The Home Background by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 14, 1916

The Home Background

By Dorothy Canfield Fisher

It is a providential thing that the question of the sort of home background which our children shall have is as much within our control as it is vital. And yet there is no axiom the truth of which

is harder for us to realize.

Our instinct is to cry out that, what with enormous rents, high prices for clothes, domestic help unattainable, and hard times hovering ominously near, nothing is more tragically out of our control than the home background. But the fact remains, apprehended by us in our better moments, that, with some few exceptions, the real essentials of a sane, wholesome, active, and happy life for the children lie easily within our reach. There are, of course, families in the congested portions of city tenement districts who cannot command the conditions necessary for proper moral and physical child life and child growth, and there are some other families who are prevented from providing the right background by confirmed ill health or desperate misfortune; but it is safe to say that ninety-nine out of every hundred of us can, by taking thought (the right kind of thought), provide our children with the essentials for normal and healthy growth to their full stature.

By all means, therefore, let us take thought, but first let us be sure that we are taking “the right kind of thought.” Let us clarify our minds as to our real purpose; let us question ourselves seriously about the home we are providing for our children. What ought we to furnish them if we are not to fail in our duty toward them? In the case of infants under a year, modern science, good doctors, and sensible trained nurses, all banging together at our hard heads for the last twenty years, have given us a big lift up out of the abysmal confusion of mind which afflicted the views of our grandmothers on the subject of babies. We know now that if we happen to have plenty of money, time, and strength, it is all very well to amuse ourselves by embroidering the baby’s petticoats and trimming the little caps with ribbon, but that these fascinating occupations have nothing whatever to do with the welfare of the child, and are simply done to please ourselves. We now know that the baby needs and must have clean milk,—absolutely clean milk,—sterilized nursing bottles, and warm feet,—conditions which can be supplied as well in a Gypsy encampment as in the palace of a king.

But in the case of older children we have not as yet so clearly in our heads the equally vital difference between the essentials of moral and intellectual life and those trimmings and embroideries of existence which our own vanity is always driving us on to obtain for our boys and girls. We do not with sufficient vividness understand that for them the essentials are not handsome nurseries, clothes in fashion, expensive schooling, well-to-do playmates, a plethora of toys, a succession of costly “amusements,” or a life of physical ease,—all conditions which, luckily for the children, are out of the reach of most of us.

The real essentials, which any of us can have by taking thought, are peace and harmony among the adults of the family; an atmosphere of purposeful, cheerful industry and clear-sightedness toward the children; and for them a life of intellectual freedom and physical activity. Now these conditions can be secured in a little five-room house, in any moderate-size American town or village, or in the country, as easily as in a millionaire’s mansion. Self-indulgence and laziness certainly can be discouraged more easily by the example of adults who expect, as a matter of course, to do a reasonable amount of real work themselves, than by any amount of verbal exhortation or “manual training” in an atmosphere where the adults expect, as a matter of course, to do nothing but what pleases them.

It is only fair to admit that these right conditions are not easily to be secured anywhere in the world. They are possessions too precious to be gained without effort. But the fact that they can be secured by almost any of us who is willing to put himself out enough to secure them, throws on us the blame if our children grow up without having experienced these inestimable blessings. Inestimable blessings they are, and their absence is an inestimable handicap. They are desirable for adults, but for children they are essential, just as fresh milk, clean dishes, and warm feet are good for adults, but vitally essential for babies. To be sure, some babies do worry along on fly-infected milk and filthy nipples, but they grow up into adults with ruined digestion and lowered vitality. So in a home where irritability reigns, where the adults practice self-indulgence as consistently as their incomes will allow, and deal justly with the children whenever they happen not to feel too tired and nervous to do so, the children do grow up somehow; but they grow up with warped and crooked moral natures, into one or another of the various life failures so tragically common.

Everything else is of less importance for children than the color of the home background. The family can live on oatmeal porridge three times a day, the children can go with holes in their stockings, and with uncombed hair; the house can be unswept, the beds unmade; the mother can dress in a cheap print wrapper—any of the dreadful things we usually think of as “impossible” are infinitely better for the children’s moral health and present and future happiness and usefulness than a mother constantly scolding to let off the steam of her bad temper, or repressing unjustly the innocent activities of her children.—Dorothy Canfield Fisher.