A Treatise on Parents and Children

Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare to / analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human / sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger's / house than it would have received from its actual parents. Not even / Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect about it. / When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary to / the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably wrong / to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course is for / the parents and children to cast off the specific parental and filial / relation when they are no longer necessary to one another. The / child does this readily enough to form fresh ties, closer and more / fascinating. Parents are not always excluded from such compensations: / it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the lover / comes in at the window. Indeed it happens now oftener than it used to, / because people remain much longer in the sexual arena. The cultivated / Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage. The British matron / has discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness; and a bishop's / wife at fifty has more of the air of a _femme galante_ than an actress / had at thirty-five in her grandmother's time. But as people marry later, / the facts of age and time still inexorably condemn most parents to / comparative solitude when their children marry. This may be a privation / and may be a relief: probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse / than a salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the moment / at least, a wrench.

For though parents and children sometimes dislike / one another, there is an experience of succor and a habit of dependence / and expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches a child to / its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in a quite peculiar way. / A benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent; but people become / attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached / to them; and to "suffer little children" has become an affectionate / impulse deep in our nature.