on complex, who deeply lament the fact
that parents do not treat them with the reverence owing from normal,
wholesome beings to one another. It is this that more than anything else
makes some children impatient of the very name, children, the term with
its ceaseless implication of relative existence becoming odious to them.
No one will maintain that it is easy to achieve relations of reciprocal
reverence between parent and child, viewing the fact that family
intimacies while tending to foster affection do not make for the
strengthening of respect. For respect is most frequently evoked by the
unknown and unfamiliar even as the familiar and the known, because it is
known, touches the springs of affection. Parental reverence may not be
unachievable, but it involves the acceptance of a child as a
self-existent being, intellectually, morally, spiritually.

One of the results of the liberating processes of our age is the
deeping consciousness of children that they have the unchallengeable
right to live their own lives, under freedom to develop their own
personalities. Revolting against the superimposition of parental
personality, the more deadening because childhood is imitative, they
have begun to hearken to Emerson's counsel to insist upon themselves.
Too often they carry their fidelity to this monition to the
illegitimate length of insistence upon idiosyncracy rather than of
emphasis upon personality. To cherish and defend every fleeting
opinion as sacred and unamendable dogma is not insistence upon self
but wilful pride of opinion. And yet even such self-insistence is
better than such self-surrender as dwarfs children and by so much
belittles parents.

It may seem superfluous to second the claim of children to
self-determination, but in truth parents have so long and so
crushingly overwhelmed their once-defenceless children with the _force
majeure_ of their own personality that even a parent may welcome the
long-deferred revolt making for self-determination. The child has
rightfully resolved not to be a perfect replica,--usually a duplicate
of manifold imperfections,--but to be itself with all its own
imperfections on its head. This is the answer to the question whether
children ought ever suffer their minds to be coerced. Intellectual
compulsion and spiritual coercion are always inexcusable, though in
the interest of that much-abused term, the higher morality, children
may resort to the accommodation of conformity with