Parental Responsibility

IT IS worth considering more than once that the responsibility can rest with the parents when some children do not achieve their full possibility or even turn out badly.

Let us of course give due blame to the evil concupiscence that can provoke a painful transformation in children even when the parents have done everything possible.

It remains true just the same that in a good number of cases, the father and the mother or one or the other must plead guilty.

A boy is sent to college. He gets along fine until the sophomore year. From then on, he bungles everything, abandons right conduct, falls in with dangerous companions, carries on high to such an extent that he has to be expelled. And when a professor expresses astonishment, the dean will explain, “It’s his background; unfavorable heredity; his brothers were just the same. The mother is a saint, but the father is one of those unfortunate individuals who is ruled by his senses; he has caused much suffering to his wife. It is just the traces of the father showing up in the children.”

The explanation can be taken for what it is worth. The law of heredity is not a mathematical law. There is no doubt, however, that it is operative, more operative than one thinks.

When heredity is not to blame, it can often be a matter of bad training. How good parents are, how very good, too good, too weak! It is their own formation that is faulty; it should be done over.

A mother brought her young son to the doctor for an examination. The doctor prescribed a remedy. “The medicine was not pleasant to take but it was very potent,” he said. Well and good; they had the prescription filled.

Sometime later they returned to the doctor.

“Well, now, how’s our patient?”

“Not any better, doctor.”

“How’s that? Didn’t the medicine take effect?”

“No, doctor, it was too hard to take; he wouldn’t touch it!”

How much botch-work of that kind goes on! Parents satisfy the child’s every whim. They recoil before the first tears, before the mere signs of an outburst, before less than that—a frown, a pout, or a dejected look. They are lost!

Reversing the scriptural phrase, “Cain, where is thy brother, Abel?” an author speaking of social problems, which can well be duplicated in the family and in education, asked, “Abel, what have you done with Cain?” In other words, “You good people, are you not responsible through your faults or your incapacities that some good individuals have become bad?”

I have charge of a soul; I may have a plural charge—several souls. What has been my conduct until now? Do I not have to reproach myself with many faults or at least many weaknesses? And I am surprised at the results obtained! Are they not the logical outcome of my bungling?

Let me examine myself; consider the whole problem seriously; if it is necessary, let me reform.