APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY TO AMERICAN HOME LIFE  
NATURALLY, the question which concerns us is, how the spiritual discoveries made in this new institution in a far-away city of Italy, can be used to benefit our own children, in our own everyday, American family life. It must be stated uncompromisingly, to begin with, that they can be applied to our daily lives only if we experience a “change of heart.” The use of the vernacular of religion in this connection is not inappropriate, for what we are facing, in these new principles, is a new phase of the religion of humanity. We are simply, at last, to include children in humanity, and since despotism, even the most enlightened varieties of it, has been proved harmful to humanity, we are to abstain from being their despots, even their paternal, wise, and devoted despots. This does not mean that they are not to live under some form of government of which we are the head. We have as much right to safeguard their interests against their own weaknesses as society has to safeguard ours, in forbidding grade railways in big cities for instance, but we have no more right than society has to interfere[128] with inoffensive individual tastes, preferences, needs, and, above all, initiative.
At this point I can hear in my mind’s ear a chorus of indignant parents’ voices, crying out that nothing is further from their theory or practice than despotism over the children, and that, so far from ruling their little ones, they are the absolute slaves of their offspring (forgetting that in many cases there is no more despotic master than a slave of old standing). To answer this natural protest I wish here to be allowed a digression for the purpose of attempting a brief analysis of a trait of human egotism, the understanding of which bears closely on this phase of the relations of parent and child. I refer to the instinctive pleasure taken by us all in the dependence of someone upon us.
This is so closely connected with benevolence that it is usually wholly unrecognized as a separate and quite different characteristic. Even when it is seen, it is identified only by those who suffer from it, and any intimation of its existence on their part savors so nearly of ingratitude that they have not, as a rule, ventured to complain of what is frequently an almost intolerable tyranny. Just as it is the spiteful member of a family who is the only one to blurt out home-truths which run counter to the traditional family illusions, so it is only a thoroughly bad-tempered analyst, one who takes a malicious pleasure in dwelling on human meannesses, who can perform[129] the useful function of diagnosing this little suspected, very prevalent, human vice.
Here is the sardonic Hazlitt, derisively relieving his mind on the subject of benefactors. “... Benefits are often conferred out of ostentation or pride. As the principle of action is a love of power, the complacency in the object of friendly regard ceases with the opportunity or the necessity for the manifest display of power; and when the unfortunate protégé is just coming to land and expects a last helping hand, he is, to his surprise, pushed back in order that he may be saved from drowning once more. You are not haled ashore as you had supposed by those kind friends, as a mutual triumph, after all your struggles and their exertions on your behalf. It is a piece of presumption in you to be seen walking on terra firma; you are required at the risk of their friendship to be always swimming in troubled waters that they may have the credit of throwing out ropes and sending out life-boats to you without ever bringing you ashore. The instant you can go alone, or can stand on your own ground, you are discarded.”
Now the majority of us in these piping times of mediocrity have no grounds, fancied or real, for assuming the r?le of tyrannical Providence to other people. But the instinct, in spite of the decreased opportunity for its exercise, is none the less alive in our hearts; and when chance throws in our way a little child, our primitive, instinctive affection for[130] whom confuses in our minds the motives underlying our pseudo-benevolent actions, do we not wreak upon it unconsciously all that latent desire to be depended upon, to be the stronger, to be looked up to, to gloat over the weakness of another?
If this seems an exaggerated statement, consider for a moment the real significance of the feeling expressed by the mothers we have all met, when they cry, “Oh, I can’t bear to have the babies grow up!” and when they refuse to correct the pretty, lisping, inarticulate baby talk. I have been one of those mothers myself, and I certainly would have regarded as malicious and spiteful any person who had told me that my feelings sprang from almost unadulterated egotism, and that I “couldn’t bear to have the babies grow up” because I wanted to continue longer in my complacent, self-assumed r?le of God, that I wished to be surrounded by little sycophants who, knowing no standard but my personality, could not judge me as anything but infallible, and that I was wilfully keeping the children granted me by a kind Heaven as weak and dependent on me as possible that they might continue to secrete more food for my egotism.
What I now see to be a plain statement of the ugly truth underlying my sentimental reluctance to have the babies grow up would have seemed to me the most heartless attack on mother-love. It now occurs to me that mother-love should be something infinitely more searching and subtle. Modern[131] society with its enforced drains and vaccinations and milk inspection and pure-food laws does much of the physical protecting which used to fall to the lot of mothers. Our part should not be, like bewildered bees, to live idly on the accumulation of virtues achieved for us by the hard won battles of our ancestors against their lower physical instincts; but to catch up the standard and advance into the harder battle against the hidden, treacherous ambushes of egotism, to conceive a new, high devotion for our children, a devotion which has in it courage for them as well as care for them; which is made up of faith in their better, stronger natures, as well as love for them, and which begins by the ruthless slaughter, so far as we can reach it, of the selfishness which makes us take pleasure in their dependence on us, rather than in seeing them grow (even though it may mean away from us) in the ability wisely to regulate their own lives. We must take care that we mothers do not treat our children as we reproach men for having treated women, with patronizing, enfeebling protection. We must learn to wish, above all things, to see the babies grow up since there is no condition (for any creature not a baby) more revolting than babyishness, just as there is no state more humiliating (for any but a child) than childishness. Let us learn to be ashamed of our too imperious care, which deprives them of every chance for action, for self-reliance, for fighting down their own weaknesses, which[132] snatches away from them every opportunity to strengthen themselves by overcoming obstacles. We must learn to see in a little child not only a much-loved little body, informed by a will more or less pliable to our own, but a valiant spirit, longing for the exercise of its own powers, powers which are different from ours, from those of every human being who has ever existed.
There is no danger that in combating this subtle vice, we will fall back into the grosser one of physical tyranny over women, children, or the poor. That step forward has been taken conclusively. That question has been settled for all time and has been crystallized in popular opinion. We may still tyrannize coarsely over the weak, but we are quite conscious that we are doing something to be ashamed of. We can therefore, without fear of reactionary setbacks, devote ourselves to creating a popular consciousness of the sin of moral and intellectual tyranny.
Now all this reasoning has been conducted by means of abstract ideas and big words. It may seem hardly applicable to the relations of an affectionate parent with his three-year-old child. How, practically, concretely, at once, to-day, can we begin to avoid paternal despotism over little children?
To begin with, by giving them the practical training necessary to physical independence of life. Anyone who knows a woman who lived in the South during the old régime must have heard stories of the pathetic, grotesque helplessness to which the rich white population[133] was reduced by the presence and personal service of the slaves ... the grown women who could not button their own shoes, the grown men who had never in their lives assembled all the articles necessary for a complete toilet. Dr. Montessori says, “The paralytic who cannot take off his boots because of a pathological fact, and the prince who dare not take them off because of a social fact, are in reality reduced to the same condition.” How many mothers whose willing fingers linger lovingly over the buttons and strings and hooks and eyes of the little costume are putting themselves in the pernicious attitude of the slave? How many other bustling, competent, quick-stepping mothers, dressing and undressing, washing and feeding and regulating their children, as though they were little automata, because “it’s so much easier to do it for them than to bother to teach them how to do it,” are reducing the little ones to a state of practical paralysis? As if ease were the aim of a mother in her relations to her child! It would be easier, as far as that is concerned, to eat the child’s meals for it; and a study of the “competent” brand of mother almost leads one to suspect that only the physical impossibility of this substituted activity keeps it from being put into practice. The too loving mother, the one who is too competent, the one who is too wedded to the regularity of her household routine, the impatient mother, the one who is “no teacher and never can tell anybody how to do things,” all these diverse personalities, though actuated[134] by quite differing motives............