flattering to the owner. In very truth, parents must come to
understand that children are not born to them as possessions. The
parental part does not confer ownership rights. Children should not be
regarded and cherished as a life-long possession nor even for a time.
They are entrusted by the processes of birth and the decree of fate to
parents, to be cared for during the days of dependence, to be nurtured
and developed till maturity, the latter to mark the ending of the
period of conscious parental responsibility.

As long as children have not reached adolescence and the consciousness
thereof, they may endure nor even note the mood of parental
possession. But once complete self-consciousness dawns, the sense of
ownership becomes intolerable to any child that is more than a
domestic automaton, and, if persisted in, makes any wholesomeness of
relation between parent and child unthinkable. Many years ago, a sage
friend tendered me some unforgettable counsel. I had, perhaps
unwisely, commiserated with him upon the fact that his lovely
children, sons and daughters alike, were leaving the parental roof
and beginning their lives anew in different and remote parts of the
land. His answer rang prompt and decisive: "Children were not given to
us to keep. They are placed with us for a time in trusteeship and now
that they are old enough to leave us and to stand upon their own feet,
it is well for them to make their own homes and become the builders of
their own lives." This sage and his like-minded wife had achieved the
art of dispossessing themselves of their children, or rather they had
never suffered themselves to tread the pathway of possession.

To a rational adult the sense of possession by another is irksome,
save in the case of youthful lovers whose irrationality may for a time
take the form of pleasure in the fact of possession by another. But
when sanity enters into the joy of the love-relation, then the sense
of ecstasy in being possessed vanishes and with its passing comes a
renewal of self-possession which alone is complete sanity.
Self-possession brooks no invasion or possession of personality by
another. The matter of possession becomes gravely disturbing because
the parental tendency in the direction of proprietorship becomes
keenest at a time when children are least disposed to be possessed in
any way. As children near adulthood, they desire to be autonomous
persons rather than things or possessions. Then the c