The father owes it to his family _to give himself at his best_, that is,
as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers
keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family
to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the
wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children,
time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have
you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the
mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and
to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith,
did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is
often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some
families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to
the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is
at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and
reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for
the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get
at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public
propaganda.

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