ut hard to like them. So might many parents in truth
say that it is easy, yea, inevitable, to love their children but very
difficult to yield them the reverence of which upon reflection they
are found to be deserving. And it happens that parents can and do give
their children all but the one thing which they insist upon having
from parents, namely, a decent respect. Such respect is in truth
impossible as long as parents always think of themselves as parents
and of children as children. The temptation presses to urge parents
sometimes to forget that they are parents, and to suggest to children
sometimes to remember that they are children--in any event,
semi-occasionally to recall that to parents children are ever and
quite explicably children.

Parents cannot begin too soon to treat children with respect. One of
the most disrespectful as well as stupid things that can be done in
relation to a child is to treat it like a monkey trained for
exhibition purposes in order to "entertain" some resident aunt or
visiting uncle. The worst way to prepare a child for self-respect is
to exhibit him to ostensibly admiring relatives as if he or she were
a rare specimen in a zooelogical garden. Too many of us are Hagenbacks
to our children, not so much for the sake of otherwise unoccupied
relatives or especially doting grandparents as for the sake of
flattering our own cheap and imbecile pride.

The relation of mutual respect cannot obtain between parent and child
as long as the instinct of parental proprietorship is dominant, as
long as there is a failure to recognize that a child's individuality
must be reckoned with. But there must be the underlying assumption
that a child's judgment may be entitled to respect, in other words, is
not inherently contemptible. Once assumed that a child may cease to be
a child and become a person able to think, decide, choose, act for
itself, there is no insuperable difficulty in determining when a
child's judgment is entitled to respect, provided of course by way of
preliminary that parents are ready to put away the pet superstition of
parental infallibility and impeccability. Nothing so calculated to win
a child's reverence as parental admission of fallibility generally and
of some error of thought and speech in particular!

One rarely hears or learns of a child who feels that parents fail to
love it but one comes upon children not a few, normal beings rather than
those afflicted with the persecuti