Part 3

Now, possibly all this suggests no very great moral advance to you. It may be that you regard it as wrong to regulate births in any way. Yet surely it is well for this difficult problem to be carefully considered in open discussion. To avoid error we must have knowledge. For myself, as I have listened to speakers or read of what is being done, though possibly I am in sharp opposition to much that is believed and advised, yet always I am glad when I reflect that only a little while ago the very mention of birth control would have been impossible at any public meeting, nor would any paper have noticed it.

Everywhere since the war the increased interest in the question has been astonishing. Is it, I have asked myself, that the terrible loss of life has forced us at last to have a deeper understanding of the value of life? Certainly all over the world women and men are beginning to understand the right of every child to be well-born.

The relations between the poverty of the family and its size must be considered in connection with this question. Much stress is also rightly laid on the injurious effect on the mother of continuous and unwilling child-bearing, and on the resulting terrible wastage of life in mis-carriages and still-births. Personally, I should always like to hear more of the effect on the children unfortunate enough to live. _For the child is unfortunate who is born into a home unwanted by its mother._

To give life well it must be given gladly. There can be no deeper tragedy than an unwilling motherhood.

The moral and religious aspects of family limitation have to be considered. It needs to be emphasised how more and more religion to-day refuses to divorce the spiritual from the material necessities of man, and how it begins to appreciate that the bread-and-butter difficulties of life have the greatest effect on the moral character of the people.

If a criticism on the work of those who advocate birth control may be offered, it is that too much time is spent in saying what everyone agrees with. Propositions, which all who think at all practically accept, are gravely supported with elaborate arguments. More might be accomplished if these elementary questions were left and freer discussions given to the many grave problems which still await investigation. There are so many questions on which far more knowledge needs collecting before any definite conclusions of permanent value can be accepted.

Roughly classified, birth control needs to be studied from three different aspects:—

First, there is the effect upon the married couple.

Second, there is the effect upon the child.

And lastly, there is the effect of voluntary limitation of the birth-rate upon society.

In estimating the consequences to the man and the woman, it is impossible to neglect the psychological results.

The effect upon the mind is far stronger and more lasting than any more direct result. I mean, it is what the individual woman or man _feels_ about limitation that is important for them. It is their own attitude to what they do that will mainly decide the results it will have. This is a question of the deepest complication. And much more knowledge is needed, and the greatest care is called for not to form hasty and unproved opinions. It is, I must insist, an individual question that can never be arbitrarilly decided, even by those competent to form a decision. That is why so much that is said, even by doctors who ought to know better, is so absurd.

Much easier to estimate is the effect upon the child. Here we seem to be on firmer ground. To save the unwanted child from being born or conceived by drunken or syphilitic parents is a work of such plain morality that there would appear to be no room for difference of opinion.

Yet the question is deeper and far more difficult than this; there are, indeed, a whole group of problems connected with it. There is, for instance, the case of the only child, who always suffers grave disadvantages, brought up in a home with adults.

Again the childless or one-child marriage is often not happy for those who love children. This is felt, in particular, when one partner desires children and the other refuses to have them born. And it must not be forgotten that all that affects the parents, must also have its results on any child that is born. Apart from economic necessities, the small, limited family is, in many ways, harder to bring up than the large family.

With regard to the effect of birth control on society, it is now becoming a familiar reflection that often those least fitted to carry out parental duties, because of faults of character or misfortune of circumstances, have the largest families.

Here the main problem is not so much to teach the mere knowledge of how families are to be limited as to induce that control and to stir up such desire as will lead to limitation being practised.

But of course, the alteration of the characters of men and women is a task of too great difficulty to be treated as a side issue.

Yet I would not end with any word of discouragement. As I started by saying, the mere consideration of these difficult questions in the broad light of day must be felt, by all of us who are old enough to remember the attitude in the past, as a wholesome sign of the times.

We care more, and very slowly we are growing more honest.

SECTION II

CHILDREN

A BOY’S MISERY

Quite the saddest thing I have come across for some time is the account of the suicide from remorse of a widow, who drowned herself in utter misery; her body being found near the spot where a fortnight before that of her son, aged eleven, had been discovered. The boy, it seems had committed suicide after being accused of stealing money belonging to his mother.

Even from the bare outline of what happened there stands out stark, like some haunting fiend of pain, the agony suffered by this boy and mother before each sought the merciful quietness of death.

I find myself conscious of emotion stronger and more vexing than the strangling sense of pity. I am angry at the waste of two lives, and especially of the fine young life so grievously destroyed. Why, I ask myself, do we torture children by forcing on their sensitive natures punishment for failure in right conduct, while we make no attempt to understand the hidden struggles and unexplained emotions that almost always are the cause? How is it we fail to remember so completely our own growth, the mistakes we made, the undiscovered sins that now we have forgotten?

This boy stole from his mother. A thief you call him—a bad and ungrateful son.

But wait—think! Why did he steal?

An easy question, perhaps, you will say to answer. He desired to buy sweets, wished to visit the cinema; he had been betting with his marbles and getting into bad habits; or he wanted to swagger as a capitalist among his friends. Yes, that sounds probable enough; some such were, I expect, the reasons given by the mother, probably believed in by the boy himself. For so often we force the acceptance of our adult stupidities upon our children. The poor boy counted himself a thief, believed that he had sinned; he felt that he had wronged the mother whom he loved so much. He did not know, for there was no one to tell him, that he did not care at all for the money he stole for these trivial reasons. No, he did not know. But underneath, hidden in the darkness of his young soul, there was a stronger driving imperative, unknown and unsuspected by any one, most of all by the boy himself, which was the irresistible force that caused him to steal.

The reason of his action is really simple and would be recognised at once by any psychologist. It must be sought in the relation of the boy to his mother. He was not loved enough. At least, in some way, he was unhappy in his home relationship—at conflict in his innermost nature. He stole money, though, he did not know it, because he wanted love.

Of his life, through his eleven years, I lack the information that would provide us with the necessary details of proof. It is exceedingly improbable that the details will be forthcoming, for this boy was unknown and his death even at the time, caused no stir. But it is a very certain inference from the evidence of the excessive remorse that drove him to take his own life that, sometime in his earlier years, he had suffered some shock of jealousy or stress of misery in relation to his mother, that initiated the trouble, which later had to force an expression by means of his thefts.

I hope that I make my meaning clear. The idea of “transferring” a feeling into a quite different action may be a little strange to you. Yet everyone knows that, if you are angry with someone and dare not show it, you may gain relief from some kind of violent action entirely unconnected with the cause of the angry feelings. The boy who is afraid of his father, or is otherwise unhappy in his home, is very likely to be a “bully,” he takes what he has suffered out of someone weaker than himself. And it is the same process when the suppressed painful feelings of jealousy or other unhappiness take the form of spending money. The impulse is so powerful that if the money cannot be got in any other way, it will be stolen.

In many children there arises jealousy in connection with their home relationships, often without reason, but none the less real to the childish imagination, and this causes them to doubt the parental love that is as necessary to them as the sun to the flower. In its mild and practically harmless form this feeling of being neglected, which few children quite escape, is only occasionally active and remains unrecognised, though it is the frequent cause of irritability, of minor sicknesses and faults in behaviour. The results in aggravated cases are far more important, and cause, not infrequently, such a desperate consciousness of inferiority, with an always pressing sense of wanting something, that there arises an overpowering physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of the hidden trouble. This relief is found usually in acts of violence, frequently in stealing.

In the case we are considering we see the boy, beyond all shadow of doubt, over-sensitive, the symptoms of the unconscious trouble expressing themselves, on the one side, in an exaggerated feeling of inferiority, and, on the other, in a compelling need to find opportunity for the assertion of power. I do not know just how it happened. Maybe, his mother, who has paid with her life in passionate remorse, was too hindered with the troublesome details of life to be able to cultivate and pick the flowers of love. I cannot know, but _I do know_ that in the tender psyche or soul of that poor boy was some terrible need for his mother’s love—a want which he did not understand, indeed, of which he was probably wholly unaware. He may even have been in outward rebellion, have thought he was indifferent to his mother, but such a state would but furnish further witness to the trouble within. Had he known what it was he wanted, he would not have done what he did. But the ever-disturbing need, causing confusion in his soul, drove him to steal the most obvious thing that he was without and his mother possessed—that was money.

I do not hesitate to state that in the great majority of cases of boyish thieving the reasons for the act must be sought in some deeply hidden cause, marking some inner disturbance, with a feeling of wanting something which the boy does not understand. The taking of small sums of money or other pilfering acts is a covering-mask, and has no connection with crime. There is one thing further that it is necessary to remember. Though the fault of boyish thieving is not in itself a sign of any moral failure in the character, our treatment of such small thefts—our adult stupidity in understanding the difficulties and seeking out the concealed unhappiness of the young soul, often hounds on the stealing boy into the thief.

We make criminals of the young because we are blind and hardened with our own failures and minor struggles. We also cause, as in the case of this boy who killed himself, the most heart-breaking tragedies. It is appalling even to contemplate the suffering brought quite uselessly upon boys and girls by grown-up foolish ignorance.

We show too little imagination in our treatment of the child who does wrong. We rarely remember his almost terrible sensitiveness, nor do we consider the unusual advantage (from the point of view of the child) that we possess just in being grown-up. And nothing, as I have said before, is to the boy plainer as a sign of this grown-up freedom than the power we have (or rather that they think we have) to spend money how we like and when we like. That is why the taking of money is one of the most common symbolic acts for a boy’s wish for love or power.

That boyish theft is often pathological is proved by the fact that the objects stolen are often useless to the boy, that they are hidden away, and, as a rule, forgotten, and further that the boy forgets, or almost forgets, what he has stolen or how he took them. Some boys have a passion for stealing certain objects which they will take over and over again. Those who have had anything to do with delinquent children well know these symptoms.

In nearly all cases the thieving is repeated over long periods; although each act may be followed by violent remorse. Parents and all those who have to deal with these childish wrong doers, should know that this sorrow, especially if it is emotionally excessive, serves only to increase the tendency to a fresh repetition of the theft. For remorse fixes the boy’s attention on his stealing, and, still more, on the pleasurable feelings that unconsciously to himself are connected with the act. He remembers these, though he does not know it, whenever he thinks of his wickedness in stealing. And this fixity of attention in itself is a kind of rehearsal of the act, that is very likely to lead to an actual performance of it. Boyish remorse is, no doubt, gratifying to parents, but, almost invariably, it is harmful to the boy.

Whenever the boy thinks how bad he is, how wrong and disastrous an act would be, he is in danger of being compelled to perform that act. Most of us have experienced this, but we forget its application to the moral conduct of the young. Once think how terrible it would be to fall down the precipice, and the idea of jumping down approaches.

Remorse is a form of temptation. And all forms of temptation should, if possible, be avoided in dealing with the misconduct of children. If your boy steals money do not leave money lying about. Also, even if he has stolen money several times, express no faintest suspicion as to his not using honourably any money entrusted to him, for some necessary purpose, such as paying railway fares or buying a school book. Never be suspicious over the change such a child brings you. As he steals from a feeling of inferiority, and, in particular, because through jealousy, whether imagined or real, he feels himself less blessed with the love of those about him than other more confident children, any sign of your not being able to trust him, must render him more liable to err.

If the thieving boy were treated with sympathy and understanding, and loved and helped, instead of being blamed and often cruelly punished, there would be fewer grown-up thieves.

CRIMINALS MADE IN OUR NURSERIES

Every child suffers sometimes from a feeling of inferiority. He is so much smaller and weaker than the grown-ups who control his play and his work that he feels uncomfortably helpless against their authority, which to him seems often to be exercised in an arbitrary and unkind way.

There are times when this consciousness of being little and weak is so overwhelming that the child is bound to do something to convince himself of his own powerfulness.

It is then that he becomes naughty. For the very easiest way to command the attention of his mother, and the other adults who are with him, is by being naughty. Good, he is left alone. The grown-ups go on with their own occupations. He feels neglected. At most he is mildly praised. “Johnnie is a nice quiet boy to-day.” But this is very different from the attention he commands when he is naughty. He defies authority. For a short time he becomes a despot, ruling the grown-ups who usually rule him. His sensation of power is intensely enjoyable. And the more disturbance he makes in the nursery life the deeper is his satisfaction. Of course, he is sorry afterwards. But his sorrow is not really for the first period of successful rebellion, but for the following time after his power fails.

Now, it is very important for the mother to understand this. The real problem is to minimise as much as can be of the child’s enjoyment of naughtiness.

Any unwisdom on the mother’s part such as her being too emotionally concerned, indulging in nagging or violent anger, may have very serious results. Inevitably the child feels as he sees his mother’s tears and want of control, “I have caused this.” Instead of being weak he is master of his mother. That is why usually he is good after he has been naughty.

But this kind of nursery behaviour is disastrous to the child’s character.

Let me tell you a rather striking story to illustrate this. A young boy, very naughty, was sent to bed. His mother, greatly troubled, went some hours later to his room. He was kneeling, praying. She thought he was asking God to forgive him. But this was what she heard: “Please, dear God, forgive my bad mummy for being so unkind to poor little Freddy.” The boy grew up in the most unfortunate way. I cannot give the details and there were, of course, several causes. Yet certainly his character suffered the first wrong in the nursery from an unwise emphasising by his mother of his own importance.

The naughty child is always the child over-occupied with thoughts of himself. And his feelings are unhealthily important to him just because he finds himself for some cause at a disadvantage. Parents, unconsciously, but very foolishly, emphasise their children’s inferiority; they speak of their weakness, tell them they are too little to do this or that, never realising the danger of what they are doing.

Children must not be subjected to conditions of emotional stress, which increase unnecessarily their inevitable consciousness of inferiority in an adult world. If the parents do not find out and remedy the cause of these feelings (which they ought to know are invariably present whenever a child is naughty) and provide an expression by which the desired power is gained in a right way, let me warn them that they are dangerously limiting their children’s chance of a successful and happy life. By connecting pleasure with bad conduct, they are certainly, though they do not know it, making the way easy for every kind of future bad conduct.

The fate of all children is decided in the nursery; criminals are made there as well as saints and heroes.

THE TYRANNY OF PARENTS

In the life of every girl and every boy there come times when they must, and should, free themselves from the thraldom of the home.

This may sound hard to parents, who desire almost always to keep their children in tutelage, and cannot often even think of them except as belonging to the home and to themselves.

Yet the young must rebel, must escape from this too-closely-binding yoke of love. They have to break away from the moorings of safety; to adventure; to find a place for themselves; to get into the world and to establish their own lives as women and men.

We should hear much less of trouble between parents and children if fathers, and especially mothers, could be made to understand that the conflict with their growing boys and girls is not a personal conflict; that it has nothing, or at least very little, to do with the actual situation, and is not directly dependent on anything that either the parents or the children may do or may not do. And this is comforting to parents—it does not mean that their children love them less.

No, the conflict is based on an inescapable psychological opposition. It is the necessity of the young to escape from the tyranny of the old.

The parent’s hand is needed to steady the child, while it is unable to stand firmly on its own feet or to guide its own steps; but as the child grows older, it must learn to walk alone. If the mother persists in holding out a hand, never lets the child fall down, she destroys a proper independence and the hand held-out-too-long is used to satisfy the mother’s selfish desire; to give her the pleasure she gains from the child’s dependence on herself, and not because of any need of the child for help.

You will see the application of this illustration.

Many mothers prolong the years of childish helplessness and absence of initiative because they do not want their children to grow up. Especially they check the boy’s or the girl’s independent feelings and impulses by persistently guiding them.

There is an immense, but usually unrecognised, selfishness in the apparently devoted parent. Such devotion ignores the right of the young to discover for themselves.

The separation between parent and child needs to be more than a mere separation in space. Sending a boy or a girl away to school or elsewhere does not separate it from the home ties; often such a separation but serves to bind them more fixedly. What is needed is a psychological separation—an emotional freedom from the too-crippling dependence of childhood. There is the need to take the home standards and compare them with other standards of the world; the getting rid of the old excessive reverence for the parents. They, too, must be criticised and judged.

This process of liberation is difficult and very painful to the child; that is why so often there is rebellion and unkindness. And the danger is greater because, at this period, the boy or the girl is so easily discouraged, turns back so readily with kindness to the old safety. And if this is countenanced by the parents, who continue to offer a too-protective affection, the character of the boy or the girl is weakened so that in after years they will not be able to meet the necessities of adult action.

The too fond mother or father perpetuates the childhood of their sons and daughters. They are a far more real danger to their children than neglectful or careless parents.

It is worthwhile considering some of the reasons why parents do too much for their children; are too careful to keep them bound to the home and within the protection of parental love.

The parents who have failed in satisfying their own desires see in their children a new opportunity. They hope for vicarious satisfaction. And for this reason, rather than for the reasons of unselfish love which they believe rule their conduct, they will sacrifice themselves so that their children may achieve what they have failed in gaining. They are to hand down and maintain _their name_, to keep in the world _their family_, and all that seems of value _in themselves_—all that would be lost by their approaching extinction.

If we stop to think, we shall see how common and easy it is for parents to use their children as instruments of satisfaction. Wherever one or other parent is unhappy, suffering under some unsatisfied desire, they seek to satisfy these desires through their children. Do we not know that the wife, and sometimes also the husband, not happy in their own marriage concentrate their hopes of a satisfying life on their children. The mother wants her daughters to be literally, wholly devoted to her; she loves again in her love for her sons; or the father compensates himself with his devotion to his daughters, while he seeks to satisfy his desire for power by completely directing the life of his sons.