The same considerations make it evident that especial care should be paid to those children who, for one reason or another, are unable to enjoy the advantages of normal family life--care to ensure that they should have available suitable substitutes for the parents of whom they are deprived and that they should receive the due quantity of love which their moral and psychological development demands.
[Sidenote: Family hatreds however are undesirable, when intense and prolonged]
Although it is necessary thus to urge both the inevitability and the desirability of the love relationship between parent and child, our attitude towards the hate relationship, which so frequently accompanies the child's early love, need not in all respects be similar. The early arousal of love in connection with the parents or their substitutes is, we have maintained, essential for the proper unfolding of the emotional and moral characteristics, and is therefore to be desired, even apart from the immediately pleasurable and beneficial aspects of this love both to parent and to child. The corresponding hatreds are certainly not in themselves either pleasurable or beneficial, and their undesirable consequences are often, as we have seen, all too clearly obvious.
[Sidenote: though to some extent inevitable and necessary]
Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that certain tendencies and affects (useful and necessary under certain conditions--such as anger or those feelings that are aroused by rivalry and competition) receive in this manner a stimulation which is not without its beneficial aspects. The tendency to revolt, in particular, is one of the most valuable aids to progress and the earliest manifestations of this tendency must necessarily have reference to the home. A child who never disobeyed his parents and who never felt their authority as irksome would in all likelihood be sadly deficient in individuality and initiative in later life. For this reason the arousal of a desire to rebel against the parents (with the accompanying feelings of hostility) is not in every case to be condemned. Indeed, as we have already shown, the incompatibility between the desires and points of view of children and of adults makes such a tendency to rebellion and hostility to some extent inevitable. It is only when this hostility is frequently and violently aroused that the benefits are not commensurate with the disadvantages. In every case moreover it would seem desirable that the tendencies to rebellion and hostility should not be concentrated on the family circle but should, as soon as may be, seek an outlet in some other direction, where they will be less liable to constant stimulation (a state of affairs that is obviously undesirable) and less likely to give rise to unprofitable and dangerous mental conflicts.
