Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families.  Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident.  We are learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that two things must be held in balance:  the scientific and the sympathetic study of childhood.  Is there any good reason why, while so readily granting that mothers should belong to mothers’ clubs, study child psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge?  There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal scientific patience.  They of course desire to have ideal children but they are not willing to learn how to grow them.

Sec. 3.  FATHERING AS A MAN’S TASK

It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you.  Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor by our sentiments or wishes alone.  A boy changes so fast that a man has to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the time.  The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding.  We keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in real touch with the boy’s world.

Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.  Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and look inside one.  They laugh at women’s clubs because they are too lazy to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their problems.  They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already accomplished for the schools.  If we were to make an inventory of what the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.

Fatherhood is our chance to become.  It is our chance to grow into our finest selves.  The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure of our gifts to its opportunities and duties.  It is our chance to be what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.  All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life.  Now, that life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his world.  We can never give any more than ourselves or any other