A Treatise on Parents and Children

The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is / the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as / confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable / institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion / to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier. / The family is still more variable, because the number of persons / constituting a family, unlike the number of persons constituting a / marriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a / family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third / family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions / may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris / slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the / parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer / colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand / to the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger is / that of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variations / in family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as frankly / political as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers being / no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels / about soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though the / mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak. The / Roman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship: / the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to / for toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: the / squire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than he / can help: the tram conductor, when employed by a joint stock company, / sometimes never sees them at all.

Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life, The / Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than The / Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations founded / so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable. / When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally / represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three the / results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under / the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly. The / modern small family is much too stuffy: children "brought up at home" / in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances differ. If the / parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where there is a good / deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of keeping itself to / itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at the neighbors over / the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows his neighbor and / everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and social importance, / is in effect broken up by school life, by out-of-door habits, and by / frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricals / and excursions and the like, families of four may turn out much less / barbarous citizens than families of ten which attain the Boer ideal of / being out of sight of one another's chimney smoke.