"I should think that the commandment 'Children, obey your parents' might be in danger of being overlooked or thrust aside," she said, "in a country in which children and parents are 'chums,' as Americans say."
That ancient commandment would seem to be too toweringly large to be overlooked, too firmly embedded in the world to be thrust aside. It is a very Rock of Gibraltar of a commandment.
American parents do not relinquish their authority over their children. As for government--like other wise parents, they aim to help it to develop, as soon as it properly can, from a government of and for their children into a government by them. Self-government is the lesson of lessons they most earnestly desire to teach their children.
Methods of teaching it differ. Indeed, as to methods of teaching their children anything, American fathers and mothers have no fixed standard, no homogeneous ideal. More likely than not they follow in this important matter their custom in matters of lesser import--of employing a method directly opposed to the method of their own parents, and employing it simply because it is directly opposed. This is but too apt to be their interpretation of the phrase "modernity in child nurture." But the children learn the lesson. They learn the other great and fundamental lessons of life, too, and learn them well, from these American fathers and mothers who are so friendly and companionable and sympathetic with them.
Why should they not? There is no antagonism between love and law. Parents are in a position of authority over their children; no risk of the strength of that position is involved in a friendship between parents and children anywhere. It is not remarkable that American parents should retain their authority over their children. What is noteworthy is that their children, less than any other children of the civilized world, rebel against it or chafe under it: they perceive so soon that their parents are governing them only because they are not wise enough to govern themselves; they realize so early that government, by some person or persons, is the estate in common of us all!
One day last summer at the seashore I saw a tiny boy, starting from the bath-house of his family, laboriously drag a rather large piece of driftwood along the beach. Finally he carefully deposited it in the sand at a considerable distance from the bath-house.