by Alfred Adler
The boys will always be on the defensive, afraid of criticism and keeping watch for attempts to subjugate them. Sometimes it is not only the mother who is tyrannical, but sisters and aunts all join to keep a boy in his place. He grows reserved and never wants to come forward and join in social life. He is afraid that all women will have the same nagging, censorious attitude and he wishes to be rid of the whole sex. Nobody likes to be criticized; but if an individual makes it the main interest of his life to escape criticism, all his relations with society are interfered with.
He looks at every event and judges it only in accordance with his scheme of apperception, “Am I the conqueror or the conquered?” No comradeship is possible to those who look at relations with others as opportunities of defeat or victory.
The tack of a father can be summed up in a few words. He must prove himself a good fellow man to his wife, to his children and to society. He must meet in a good way the three problems of life — occupation, friendship and love — and he must cooperate on an equal footing with his wife in the care and protection of the family. He should not forget that the woman's part in the creation of family life can never be surpassed. It is not his part to dethrone the mother, but to work with her. Especially with regard to money we should emphasize that if the financial support of the family comes through him it is still a common affair. He should never make it appear that he gives and the others receive. In a good marriage the fact that the money comes through him is only a result of the division of labor in the family. Many fathers use their economic position as a means of ruling the house hold. There should be no ruler in the family and every occasion for feelings of inequality should be avoided. Every father should be aware of the fact that our culture has overemphasized the privileged position of the man, and that in consequence his wife, when he married her, was probably in some degree afraid of being dominated and put in an inferior position. He should know that his wife is not on a lower level than he merely because she is a woman and does not support the family in the same way as he supports it. Whether or not the wife contributes in money to the support of the family, if the family life is a real cooperation, there will be no question who makes the money and to whom it should belong.
The father's influence on his children is so important that many of them look on him, throughout their lives, either as their ideal or as their greatest enemy. Punishment, especially corporal punishment, is always harmful to children. Any teaching which cannot be given in friend ship is wrong teaching. It is unfortunately frequent that the father of the family is given the task of punishing the children. There are many reasons why this is unfortunate. First of all, it reveals a conviction on the mother's part that women are not really able to educate their children; that they are really weak creatures who need a strong hand to help them. If a mother tells her children, “You wait till father comes home”, she is preparing them to regard men as the final authorities and the real powers in life.
Secondly, it disturbs the relation of the children with their father and makes them fear him, instead of feeling him a good friend. Perhaps some women are afraid of losing their hold over their children's affections if they punish them themselves; but the solution is not to delegate the punishment to the father. The children will not reproach their mother any the less because she has summoned an executioner to her aid. Many women still use the threat of "telling father" as a means of compelling their children's obedience. What sort of conclusion will the children draw about the man's part in life?
If the father is meeting the three problems of life in a useful way he will be an integral part of the family, a good husband and a good father. He must be at ease with others and able to make friends. If he makes friends he is already making his family a part of the social life around him. He will not be isolated and bound to traditional ideas.
Influences from outside the home are finding their way into it and he is showing his children the way to social feeling and cooperation. There is a real danger, however, if the husband and wife have different friends.
They should live in the same society and avoid being separated through their friendships. I do not mean, of course, that they should ding together and never go out by themselves; but there should be no difficulty in the way of their being together. Such a difficulty occurs, for example, if the husband does not want to introduce his wife into the circle of his friends.
The center of his social life, in that case, is outside of the family. It is very valuable in the development of children that they should learn that the family is a unit of a larger society and that outside the family there exist also trustworthy human beings and fellow men.
It is a favorable sign of the ability to cooperate if the father is on good terms with his own parents, sisters and brothers. Of course, he must leave his family and become independent; but this does not imply that he should dis like his closest relatives and Break with them. Sometimes two people will marry when they are still dependent on their parents and will exaggerate the connection which binds them to their families. When they speak of "home" they will refer to the home of their parents. If they are involved in the idea that their parents are still the center of the family, they will not be able to establish a real family life of their own. It is a question, here, of the cooperative ability of everybody concerned.
Sometimes a man's parents are jealous, want to know everything about their son's life, and make difficulties in the new family. His wife feels that she is not sufficiently appreciated and is angry at the interference of her husband's parents. This is particularly apt to occur where a man marries against the wish of his parents. His parents may have been wrong or right. Before their son marries they can oppose his choice, if they are dissatisfied; but after he has married they have only one course open to them — they must do everything they can to secure the success of the marriage. If family differences cannot be avoided, the husband should understand the difficulties and not worry about them. He should look on his parents' Opposition as a mistake of theirs and do his best to prove that it was the son who was right. There is no need for the husband and wife to submit to the wishes of their parents; but it is obviously easier if there is cooperation and if the wife can feel that her husband's parents are thinking of her welfare and advantage, not of their own.
The function that everyone expects most definitely of a father is a solution of the problem of occupation. He must be trained for an occupation and he must be able to support himself and the family. In this he may be helped by his wife and later on, perhaps, by his children; but in our present cultural conditions the economic responsibility falls mainly on the man. A solution for this problem means that he must work and be courageous, that he must understand his profession and know its advantages and disadvantages, that he must be able to cooperate with others in his profession and be well thought of by them. It means still more. By his own attitude he is helping to prepare the way in which his children will face the problem of occupation. He should therefore see what is necessary for the successful solution of this problem — to find work which is useful to the whole of mankind and contributes to its welfare. It does not so much matter, however, that he should consider his work useful; what is important is that it should be useful. We do not need to listen to his words. If he thinks himself an egoist, it is a pity; but if at the same time the work he is doing contributes to our common welfare, no great damage is done.
It is with the solution of the problem of love that we are now dealing — with marriage and the building up of a happy and useful family life. The chief demand upon the husband is that he should be interested in his partner; and it is very easy to see whether one Person is interested in another or not. If he is interested, he interests himself in the same things as the other and makes the welfare of the other his own spontaneous aim. It is not affection only that proves interest; there are too many kinds of affection for us to regard it as a sufficient witness that everything is well. He must also be a comrade to his wife; he must b
e striving to make life easier and richer for her; and he must take pleasure in pleasing her. It is only when both partners place their common welfare higher than their individual welfare that a true cooperation can occur.
Each partner must be more interested in the other than in himself. A husband should not Show his affection for his wife too strikingly before the children. It is true that the love of a husband and wife is not to be compared with their love for their children. They are quite different things and neither can diminish the other. But sometimes children feel, if the parents are too expressive in their affection for each other, that their own place is narrowed. They grow jealous and wish to make dissensions. The sexual partnership should not be taken with so little seriousness. So, too, in giving explanations of sexual matters, the father with the boys and the mother with the girls, they should be careful not to volunteer information, but to explain only as much as the child wishes to know and can understand at his stage of development. I believe that in our own time there is a tendency to explain to children fax more than they can grasp properly and to rouse interests and feelings for which they are not prepared. In this way sexual matters are minimized and treated as if they were a mere bagatelle. This fashion is not much better than the old fashion of being dishonest with children and concealing all sexual information from them. It is best to understand what the child wishes to know and answer the problem which he himself is considering; not to force on him what, from our own standards, we think should be known by everybody. We must preserve his trust and his feeling that we are cooperating with him and interested in helping him to find solutions for his problems; and if we do this we cannot go far wrong. Incidentally, the fear of some parents that their children will hear injurious sex explanations from their fellow children has little justification. A child whose training in cooperation and independence has been good will never suffer from the talk of his friends; and very often children are more delicate in these matters than their elders. A "street explanation" never harmed a child who was not already prepared to take a mistaken view.
In our present society men are offered fuller opportunities for experience in social life; for knowledge of the systems of society, with their advantages and disadvantages, and of the moral relations in their own countries and in the world at large. Their sphere of activity is unfortunately still broader than the sphere of activity of women. It thus falls to the father's part to be the adviser of his wife and children in these problems. He should never boast of his greater experience and make capital out of it. He is not the family tutor. He should advise them, rather, as one friend advises another, avoiding every resistance and happy if the others can agree with him. If there is resistance on the side of his wife, who is perhaps not very well trained for cooperation, he should not insist on his point of view or try to use authority, but look around for ways to diminish this resistance. He will not succeed by fighting.
Money should not be overemphasized or made the subject of quarreling. Women who are not earning money themselves are much more sensitive than their husbands generally believe and feel deeply hurt if they are accused of extravagance. Financial affairs should be settled in a cooperative way, within the financial capacity of the family. There is no excuse for the wife or children if they use their influence to make the father pay more than he can afford; and there should be an agreement an expenses made from the beginning so that no one feels dependent or badly treated. A father should not think that he can assure the future of his children by money alone. I read once an interesting pamphlet written by an American, in which he described how a rich man who had been born in a very poor family wished to secure his descendants for many generations from poverty and restriction. He went to a lawyer and asked him how it could be done. The lawyer asked him how many generations would satisfy him; and he replied that he thought he could manage it till the tenth generation. "Yes, you can do it," said the lawyer. "But do you realize that each member of this tenth generation will have more than five hundred ancestors with as much part in him as you have? Five hundred other families will be able to lay claim to him. Is he your descendant any longer?” We can see here another example of the fact that whatever we do for our own descendants we are doing for the whole community. We cannot escape this tie to our fellow men.
If there is no authority in the family there must be a real cooperation. Father and mother must work together and agree together in everything concerned with the education of their children. It is of the utmost importance that neither the father nor the mother should show any favoritism among their children. The dangers of favoritism can hardly be too dramatically put. Almost every discouragement in childhood springs from the feeling that someone else is preferred.
Sometimes the feeling is not at all justified; but where there is real equality there should not be an occasion for it to develop. Where boys are preferred to girls, inferiority complexes amongst the girls are almost inevitable. Children are very sensitive and even a very good child can take an entirely wrong direction in life through the suspicion that others are preferred. Sometimes one of the children develops quicker, or in a more likeable way than the others, and it is difficult not to show more liking for this child. Parents should be experienced enough and skillful enough to avoid showing any such preferences. Otherwise the child which develops better will overshadow and discourage all the other children; they will become envious and doubtful of their own abilities, and their ability to cooperate will be frustrated. It is not enough to say that there is no such preference. Parents must observe whether there is even a suspicion of such a preference in the mind of any of their children.
Now we come to an equally important part of the family cooperation, the cooperation of the children among themselves. Unless the children feel equal, mankind will never be well prepared in social interest. Unless girls and boys feel equal, the relations of the two sexes will continue to offer the greatest difficulties. Many people ask, “How does it happen that children in the same family often differ so widely?” Some scientists have attempted to explain it as the result of differing heredity; but we have seen that this is a superstition. Let us compare the growth of children with the growth of young trees. If a group of trees are growing up together, each one of them is really in a quite different situation. If one grows faster because it is more favored by the sun and the soil, its development influences the growth of all the others. It overshadows them; its roots stretch out and take away their nourishment. The others are dwarfed and stunted. The same is true of a family in which one member is too prominent. We have seen that neither a father nor a mother should assume a dominating position in the family. Often, if the father is very successful or very talented, the children feel that they can never equal his achievements. They grow discouraged: their interest in life is blocked. It is for this reason that the children of famous men and women are sometimes a disappointment to their parents and to the rest of society. The children have seen no way open to excel their father or mother. If a father is very successful in his profession, he should never stress his success in the family or his children's development will be hindered.
The same remark holds good among the children themselves. If one child develops especially well, it is quite likely that he will receive most attention and favor. It is a pleasant situation for him; but the other children feel the difference and resent it. It is not possible for a human being to bear, without disgust and irritation, the position of being put on a lower level than someone else. Such a prominent child can damage all the others; and it is not too much to say that the others will all grow up suffering from mental starvation. They will not cease to strive for superiority, for this striving can never cease. Their striving, however, will turn to other directions which may well not be realistic or socially useful. Individual Psychology has opened up a very wide field for research work by inquiring into the advantages and disadvantages for children according to the order of their birth. To simplify a consideration of this, we shall suppose that the
parents are cooperating well and doing their best in the training of the children. The position of each child in the family still makes a great difference and each child will still grow up in quite a new situation. We must insist again that the situation is never the same for two children in a family; and each child will show in his style of life the results of his attempts to adapt himself to his own peculiar circumstances.
Every oldest child has experienced for some time the situation of an only child and has been compelled suddenly to adapt himself to a new situation at the birth of the next oldest. The first-born child is generally given a good deal of attention and spoiling. He has been accustomed to be the center of the family. Too often it is quite suddenly and sharply, without any preparation, that he finds himself ousted from his position. Another child is born and he is no longer unique. Now he must share the attention of his mother and father with a rival. The change always makes a great impression and we can often find in problem children, neurotics, criminals, drunkards and perverts that their difficulties began in such circumstances. They were oldest children who felt very deeply the arrival of another child; and their sense of deprivation had molded their whole style of life.
Other children may lose position in the same way; but they will probably not feel it so strongly. They had already had experience of cooperation with another child; they had never been the sole object of consideration and care. To the oldest child it is a complete change. If he is in fact neglected on the arrival of the new baby, we cannot expect him to accept the situation with ease. If he bears a grudge, we cannot hold him guilty. Of course, if his parents have allowed him to feel sure of their affection, if he knows that his position is secure, and, above all, if he is prepared for the arrival of a younger child and has been trained to cooperate in its care, the crisis will pass without ill effects. Generally he is not prepared. The new baby really takes away from him attention, love and appreciation. He begins trying to pull his mother back to him and thinking how he can regain attention. Sometimes we can see a mother pulled this way and that by her two children, each struggling to occupy her more than the other. The oldest child is better able to use force and to think of new tricks. We can reckon up what he will do in these circumstances. He will do just what we should do if we were in his circumstances and were pursuing his aim. We should try to worry the mother, and fight her, and develop such characteristics that she could not possibly overlook us. He will do the same. In the end he exhausts his mother's patience. He fights by every possible means, in the wildest way.
