Children--and Time

It is quite common to hear comment and concern about the weakening and waning of home influence and discipline. It is not unusual to hear parents complain that they have tried “everything” and failed. They have counseled and cautioned and coaxed and threatened, sometimes seemingly without satisfying results. If such failures were only a personal and private problem, they would be serious enough. But failure in the home is also failure in the neighborhood, in the nation, in the world. Perhaps most parents are willing, conversationally at least, to do all they ought to do for their children. But in addition to all the material things parents provide for them, among the always urgent requirements are understanding and companionship. But one of the common complaints is that we don’t have time. We are so breathlessly busy. And it is true, we are busy. Whether or not what we are busy at are things of first importance is another question, but certainly we are busy. And yet we have all the time there is. We live longer, generally speaking, than our grandparents did. The day is still as long, and so are the seasons. But with more conveniences to carry our load, we are still breathlessly busy. And since we can’t add hours to the days nor days to the years, it is squarely up to us what we are going to do with the time there is. But before we give our answer, suppose we face this fact: If we don’t have time for our children, someone else will. They aren’t going to sit by and wait for us to make time. They are going to grow up whether we have time for them or not. They are going to grow up no matter how much or how little influence we have in their lives. They need companionship, and they are going to find it somewhere. And if we don’t give it to them, the kind of companionship they find may not be the kind we could wish they had found. They are going to find friends and form habits and learn the ways of life under the influence of someone, someplace. And if we want our influence, our standards, our environment to be uppermost, we’ll have to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, and not merely at our own convenience, not merely when we have more time.