THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

BY MARY VIDA CLARK

It is a hundred years since we have heard much of the Rights of Man. The French Revolution put a quietus on that topic. The past century has talked volubly of Women's Rights, but apparently the problems of feminism are among those largely solved by the Great War. It will soon be the turn of the last remaining unenfranchised class of human beings to claim their rights-the children.

Just as women were considerably unsettled by the egocentric struggles of their mates and would try their hand at the same game, so the extramural activities of mothers have increasingly upset the objects for which home and hearth are supposed to exist, and doubtless will in time make for the wider recognition of the particular brand of servitude to which this class is subjected. From among the innumerable rights to which the child is entitled as corollaries of his inalienable constitutional rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", a few may be selected for present consideration.

First in importance and chronology is the child's right to life-to be at all. In these days when no one is too young and innocent to chatter glibly of "birth control", the right of the next generation to exist seems in danger of being overlooked. The philosophers of an earlier day reduced our many human instincts to the two fundamentals of self-preservation and propagation, but it remained for this generation to stir up an open conflict between the two, and to exalt the egoistic over the altruistic.

But we who with such equanimity contemplate the denial of the duty of parenthood in general, and the exercise of the right of the woman "to live her own life", could hardly conceive a world in which we personally were deprived of participating. How monstrous it would seem to us if we ourselves had actually

been denied existence because of the preference of our parents for French millinery or what not! And yet this is what we see all about us. How many so-called families do we not know who, on incomes of from $5,000 up, cannot afford a child or more than one, but who can afford to spend on "little dinners" at restaurants or on "girl and music shows" and on extra frills at home enough to support in decency several young hopefuls? Someone may urge that such people are not fit to be parents. Perhaps not; few people are, for that matter. But perhaps if they had the gumption to make the sacrifices that parenthood demands, the qualities that survived the conflict of motives might make them fit. To how many people who feel it desirable to restrict their progeny to the minimum, would the luxury of children, which might be so good for them, be possible through abstinence from those things that they would be better off without? From the point of view of self-interest and a forwardlooking calculation of profit and loss, many couples might support children by saving the large fees for medical and sanatorium care for the neurasthenia that their mode of life is likely to induce.

The right of the married to be childless appears to go hand in hand with the right of the unmarried to have children, which seems to be one of the tenets of the new religion. The result of putting this preachment into practise, as it affects the chief agents, does not concern us here; but how about the party of the third part concerned therein the child? What this school of thought tends to minimize or ignore is the fundamental right of the child to have a father.

It is not only in Bohemia but also in Mayfair that one is now likely to meet the female free-thinker and theoretical free-lover, generally a spinster of unspotted reputation, who proclaims the right of every woman to have a child if she pleases, and out of matrimony, if matrimony is undesired or unattainable. The modus operandi to effect this "woman's right" is not touched upon, and the earnest inquirer is left in doubt as to the method. What is generally kept in the background is the child's relation to the paternal parent, if there is to be one, or its relation to life without the customary equipment of a father.

Does it occur to no one to plead that a child has a right not merely to a begetter but to a father, a real father, with a back and shoulders to ride on at the appropriate time, who develops into a companion for fishing and such activities, with whom a fellow can stand gazing at machinery, and who knows a thing or two about it-just a plain father, who lives at home and supports his family? Of course it is not to be denied that there are unfortunate children who are deprived by death of one or both of their properly married and publicly recognized parents, and that such may live a reasonably normal and happy life. But it seems a pity that these "acts of God" should be copied by human institutions already too imperfect.

Nor should we decry the admirable and rapidly increasing tendency of the home-loving spinster who has abandoned thoughts of a husband, to satisfy her maternal instinct and do her bit for the world by adopting a homeless child. A fatherless home with a good foster-mother is a better place to rear the young than an orphan asylum. Perhaps the phenomenon of the modern excessive supply of maternally-minded unmarried women is Nature's method of providing for the also excessive products of marriages prematurely dissolved by physical or moral disaster.

All these exceptions, however, are at best makeshifts, and serve chiefly to call attention to the fact that the child who is properly equipped for life has two parents, as well as two arms and legs, however many cripples there may unhappily be in the world.

Next in importance is the child's right to brothers and sisters, or what our eugenic friends call by the comic name of “siblings". If the plural is in all cases too much to demand, at least one “sibling" should be a minimum concession. The liability of the only child to the danger of being "spoiled" has been long and widely recognized. The expectation of moral life which can be calculated for an only child is about equal to that of the proverbial "minister's son". But it is not only in the strictly moral sphere that to be an only child is an extra hazardous occupation. Our ultramodern psychologists and psychiatrists are calling attention to previously unrecognized mental risks, and warning us that this way madness lies. The first decade of life is no longer pictured as a garden of delight, but as a field of battle where "invisible armies

clash by night". It is in these infantile conflicts ("conflict" is the technical word) that those wounds of the spirit are acquired, which, after festering in "the unconscious" for a few decades, break out in the neuroses and psychoses of middle life. One of our leading Freudians has produced a learned monograph entitled The Only or Favorite Child, a signpost pointing out the descensum Averno down which these pre-ordained victims of infant damnation are pushed by the fatuous and doting parents who are called by an inscrutable Providence to do the work. According to this school of thought, the superior opportunity that the only child is afforded by his freedom from domestic competition is that of ending his days in an insane asylum—and being able to be a paying patient.

But even without these lurid lights on this dark subject, we can feel our way to the sensible realization that an only child is at best a forlorn and unnatural object, arbitrarily and unjustly deprived of the company of his peers, and condemned to excessive and demoralizing association with rude-mannered adults, constantly intruding their unwelcome attentions, and making the unfortunate an object of ridicule to the more happily situated groups of brothers and sisters to be observed in the outer world. To fail to conform to the requirements of this abnormal environment, where one is the only one of his kind in his world, makes for immediate misery; and to conform, it now appears, results in even more serious disaster in the future. A cruel dilemma indeed for a guileless enterer in life's handicap! And yet the senile speak of "childhood's happy hours"!

Consider next the child's right to respectful treatment. The rudeness exhibited by most adults in their relations with children is fully recognized only by the victims themselves, who are too forbearing and well-mannered to speak out in their own defense. The child is a very serious-minded individual, engaged in a life and death struggle for existence and growth and knowledge, in a world ill adapted to meet his needs, to which he must by increasing and herculean effort learn to conform. Self-respect and consideration for others demand the repression, so far as possible, of external indications of the conflict going on within the soul; but to the combatant, conscious of the struggle, life and himself are

very serious propositions. To the adult, however, whose growing pains have ceased and been forgotten with the conclusion of his stunted development, the child, because of a certain meretricious outer appearance of calm, seems for some inscrutable reason an object of hilarity, to be treated jocosely when not subjected to autocratic domination and suppression. A sense of humor, in cases where it exists at all, is a development of maturity, a thing not born but made. The child still regards life as real and earnest. Yet his serious observations on his discoveries in the natural and supernatural world are treated by thick-headed grown-ups as funny sayings to be bandied about for public entertainment. Who is possessed of a memory so short as to include no example of the humiliating experience of overhearing, or even hearing in his presence, his elders' hilarious enjoyment of his carefully thought-out comments on the nature of things as they are or seem to be? The otherwise civilized adult who would not dream of greeting with roars of laughter, or even with a smile, the naïvété of another adult who had not enjoyed similar privileges of education or experience, will unhesitatingly laugh in the face of a child who has paid him the compliment of confiding an observation or asking a question regarding some matter of serious concern. The child, naturally sensitive to ridicule, soon learns to keep to himself his queries and his discoveries, painfully and laboriously acquiring knowledge by putting two and two together through æons of time. Who cannot recall certain of the problems of his child mind? How, for instance, did a war come to an end; was it when one side had lost its last man? Did contemporary kings and queens wear crowns and ermine, or clothes just like other people? What was a wing of a house referred to in a story book; did some houses have attached to them gigantic birds' wings, under which the happy inmates could sit in the cool shade? One must be on the lookout for such houses. As for those fundamentally important and puzzling questions regarding the sources of life, the evidence was really too confusing, and what colossal accumulations of twos and twos were required to put anything together satisfactorily in that department of essential knowledge!

The right to conform is an important but little recognized right of the child which deserves thoughtful consideration by the