What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care?
What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care?
What is the ideal of those
most advanced in knowledge of childhood's needs and most sincere in
devotion to the welfare and happiness of the young? It is certainly
not one which ignores or minimizes the influence of the private home
or one which includes the belief that one parent, however wise or
good, can do as much for a child as two parents working in harmony
over a long period of years can accomplish.
Nor can the influence of such a proposed separation of mating and
parenthood upon the sex-relationship itself be ignored in any proposed
new ways of living together. Some of the critics of the family, as we
know it, may put "duty" in quotation marks when dealing with
sex-relationship in the effort to put "love" on the throne, but
experience shows that in all the intimate relationships of life some
stay from without the individual desire is needed to restrain from
impulsive change and lessen frictional expression of temperamental
weakness. On reason and a sense of obligation are based all successful
human arrangements, and these need social support.
