# Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/Youngest Sons and Only Children

My title recalls Tom Crow vividly to my mind. I noticed him first shortly after the opening of college. He was always late to my lecture, coming in heated and perturbed, if he came at all, and stumbling awkwardly over the feet of those who had been prompt, as he scrambled into his seat in the middle of the class room. His hair was usually damp and uncombed and his clothing unkempt as if while in the swimming pool or on the tennis courts some one had suddenly reminded him of his neglected intellectual obligation and he had hastened to his task adjusting his clothing on the way. In point of fact, as I learned later on inquiry, this was actually what had happened, for, since Tom had never before done any thinking for himself, his roommate had been engaged to do it for him, and sometimes was tardy in his duty. Tom showed himself a poor student; he was a likeable loafer who meant to do his work, but who could never get at it. He was so poor a student that when his mother came to visit him after his pretty complete failure at the end of the first semester she called on me.
"Don't be too hard on Tommy," she said. "I've always looked after him at home, and this new life is pretty nearly too much for him. When he was in high school I always used to give him his toast and ​coffee in bed, and while he was eating I got his bath ready and laid out his fresh clothes, and got his things in order for him to start to school. He'll learn in time if you are patient with him."
In addition to the fact that it was bad hygiene for Tommy to eat before he bathed, it was poor discipline which his mother subjected him to. He was an exaggerated type of the only son whose career in college was short because he had been coddled by a too loving and a too indulgent mother at home.
Let me explain at once that though I am not the only child, I am the youngest son, and so am writing without prejudice and not without experience. As a child I had more freedom and more privileges than any of my older brothers and sisters had been permitted to enjoy. I was the normal spoiled child, I think, petted by my older sisters and praised and coddled by father and mother. I went to school when I pleased, and worked when I wished to do so. When I was fifteen my father died.
It is a handicap, I am convinced, to be the only child or the youngest son or the son of but one parent. A beneficent creator when he wrote the directions for running the universe decreed that every normal child should have two parents, and I think that either a greater or a smaller number than this generally results in an ill effect upon the child; and he intended, also, until society made it unpopular, that there should be more than one child in every family, in order that one might help in the training and the education of the others. Sometimes a wise parent is able to overcome this handicap for his child; sometimes a clever independent child is able to manage ​himself or his parent so skillfully as to offset the handicap; but these cases are rare.
At this point I hear the indignant protesting mother saying, "Well, I'm perfectly certain that I have not spoiled my boy," and she launches out into a detailed recital of all his virtues and accomplishments and of the rigidty of her personal régime. I have heard the story so often and so vividly presented that I could recite it from memory without prompting, and sometimes I have been glad to admit that it was true.
"What is the matter with Percy?" the mother of an only child said to me a few days ago. "He works hard, he loves his work, but he doesn't get on."
"He is a spoiled boy," was my reply, "who neither loves his work nor works hard. He is a bluffer who works upon your sympathies by a recital of his woes and endeavors, and the results bring him more money and more privileges." She was a loving, indulgent, anxious mother who believed everything that her boy told her as if it had been gospel, and made adequate explanation of every dereliction and irregularity of which he was guilty. Her boy had not escaped the handicap.
I was talking to the father of a freshman who had failed in his college course completely. The boy was intellectually bright, but he had not studied, he had not gone to class, and he had fallen into bad ways and wasted his time generally.
"What is the matter with the boy?" the father asked. "Why has he failed?"
I did not answer for a moment, and then I met his inquiry by asking a second question.
​"How many children have you?"
"He is our only child," was the reply, "and we have done everything for him."
"You have answered your own question," I said. "He's your only child, and you've done everything for him." There had been nothing the matter with the boy; it was with the father.
It is true, as I have said, however, that some children escape the handicap of being the youngest or the only child or the child of one parent, and for the sake of harmony at the outset, we will agree that yours is one of these, that he has-not been made conceited by praise nor made selfish by indulgence. It is of the others, you will understand, that I am writing.
A college officer who comes into personal contact with scores of undergraduate young men every day will, as the years go on, have many things suggested to him relative to their home and their home influences, to their parents and to their ideals. Behind these boys he will come to see weak, incapable parents or hard-working, struggling fathers, and thoughtful, wise mothers, and influences that are stronger than words. He will come in time unconsciously to group these boys according to the characteristics they show, to separate, for example, the country boy from the city boy, for even the crude city boy has a vulgar crudeness all his own that is easily distinguishable from the rustic crudeness of the young fellow from the country. He will recognize the boy who has done right and kept clean from principle, and he will pick out the fellow without personal principles who has ​played the game safe with the home folks and kept out of trouble through policy.
The undergraduate who has had his secondary training in a military school reveals that fact almost invariably the moment he opens the door of a college office, by his standing at attention or by his persistent and recurring use of "Sir" when he speaks to a superior officer. If he did not reveal it at this point he would be almost sure to do so later by the reluctance and irregularity with which he attends his college exercises. The trouble with this sort of boy is that during his school life he was so completely occupied with routine that he had no time to himself and no opportunity to learn self-direction. When the day came that he should determine for himself how his time should be employed, he was helpless. The routine had been so rigid that he revolted in the opposite direction. Having always had his duty mapped out for him, he lacked the strength to do it for himself.
I have come to say that I can usually recognize, before he has been in college long, the youngest son or the only child, or the child of a single parent, or the child who is living at home. Children are injured by over-attention quite as much as by neglect; they may be too well brought up as well as too ill. If it is true that the watched pot never boils, it is equally true that the coddled child seldom develops self-reliance and independence. A good many years ago when I was a teacher in an academy a troubled mother came to me with her only son. She had worried over him, and worked with him, and directed ​him, and thought and planned for him, and goaded him on to his lessons with little avail. He was eighteen years of age and was scarcely ready for high school. She told me all these distressing details with much feeling as he sat by stolidly listening. He seemed to me a bright enough boy who was not listening to the tale of his intellectual shortcomings for the first time.
"What's the matter with Bob?" she asked in real distress. "Why doesn't he do better?"
"Too much mother, I believe," I answered frankly. For the first time during the conversation Bob looked at me and smiled and winked a knowing eye.
"You have been working out his problems for him during all these years," I continued, "let him do it for himself, now. Leave him here, and don't see him for six months."
"I have never been away from him a week in his life," she said. "He doesn't know how to take care of his clothes, or to look after himself. It would kill me to stay away from him that long."
"It will ruin him if you don't," I said. She was after all wanting very much to do the best for her boy. She left him, hard as it was, and for the first time in his life Bob was thrown upon his own responsibility. I need not go into detail. He liked the new régime, he did his work, and had his first experience in passing his examinations on his own initiative.
The picture is, of course, not always so black a one. Three of the undergraduates of my acquaintance this year who made the most conspicuous success in college, both from the standpoint of the faculty ​and of the student body, were either only sons or youngest sons. More than this they were living at home. They were, however, rather notable exceptions which tested the rule. They were strong enough to follow their own independent action, and their parents were wise enough not to ruin them by indulgence.
The fault of the type of young fellow of whom I have been speaking lies in his training. The youngest-son, in the ordinary Middle West families, at least, who send their sons to college, comes into manhood at a time in the family history usually, when affairs are more prosperous at home than they were when the older children were ready for college. The family has moved into a new house, mother has more leisure, and father has more money to spend. The oldest boy when he was in high school may have delivered papers, or mowed the lawn in summer and looked after the furnace in winter, but now that the family is in better circumstances, there is a man to take care of these matters and the youngest son has nothing to do but to keep up his school work and enjoy himself. He has a generous supply of spending money, he may even have a motor car of his own, and there is no reason why he should take thought of the morrow.
I was talking to two such boys only the other day—pleasant lovable fellows—who have as much spending money—as would have taken me through college. They ride around in a high-powered car, they squander money daily on the "movies" and in ice cream parlors, and neither one would think of mowing the grass on their front lawns if it were as ​high as their necks. The father of neither one of them is rich, but they are developing habits of laziness and extravagance, are often unhappy or bored because they can find no new pleasure or excitement, and though they are bright and clever, they are totally lacking in independence and initiative. They are the true types of the middle class youngest son and they will not be in college long until they will reveal the fact by indifference and discontent and dissipation, possibly, and a shirking of unpleasant and difficult duties.
Such a child at home soon comes to know how much the family exchequer will stand and what privileges he can count upon, and a few years of indulgence will teach him to get all he can. I was talking to a father this spring. His only son, a freshman in college, had grown tired of his course; it necessitated work, and he did not enjoy work. To relieve himself of this hardship he had run away, but finding life as a nomad more difficult than he had supposed it would be he had telegraphed his mother for money and had come back for a time, but now he was leaving college. He was not getting what he wanted, he said. I was urging his father to make him stay and finish what he had begun; he needed the discipline, and if he left now it was unlikely that he would ever come back.
"Charles will come back to college, I am sure," the father said, "any boy who has as good a place waiting for him after he graduates as he has will not be so foolish as to waste his chances by not getting an education."
"Doesn't he know that you'll give him the money ​and the place whether he gets an education or not?" I asked.
"Well, I suppose he does," the father admitted, and the father was correct. Charles has never done anything that he did not like to do, and he never will, and father will give the money just the same.
The mother left with a young boy to bring up is likely to take the obligation very seriously. She realizes at once what a loss it is to him to be without the counsel of his father, and she tries bravely to play the part of both father and mother. For fear that she will fail in this dual task, she scarcely lets him out of her mind or out of her sight night or day. The first error which she generally falls into is to make his life too easy. There is for him little or no sacrifice. If any one is to do without things she does it in order that he may have what he wants. He must do as the other boys do; he must be supplied with all the comforts that would have been his if his father had lived; she does not like to see him do difficult or disagreeable things, especially if she can do them herself or hire some one to do them. If he wants to take responsibility he is often not allowed to do so, until he soon comes to the point of not offering to take it. "I would rather make sacrifices myself," many a foolish mother says, "than to have my son deprived of the pleasures and opportunities to which he has a right." All this can not help but weaken the boy and make him selfish and thoughtless and extravagant. He comes to feel that he is entitled to a good time and that if he wants money it is up to his mother to get it for him in some way.
​Last Commencement I met the widowed mother of one of the members of our graduating class. She was keenly interested in her son's progress, in his pleasures, in the fact that he should have gotten out of his undergraduate life all that was possible. She told me what a sacrifice it had meant to her to send him to college and with what self-denial it had been possible for her to raise the needed money. She commented upon the extra cost of this last year, but she did not regret one dollar that had made it possible for him to have what he wanted. It was easy to see from her faded, out-of-date clothes what some of her sacrifices had been that had enabled her to send him the necessary money. And yet about the campus her son had been looked upon as a young fellow of wealthy family. He had gone with the fellows who spent money freely, he had never stayed away from dinners or dances or house parties, because he could not afford to go. There had been no hesitating on his part when money was concerned. And all the time at home his mother was working and pinching—and denying herself in order that he might live in selfishness and luxury, and all the time by this sacrifice she was doing him an irreparable injury for which he and the woman he marries will in the future have to pay a heavy price.
In another way these mothers in an unselfish endeavor to do the best for their sons and to supply the place of the father that is gone, often do them harm, and that is by never allowing them to do their own thinking, to look out for themselves, to make mistakes and by making them to learn how these mistakes may be corrected. These eager mothers choose ​their boy's clothes and companions, and courses of study. They map out his future and all but do his work for him. They think for him, and smooth out the way for him, and leave him no chance to develop self-direction or initiative. They get him up in the morning, and tell him when to go to bed at night. If he has a task to perform, they regularly set him to it; if he has duties and obligations he is reminded of them before he has an opportunity to rely upon his own memory or think out his own plan of procedure. He is never allowed to forget to be polite or prompt or thoughtful or regular when mother is by, and knowing that he will not be, he comes to depend upon the fact that if there is anything he ought to do mother will remind him of it or call his attention to it in plenty time even if it is nothing more than speaking to a caller or changing his underwear, and so he never learns to depend upon himself or to tax his memory with the slightest obligation either mental or moral. In her abnormal fear that he will omit some duty, the over-conscientious mother robs her son of the power, when he leaves her, of doing any duty.
A refined, educated mother sat in my office only a few weeks ago. Her only son had failed, and she wanted to know why. She had watched over him and directed him, and kept him immaculate physically; he had wanted nothing that he did not get. He had never made a sacrifice. She had petted him and loved him and scarcely ever let him get out of her sight. He was a good boy, she knew, she said, before he came to college. How had it all happened? But the facts were that he was not a good boy, and ​never had been. He had no independence, no principles, no desire to do well. He had talked to me very frankly. He had had a few "sprees" while he was in high school. "It was pretty hard to get away with it," he said, "for she watched me pretty closely, and I did not want to hurt her." His theory was that anything is all right if you don't get caught. Since he had left home he had been drunk, he was in debt, he had contracted a wretched disease, but he had no compunctions and little power of resistance. He is one of a type of boys spoiled at home.
In contrast to the illustration just given is one of another whom I know. She is a widow and a woman of influence and wide acquaintance. This summer her only son wanted a position and asked her to go to some of her friends who were in business and try to get him in with them. She declined to do this and showed him that it would be very much more to his credit and advantage if he should himself apply to people whom neither of them knew and secure a place upon his own initiative. It required courage and backbone for him to do this, but he was a happier and a stronger boy when he came home one night with a good job which he had got through no one's efforts but his own.
There is another phase of this error on the part of parents, especially on the part of mothers, to teach their sons independence and self-reliance and a sense of responsibility which is seen in their tendency to come to college with their sons in order that they may look after the boys and give them their care and their supervision. When this action is taken for financial reasons, because the family exchequer is low ​and a necessary saving of money can be effected by all living together I have nothing to say. I feel much as I do when a fellow tells me that he has to make his living while he is carrying his college work—it is a situation which has to be met and should be met without grumbling or complaint, but it is not one which is ordinarily best for the student. When parents come with their sons to college because they feel that by so doing the boys will be more healthy, more comfortable, or more moral, they are ordinarily making a mistake.
"I want my son at home with me as long as possible," a father remarked to me, "I do not like to think of his getting out from under his mother's influence." He did not realize that no boy who has been correctly brought up can get out from under the influence of his mother no matter how widely they may be separated in time or distance.
I have never known a young fellow who was restrained in college by having his mother or even by having both parents with him if he had any tendency to irregularities of character, more than he would have been had he been away from home. Subterfuge is so easy, explanations flock to his brain, and opportunities are infinite for evasion. There is always the "friend" to fall back upon who wants one to study with him or to work up a few experiments. The boys who live in town with their parents are the hardest sort to keep any kind of check on, and they seldom have the self-reliance that those boys have who are away from home and working out their own difficulties.
I appreciate the fact that it brings the keenest ​pleasure to parents, especially to mothers, to make these sacrifices, to perform these services, to have their children with them and to give them their constant thought and attention. It requires a wise head and a strong will and often real mental suffering to keep the hands off. I remember the saying of a well-known physician that cuddling was good for a mother but harmful for her baby; so experience has taught me that this loving, anxious care for youngest sons and only children, this indulgence and sacrifice on the part of parents, this constant thought and planning for their present and for their future no doubt develops and strengthens the characters of the parents but it is seldom good for their sons.
"What fault do you find with my son?" a mother asked me a few days ago when we were talking on this subject. "Isn't he a credit to me; has he not succeeded? How have I spoiled him?"
I parried her question by saying that she was, perhaps, an illustration of the mother who has sensibly met all these conditions and who has not robbed her son of his independence by doing his thinking for him. I knew very well, however, that though he was a fellow of excellent intellect who had done his college work creditably, he had been over-fastidious and ladylike, disliking to soil his hands with hard work. He had been made selfish and self-centered. He had not succeeded at first; it was only after years of contact with shrewd men in a profession that tests men's characters for real worth, and which holds up snobbishness and superficiality to derision, it was only after he had married a sensible woman who knew how ​to stimulate him to his best endeavor, that he showed that there was really good stuff in him.
Such boys as I have been discussing are not always failures in college; on the contrary they not infrequently get high grades and do the routine work of college excellently, but their training almost always shows in their characters. They are too often selfish and extravagant; they are on the look-out for concessions and special favors; they want a longer vacation than other students in order that they may satisfy special desires. They have been so used to special consideration all their lives that they are unable to understand why they can not receive it when they get to college.
"I ought not to spend so much money as I do," an undergraduate confessed to me recently, "mother can't afford it; she is making sacrifices for me constantly. She does her own work and takes care of the furnace, and gives up most of the pleasures she would enjoy, simply that I may have a generous allowance. She is always sending me boxes of things to eat, and entertaining my friends, and looking out for my comfort, and I selfishly let her do it." This selfishness of his showed in his relations with his friends of whom he had too few, it showed in his college work which was usually in a bad way, and it was a constant blot upon his character. He was exacting in his demands upon those with whom he associated; he borrowed notes and books which were never returned until they were sent for, he asked for help in his work whenever and wherever he could get it; he had never made sacrifices or depended upon him​self at home and it was hard for him to begin at college.
Last Christmas I had a dozen letters from as many mothers whose only sons had not been home since the opening of college in September begging me, in violation of the college rules, to let them come home a few days early—they were homesick.
"Won't you please let my son come home four days early," one mother wrote, "I have not seen him for several weeks, and because he is our only child I know you will make this special concession in his case." When I answered that I regretted not to be able to grant her request the father wrote and persuaded a special friend of mine with whom he was acquainted to write also to plead for the special privilege.
Though it is true, as I have said, that some of these younger sons and only children succeed in carrying their college work satisfactorily, that they overcome their handicap, yet a very large percentage of them fail or do their work in a commonplace way. This is not strange, for they find it difficult on their own initiative to do anything regularly or thoroughly. There is no one to set them to their tasks, and they have seldom formed the habit of setting themselves to duty and its accomplishment. They have mostly been told what to do, and so now when there is no one to tell them to study, to get them up in the morning, and to get them off to their college classes, they are likely to find themselves in bed at ten o'clock in the morning when they should have been at chemistry at eight; they are pretty sure to put off their study until to-morrow when there is a vaudeville to which ​they may go to-day. It is not difficult to see how they find their way to the Dean's office very early in their college course. They find the college life more strenuous than they had expected, and never before having done anything that was difficult or disagreeable, they do not see why they should do so now.
"Why did you not let me know that my son was not doing his work?" a mother wrote me not long ago, "and I should have come down and stayed with him until he got his work up. I have never let him get behind while he was in high school, and I can not understand why he is failing now." The trouble all lay in the fact that previously his mother had been his conscience; he had not learned self-direction in any sense; and having no director he loafed and slept late in the mornings.
It is the spoiled boy at home who in college develops into the loafer and the indifferent student. His parents often do not set for him especially high standards; they are pleased if he does not fail; they are satisfied to have him merely intellectually commonplace. And since they are contented, he has for himself no high intellectual ambitions; he prides himself that he is not a grind and pats himself metaphorically upon the back when he evades probation.
It is this same spoiled boy also who in college evades everything that is unpleasant or difficult. He is in few college activities because to get into activities requires initiative and sacrifice, and it demands usually more than ordinarily high scholarship. He has not learned to economize either his time or his money; he does not know how to make sacrifices, and he can not give up the petty gratification or pleasure ​of the moment in order that he may later enjoy a greater and a more worthy pleasure.
I can understand the interest of parents in their children and their desire to save them from sacrifice and hardship and pain and struggle, but as they are shielded from the difficult they are often harmed; in trying to help them we often hinder. Protecting and coddling them unfits them for the hardships of life which they are as sure to meet as the sun is to rise.
I said at the outset that my father died when I was fifteen. Up to that time I had taken no responsibility. I had had no tasks, no difficult problems. I had made no sacrifices. I had lived a life of pleasure and irresponsibility. Circumstances in the family were such that at my father's death it was imperative that I should run the farm on which we were living. I must do a man's work. I must be up in the morning by four o'clock without being called, and out in the fields plowing and sowing and reaping and looking after all the varied interests which have to do with farm life. If my strength was slight I must work faster or longer in order to accomplish as much as the older and stronger workmen. I kept at it eight years and until I entered college. It seemed then a cruel hard life for an inexperienced child. Often when the load was heavy and the problems difficult to solve, in my heart I rebelled against my lot; but I kept on, in spite of the rebellion, and finished my tasks. Mother encouraged me, but she could give little help, little direction, little suggestion. I must meet my own difficulties and solve them alone, as I have since learned every one must do in life and in death. I look back now to this ​experience as the best which could have come to me; it was my salvation. It gave me hard muscles and a strong body and a strong will; it showed me that one must have backbone and principles if he would win the respect of men; it taught me courage and self-reliance and initiative; through it I was able to find myself, and by it I was helped to overcome the handicap under which many another youngest son or only child is struggling.
I was trying not long ago to help the father of an only son to solve his difficulties. The boy had been dismissed from college because he had failed through loafing and irregular habits. The father was a man of moderate means, but the boy had had every indulgence and no responsibility.
"What shall I do with him?" was his query.
"Put him to work for a year," was my reply; "give him something difficult to do, and let him see how hard it is to earn his living."
"I have a farm," he went on, "I could put him out there; but it would be a hard life. He would have no pleasure; the surroundings would not be such as he has been used to, but I'll do it."
"If you do," I warned him, "you will have a more severe struggle than the boy. After your disappointment has grown a little less keen you will go out to the farm some day, and you will see the boy dirty and perspiring and tired and your heart will be touched; you will say, 'Why should I torture him in this way,' and unless you are a strong man you'll bring him away with you."
"I believe I shall," he said shamefacedly, "I believe I haven't the courage to do otherwise."
​"But you could make a man of him," I pleaded as he left me.
A friend of mine, a wise woman with one son, had more courage. The boy, who was in the high school, got it into his head that he would like to earn a little money, and having a job offered him accepted it. This work necessitated his getting up at five in the morning and working until time to start to school.
"It must be rather hard on you," a sympathetic neighbor said to his mother one day, "getting up so early in the morning to get William's breakfast and to get him off."
"But I don't get up," was the mother's reply. "When William took the job I explained to him that he must manage himself; if he lost the place through failure to get there on time, it was his own fault. So he bought a 'Big Ben' to awaken him at the proper time; he gets his own breakfast, and he has never been late one morning. It took a lot of courage and self-control for me to hear him coming down stairs before daylight these cold winter mornings and not to get up and help him off, but William's character is worth more to me than my own selfish comfort in looking after him." She has been a thousand times rewarded in the years that have followed in the strong, sturdy, self-reliant son to whom she now looks up. Her way is the only way I know to make men of character and self-reliance and independence.
No one gains strength except through struggle; self-reliance comes through meeting hardships. There is no strength of character without sacrifice, and as we make it easy for our children, as we save them from the hard, unpleasant things of life unduly ​we do them damage. It is the boy who has learned to do a task that is given him whether he likes it or not, who can direct himself and look after himself, who does not shrink from difficult and unpleasant things, who does not hesitate at sacrifice or self-control, who has been taught to think of the comfort and pleasure of others as well as of his own—it is this sort of boy who is going to get on in college and whose home training will show before he has been in the college community a week. Such boys are to a college officer like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. The spoiled, humored boy who has been kept from hardships and sacrifice, no matter with what loving care, will hardly escape a weak youth and a selfish ineffective manhood.
A brown thrasher has a nest in our sweet honeysuckle, and for weeks we have been interested in watching her movements. Just now she is teaching her children to fly, and it seems to an onlooker no trifling task. I said "children," for though we have never so trespassed upon the privacy of our shy tenant as to look into her dwelling, I am sure from the way in which she has been conducting her child's education that there is more than one little thrasher in the nest. It was no only child who was being put through his exercises this morning.
The first sound that caught my ear when I wakened was the voice of the mother, firm and insistent, directing and encouraging her child. When I went to the window I saw the prospective young aeronaut, tailless and nervous, perched on the telephone wire. He was very tottery and was whimpering audibly, but I could tell from the strong notes of his mother's ​voice coming from the lilac bushes that she was not to be moved by his tears. He must take the initiative; he must make the leap. She kept after him vigorously flying toward him in a most threatening manner occasionally, until finally, screwing up his courage, he spread his little wings and landed safe in the honeysuckle. A moment later I saw the mother fly into the nest with a big juicy worm in her bill. It was bad pedagogy, but she had taught him self-reliance and self-direction. Later in the day he seemed to have developed a considerable initiative, and was helping his mother with the housework by bringing home a few choice worms for the younger children's supper.
It is not easy to train either young birds or young people properly. The most of us who have been pushed out early and have had to rely upon ourselves hesitate to do the same thing for the young people whom we had under our direction. We would fain save them the danger and the pain. So many youngest sons and only children have been kept so completely from that which is unpleasant or difficult, they have been so coddled and pampered that they shrink back when the test comes. They grow selfish and lack initiative and self-reliance. They do not like that which is difficult. They have whimpered, and mother has told them that they need not learn to fly.