t child.

Because of their fuller years and the circumstance of protective
parenthood, parents are conservators, maintainers, perpetuators. Because
of their uninstructed years and freedom from responsibility, children
often become radical, uprooters and destroyers at the imperious behest
of the future. These impersonal clashings of past and future can be kept
on an impersonal basis, provided parents can bring themselves to see
that things are not right merely because they have been and that things
are not wrong solely because they have not been before.

Perhaps at this point, though parents have experience to guide them
and children only hopes to lead them, it is for parents to exercise
the larger patience with hope's recruits, even though these find light
and beauty alone in the rose tints of the future's dawn. Felix Adler
has wisely said: "A main cause is the presumption in favor of the
latest as the best, the newest as the truest.... The passion for the
recent reacts on the respect or the want of respect that is shown to
the older generation.... Now if one group of persons pulls in one
direction and another group pulls in exactly the opposite direction,
there is strain; and if the younger generation pulls with all its
might in the direction of changing things, and if the older generation
leans back as far as it can and stands for keeping things as they are,
then there is bound to be a tremendous tension."

It may be true, as has lately been suggested by the same wise teacher,
that the children of our time are in protest against parents, because
these are the authors and agents of the sadly blundering world by them
inherited. Is it not also true and by children to be had in mind that
parents are fearful of the ruthless urge and, as it seems, relentless
drive of the generation to be, which become articulate in the
impatiences of youth? Dealing with the difference that arises out of
the fact of parents facing pastward and children futureward, Professor
Perry declares[I]: "The domestic adult is in a sort of backwash. He is
looking toward the past, while the children are thinking the thoughts
and speaking the language of tomorrow. They are in closer touch with
reality, and cannot fail, however indulgent, to feel that their
parents are antiquated.... The children's end of the family is its
budding, forward-looking end: the adult's end is, at best, its root.
There is a profound law of life by which buds and roots grow in