the half-grown babies? Entrance into the high school,—is it synonymous with entrance into ‘club’ life for the little men and women? and is it school or the club, study or the play, that seems to be the side-show as one catches the talk of the boys and girls? The party-going, the theater-going,—does parental common sense, with firm yea and nay, or does the child’s wish for ‘doing what all the others are doing,’ regulate the frequency of it, and the hours of coming and going, and the degree of grown-upishness? The real ‘social center’ for children of 1910,—is it still the home? The prime confidants, the closest comrades through the adolescent years,—are they still mother and father? Vital questions, the child’s career a few years later depending much on the answers. And here again the all-too-true word for many and many a parent is—abdication.

The New York Independent, in commenting on what it calls this “thoughtful” article, cites the fact that as parental responsibility has declined, there has been a growing interest in such fads as “Child Study,” “Child Science,” “Child Protection,” “Child Legislation,” and “child welfare” in general, and adds:—

We can’t help thinking that “the start in life” that a child got in an old-time group of brothers and sisters quickened its perceptive faculties and its motor centers quite as well as a kindergarten awakens them; and we venture to doubt whether any real substitute has yet been found for the moral training which a child gets from even an “ordinary” father or mother.

Similarly, the New York Tribune speaks of this spirit of parental irresponsibility:—

It is disheartening, too, that to an alarming extent parental control of children has been relaxed, if not altogether abandoned, and responsibility not only for technical instruction, but also for moral culture and general discipline, has been shifted from the home to the school, . . .

The laws of nature are not to be disregarded with impunity, and there is probably none of them more imperative or more inexorable in its exaction of penalties for its violation than that which prescribes parental care for, and control of, children, and dutiful subjection of children to their parents. No satisfactory substitute for that relationship has yet been found.

In the catalogue of sins especially prominent in the church of God in the last days, as given by the apostle Paul, is that of disobedience to parents. Sad it is that this condition exists, that we see so many boys and girls coming up with but little if any restraining influence. Were time to continue, it would be sad to contemplate the moral status of the next generation. To those engaged in this last great movement, these conditions should appeal with special emphasis. Every Seventh-day-Adventist parent should seek to know his duty in relation to the children God has entrusted to his care and training. What account will these parents render in the day of final judgment? How shall we answer for the souls of our children, if, through our indifference or neglect, they are left without a hope in Jesus Christ? The closing message has as a part of its work the turning of the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers. May this be its result in the home of every believer in this message.

F. M. W.