Parents are Too Permissive with Their Children Nowadays

Few people would defend the Victorian attitude to children, but if you were a parent in those days, at least you knew where you stood: children were to be seen and not heard. Freud and company did away with all that and parents have been bewildered ever since.

... The child's happiness is all-important, the psychologists say, but what about the parents' happiness? Parents suffer constantly from fear and guilt while their children gaily romp about pulling the place apart. A good old-fashioned spanking is out of the question: no modern child-rearing manual would permit such barbarity. The trouble is you are not allowed even to shout... Certainly a child needs love... and a lot of it. But the excessive permissiveness of modern parents is surely doing more harm than good.

Psychologists have succeeded in undermining parents' confi­dence in their own authority. And it hasn't taken children long to get wind of the fact. In addition to the great modern classics on child care, there are countless articles in magazines and newspapers. With so much unsolicited advice flying about, mum and dad just don't know what to do any more. In the end, they do nothing at all. So, from early childhood, the kids are in charge and parents' lives are regulated according to the needs of their offspring. When the little dears develop into teenagers, they take complete control. Lax authority over the years makes adolescent rebellion against parents all the more violent. If the young people are going to have a party, for instance, parents are asked to leave the house. Their presence merely spoils the fun. What else can the poor parents do but obey?

Children are hardy creatures (far hardier than the psychologists would have us believe) and most of them survive the harmful influ­ence of extreme permissiveness which is the normal condition in the modern household. But a great many do not. The spread of ju­venile delinquency in our own age is largely due to parental laxity. Mother, believing that little Johnny can look after himself, is not at home when he returns from school, so little Johnny roams the streets. The dividing line between permissiveness and sheer negli­gence is very fine indeed.

TEXT 12

One day you feel good and the next you feel bad, and between those two poles are compressed all the joys of heaven and the an­guish of hell. The events that prompt feelings, the justification for the feelings, even the reality of the perceptions that lead to them are all unimportant. It is the feeling that counts.

Despite its importance, there is an incredible amount of confu­sion about feelings and emotions in both the minds of the public and the attention of the "experts". "Emotion" is the general term which encompasses the feeling tone, the biophysiological state, and even the chemical changes we are beginning to understand underline the sensations we experience; "feeling" is our subjec­tive awareness of our own emotional state. It is that which we ex­perience; that which we know about our current emotional condi­tion.

Feelings, particularly the complex and subtle range of feelings in human beings, are testament to our capacity for choice and learn­ing. Feelings are the instruments of rationality, not— as some would have it — alternatives to it. Because we are intelligent crea­tures, we are capable of, and dependent on, using rational choice to decide our futures. Feelings become guides to that choice. We are rujt just passive responders, as some lower life forms are, to that which the environment offers us. We can avoid certain conditions, select out others, and anticipate both and, moreover, via anticipa­tion we can even modify the nature of the environment. Feelings are fine tunings directing the ways in which we will meet and manipu­late our environment.

TEXT 13

THE HAPPY MAN

By Somerset Maugham

It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have of­ten wondered at the self-confidence of the politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their fellows mea­sures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of view. I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise an­other how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself. And life, unfortunately, is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable and who am I that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own a complete and rounded thing; I have not been tempted to teach my neighbour what he should do with his. But there are men who flounder at the journey's start, the way before them is confused and hazardous, and on occasion, however unwillingly, I have been forced to point the finger of fate. Sometimes men have said to me, what shall I do with my life? and I have seen myself for a moment wrapped in the dark cloak of Destiny.

Once I know that I advised well.

I was a young man, and I lived in a modest apartment in London near Victoria Station. ¹ Late one afternoon, when I was beginning to think that I had worked enough for that day, I heard a ring at the bell. I opened the door to a total stranger. He asked me my name; I told him. He asked if he might come in.

"Certainly."

I led him into my sitting-room and begged him to sit down. He seemed a trifle embarrassed. I offered him a cigarette and he had some difficulty in lighting it without letting go off his hat. When he had satisfactorily achieved this feat I asked him if I should not put it on a chair for him. He quickly did this and while doing it dropped his umbrella.

"I hope you don't mind my coming to see you like this," he said. "My name is Stephens and I am a doctor. You're in the medical, I believe?"

"Yes, but I don't practise."

"