DOROTHY DIX: Parents Need a Sense of Humor

.. So That They Can laugh at the Follies of Youth Instead of Breaking Their Hearts over Them-

The Only Thing That Ails Their Boys and Girls Is Youth.

[The Welland-Port Colborne Evening Tribune, 5 October 1931]

The thing that parents need most is a sense of humor and unfortunately most of them haven’t even a rudimentary funnybone in their whole anatomy. I grant you that rearing children is no merry jest. It is a serious and a heart-searching business, especially so in these days when the youngsters are given to taking every risky hurdle in their stride and knocking down all of the old bars of conventional behaviour. Nevertheless, most fathers and mothers make a mistake in regarding their adolescent boys and girls too tragically and they shed many tears over things that they had better laugh off.

This attitude isn’t good for the parents and it isn’t good for the children. Indeed, you might almost say that the more conscientious parents are in doing their duty, the less they do it. For the fathers and mothers who consider their children as an awful RESPONSIBILITY are bound to find them an awful burden, and this makes an awful barrier, that neither can surmount, between them and the children.

It is a matter of common observation that parents are so much more indulgent to their younger children than they were to their older ones. The thing that Junior would never have been permitted to do Benjamin does with impunity. Fifteen-year-old Sadie says things to mother and discusses topics with her that Maria, who is 30 and married, would never dream of broaching to her.

Also, there is a much greater comradeship between the younger children and their parents than is ever established between the older children and their father and mother.

The reason for this is that the parents are relaxed. The worked out all of their theories of child-rearing on their first-born and by the time the younger ones came along they have discovered that most of their ideas about how to rear infant phenomenon were all bunk.

They have quit trying to read something occult into a baby’s cry and begun looking for a pin or the peppermint bottle. They have found out that everything an infant does is not deeply significant, and they can give a child a bite of candy without it curling up and dying at your feet, and rock it to sleep occasionally without addling its brains. Also that you can kiss it without cursing it with mother fixation that will wreck its whole future life.

Parents never really enjoy their children until after they cease to regard them as agonizing problems that they have to work out and realize that most of the difficulties that they have lain awake nights trying to solve will automatically disappear if they will give nature a chance to take its course. Nor do children ever get close to their parents until mother and father quit weeping over them and learn to laugh with them.

It is queer that men and women who are not so long from their own youth and who must remember how silly and inconsequent they were, how eager and how ardent and what false values they put on things, fail to understand that their own children have to go through this same period of youthful folly and that is something to smile over instead of tearing your hair about.

But they don’t. They expect their hobbledehoy boys and girls to have the wisdom, the settled purpose in life, the thoughts and feelings and desires that they have and when they find they haven’t and that their youngsters are just kids, mad with the joy of living and brimming over with curiosity about the show that is just unfolding before them, they beat upon their breast and utter doleful lamentations about what the younger generation is coming to.

Every day some mother tells me that she has just worn herself to skin and bone trying to teach her girls to be orderly and to get them to do household chores, and that she can’t do it, and that they scatter their things all over the place.

“Good gracious,” I say to her, “why vex yourself? All girls are like that. Don’t you remember when you used to hang your party dresses up on the floor and how you hated to make beds and wash dishes and how your mother prophesised that you would run some man crazy if you married him? And now you are the model housekeeper of the community. Let Mamie alone, she will learn how to be orderly when she has her own house.”

Or some mother wails out that her girls are boy crazy. “Well, weren’t we all when we were that age?” I ask her. “Don’t you remember when you thought you would die if Tommy Jones didn’t walk home with you from school, of Jimmy Smith didn’t ask you to dance at a party?”

“And don’t you remember when you thought you would perish with chagrin if you didn’t have as big a bow or hair-ribbon as every other girl and how you thought you had just as well give up and die and not try to live any longer in a cruel world if you didn’t get to go on a picnic that you had set your heart on?”

“Yet we all grew up into respectable women and acquired a philosophy of life, and learned how to write the proper price tags on things.

And every day you hear men calling their young sons fool: because their boys were giddy sport clothes and step out of night and are more interested in a football score than they are in the stock market and drive their cars past the speed limit. What a pity that fathers can’t remember that they did all of these things when they were boys and yet they have settled down into being the pillars of the community.

That is why I say parents need a sense of humor so that they can laugh at these follies of youth instead of breaking their hearts over them. For the only things that ails their boys and girls is youth, and that is something that time cures. Alas and alack.

DOROTHY DIX

Sisters Comment: When I was born in the same year the HMS Beagle departed on its first voyage, regimented decorum was the child rearing model of the day. Childish mouths were kept silent when the parents entered their nursery domain and any opinions of youth were met with stern countenances and firm intolerance. I was a giddy spring flower but a silent one. Allow your children to speak, and trust they will become the model parents of tomorrow.