viii INTRODUCTION 



business than exploding unsound dogmas of 

 childhood. The stress seems not so much to be 

 laid upon the child as upon children, and the main 

 plea is the children's plea for a higher standard 

 of parentage and a recognition of the parents' 

 place in the world. And this plea deserves to 

 be heard. The child, summoned into existence by 

 no will of his own, has every right to expect that 

 his parents will undertake the moral burdens of 

 fatherhood and motherhood. He has the right to 

 expect them to maintain the wholesome idealism 

 of the home: for it is the home that gives set 

 and direction to his appreciations and shapes his 

 unconscious tendencies and reasons for doing 

 things. His opportunity for achieving a charac- 

 ter a perfectly fashioned will depends, in the 

 main, upon the fidelity of mother and father in 

 meeting these conditions. To give the world a 

 healthy-minded, generous youth, one who respects 

 others as he respects himself, who has learned 

 the lessons of self-control and unselfish service, 

 means mothering and fathering the growing soul 

 for almost a score of years, and is the greatest 

 undertaking, as it is the true business of life. 

 The world needs men and women of this sort, 

 and it can not have too many of them. To give 

 it any other sort is to sin grievously against so- 

 ciety. Parents who fail at this point, whatever 

 they may have amassed or achieved, have failed 

 in the one thing where failure is irretrievable. 

 In these later years the psychologist has pro- 



