 CHAPTER VI. And they lived happily ever after. The romance in the old storybook always ended blissfully in marriage. The valiant Prince Charming slew dragons, vanquished giants, and worsted sorcerers, but once he had attained the fair lady of his dreams, he left all his worries behind him. Today, however, Prince Charming, unless he is an incurable romanticist, realizes that the real struggle begins only after marriage. Now that you have won the fair lady, how are you going to support her? Is the question he must solve satisfactorily before he can qualify as a suitable husband? The answer is determined by two factors. How much money is earned? How can that sum be spent most efficiently? The first query is quickly disposed of. The second, however, requires careful thought and planning. Its solution is up to both the husband and the wife, for each couple must work out their individual problem. We wish we could do it for them, but we can't. At best, we can only give the rules which we have evolved as the result of our own experience. The first step in the art of orderly spending is the preparation of an adequate budget. This is not so formidable as it seems, for the budget is nothing more than an inventory of resources and a calculation of needs that will help you develop a schedule of spending which should be fair to both you and your partner. It will differ in detail for each couple, because no matter how similar circumstances may seem to be, senses of values will vary. At the start, however, it is well to keep an itemized account of expenditures to aid in adjusting your budget to actual needs and to learn just how much you are spending for each item. You may find that you have been paying more for some things than you thought you were. Once you have settled on the approximate amount to be allotted to each purpose, however, you probably will find that keeping a written record of every purchase is more of a nuisance than a help. It may help you to plan your budget if you study some of the model estimates published from time to time by savings banks, life insurance companies, and other financial organizations. You who are just planning to be married, however, will find that these statements are compiled usually for families with two or three children. At best, they will only roughly approximate your special problems. Let us consider the situation faced by a young couple just starting out in married life. Generally speaking, if you live in a big city and your income is about $100 a month, you will pay about $35 to the landlord. Rents, unfortunately, are disproportionately high in the largest urban centers for persons of limited means. In smaller communities, you undoubtedly will find quarters for somewhat less. Your food at the present price level will cost at least $25 a month for an adequate diet, and this assumes extremely intelligent and careful buying. And to and from work for one person will cost you not less than $2.50 a month. Total transportation costs for both of you if only one works will be between $3 and $4. Not more than $10 a month should be spent for clothes, and at least $6 must be set aside for insurance and savings. This leaves roughly $20 a month for all other expenses. It is not easy for two to live on $100 a month, but it is being done. While it is not true that two can live as cheaply as one, two persons who are in love may live more happily if they marry and both continue to work than if they undergo the strain of a long engagement. This problem, however, must be worked out with reference to the particular case. Four, as pointed out in an earlier article in this series, it is more difficult for a man to get a foothold in certain professions if he marries before his apprenticeship is complete. It seems obvious that if you are wed before the man finishes his professional preparation, you will not wish to have children for the time being and that the wife will continue to support herself. I have seen many complications caused by the arrival of children before the husband had completed his professional training. One young couple I knew were getting along very smoothly while the wife was working and her husband was spending his last year in medical school. The arrival of a baby made it necessary for her to quit her job. This in turn made it imperative for the man to earn a livelihood. He took a position in a department store where today, ten years later, he is still a junior employee. By now, in the ordinary course of events, he might have been established in the profession for which he was studying. All young couples, fortunately, do not encounter such tragedies. If your income is around $2,000 a year, your financial position is relatively more secure. You may find a suitable apartment in a large city for between $50 and $60 a month, including heat and hot water. The rent in a smaller community will be less, but remember that if you furnish your own heat and hot water, you must add the cost of fuel. If to save money you move beyond the public transportation system, you must include the cost and upkeep of a car. But even considering the added expense of an automobile, provided you take care of it partly yourself and thus save some service charges, you may have better living conditions and derive more enjoyment from life than if you lived closer to town. Your food budget now may be about $40 a month, enough for a liberal diet. Your clothing allowance should be sufficient for average needs, say $15. Insurance and savings should be greater than those of the couple in the $1,200 group. At least 14% of your income now should be set aside for these purposes. If you plan to have children on an income of between $2,000 and $3,000 a year, you still will be able to live comfortably, but you probably will be happier if you move into a community made up of young people of your own income group. This will enable the mothers to make various sorts of cooperative arrangements for childcare, which serve the threefold purpose of giving the children desirable social experience, providing the mother with more freedom, and keeping costs down. It also contributes toward a congenial social life for the adults. The proportions to be spent for the larger items hold true in general for the family whose income is between $2,000 and $3,000 a year. Without knowing your individual circumstances, however, no one can make a budget for you in minute detail. The amounts you should allot to various items are governed by many considerations. For example, there are some types of employment that require more expensive clothes than others, while some professions necessitate the purchase of equipment. Again, the major proportions will change with the needs of your dependents, whether these are children or older persons who look to you for help. Moreover, a wife who confines her activities to the home will do many money-saving chores and require fewer clothes than she would if she too went to business. Notwithstanding these individual variations, the foregoing rules of thumb will be helpful in keeping you within safe bounds. But the proportion of your income to be spent for various purposes is only a small part of your problem. Don't be surprised if your budget fails to balance. Probably 95% of those who attempt to budget their family expenses have this experience. The primary reason is that few persons really know what it costs to live. This is due in part to the fact that we often confuse total expenses with day-to-day expenses. Most people think of living costs as the immediate outlay for food, clothing, and shelter, disregarding the important item of depreciation. The average housewife understands depreciation as it applies to food in a refrigerator, but gives very little thought to the same process as it applies to furniture, appliances, motor car, clothing, and the house she lives in if she and her husband own it. When replacement or repair of these more durable goods becomes necessary, there often is no fund available for the purpose. If replacement or repair is made, the budget is thrown out of balance. If neither is undertaken, depreciation sets in all the faster. In order to catch up at this point, many couples take what seems at the time to be the easiest way out. They borrow money. This may appear to solve the problem, but actually the repayment of the loan throws the budget farther out of balance. Not only that, but a substantial interest charge must be met. To cover such obligations, you will have to curtail your living expenses, and you will find this much harder to do than to save for these emergencies in the first place. One of the greatest financial difficulties encountered by young people and many older ones too, for that matter, is that of making an intelligent decision in the purchase of such important and costly items as a house, mechanical home appliances, furniture, and life insurance. The reason why it is difficult to select these things is that we buy them too seldom to acquire much experience with reference to them. Life insurance is a subject on which very few of us have specific information. It is as important as it is trite to point out that the amount and the type of insurance should be governed by the kind of hazards against which you should provide. Yet it is necessary to realize that the need of protection changes as life progresses. A father with young dependent children should carry considerably more insurance than a man with no dependence other than his wife. Consequently, it is desirable to carry two types of insurance. On the one hand, a straight life contract, entered into preferably early in life when annual premiums are lower, and on the other hand, successive renewable term insurance policies, which may be purchased when temporary responsibilities, such as the rearing of children, are undertaken. Protection for a childless wife might be limited to an amount equal to two years of the husband's salary. Roughly the same amount of term insurance may be taken out for each child. The earlier in life such policies are acquired, of course, the smaller the annual premiums. Renewable term insurance premiums are lower than straight life insurance because in the former there is no cash surrender value. Term insurance, like fire insurance, buys protection and nothing else. It is a mistake to look at life insurance as a primary form of saving because generally speaking, the more the life insurance policy conforms to a savings account, the less effectively and economically it affords protection against the hazard of death. Buy the life insurance as life insurance and put your savings into a savings account. It is well to remember at this point, too, that if you can accumulate enough to pay your insurance premiums yearly, rather than weekly or monthly, you will pay a lower rate. The purchase of a home is another difficult undertaking for the newly married couple because the average person cannot tell the difference between a well-built home and one which is poorly constructed. Unless there is some understanding of this matter, it probably will be wiser to defer the purchase of a house and live in rented quarters until one acquires such knowledge. It must be remembered also that the upkeep of a dwelling is likely to come to a substantial figure and that the budget may be severely strained if one does not know in advance the actual costs of owning real estate. Not the least of these items to be investigated is the amount of assessments, which are or may be levied against the property. The likelihood of such levies is seldom pointed out by the real estate salesman. Furthermore, if one's position is insecure or there is a possibility of being transferred to another section of the country in the course of one's employment, it would be wiser to live in rented quarters. It is a good general rule to pay no more than twice one year's salary for a house. Of this amount, not less than 10% will be required generally as a down payment. Then you will have to pay interest and amortization on your mortgage, which with taxes and upkeep probably will come to as much as the rent for a similar house. At the end of a period of years, however, you own the house, which is a definite advantage. Perhaps you have decided, as many young couples do today, that you will both work for wages. The arrival of a baby or possibly some other unplanned event may force the wife to give up her job. If you would avoid real difficulties, therefore try from the outset to meet the big items, rent, food, essential clothing, and the minimum of insurance and savings out of the husband's earnings. Let the wife's earnings cover only those items which, though desirable, are less important to your welfare, such as luxury clothes, recreation, and items of a similar character. Any couple who depend on the wife's earnings for such essentials as food, clothing, and shelter should be prepared to adopt a lower scale of expenditure for any of or all these purposes. For as a general rule, her contribution to the family income is likely to be less certain than that of her husband. The time to take on additional expenses is after an increase in the husband's wages, not before. Guard against the assumption of obligations which you could not meet if your combined income were reduced. Simple as this rule would seem to be, I have seen and ignored time and time again, usually with the same unhappy result. I have in mind the case of a couple whom we shall call the Browns. Doris Brown supplemented her husband's salary by giving piano lessons at home. They planned to have a baby and could well have managed to do so with but a short interruption to Doris' teaching activity. But, and this is what so many couples contemplating children overlook, complications set in which made it necessary for her to spend the last six months of pregnancy in a hospital. Not only did the family income decline by the amount she had earned, but expenses increased greatly. Some of the deficit was made up by borrowing, but there is a limit to the amount that can be obtained in this manner. That limit was reached before the last $150 was paid on the grand piano which Doris required for her work. As a result, the piano was taken back by the dealer. The Browns, fortunately, are persons who do not give in readily in the face of adversity. They will work out their own problem and regain lost ground. Indeed, they've already moved into cheaper living quarters not only to adapt themselves to a smaller income but also to work out of debt and reacquire a piano. Much of the heartache in this situation might have been avoided if the couple had depended less on the wife's income to meet essential expenses. One of the greatest pitfalls in the path of any young couple is the feeling that they must keep up with the Joneses. We all think of ourselves as belonging to a certain social group whether we express it in snobbish terms or not. But we need not on that account maintain a standard comparable to that of a neighbor whom we admire if in doing so we overextend ourselves. Intelligent persons are not impressed favorably by pretense. What impresses is training and ability. Since the best time to acquire these is when we are young it may be necessary for a while to practice the very opposite of ostentation, self-sacrifice. If your husband is a professional man and you have married early he may still be working for an advanced degree. This entails fees and what is even more exacting time. It means sacrifice, giving up social engagements and many comforts which you would be able to have on your husband's present salary. There is no more basic part of the budget today than provision for more vocational training. Most of us waste money on non-essentials. We have glass curtains before we can afford them. Whereas no curtains often make our houses lighter and more restful. We have fancy trays, knick-knacks and extra little tables that we do not need. The most attractive houses are in many cases those which show no evidence of overcrowding. How many women, if they look into their bureau drawers will not find them cluttered with accessories which either are not used or if worn, spoil the elegance and tidy distinction of their costumes. Buying wisely is an art but it requires no special talent only a willingness to learn and there are any number of books and magazine articles available that will help you to be better buyers. There are a few general recommendations however which may be made. For example, don't buy without asking yourself in each instance, do I need this and will it fit in with other things I now have or will it require further buying? Thus a brown coat no matter how cheap is no bargain if all your accessories are black. Another important principle of good buying is be sure you know what you want then buy the best you can afford. The best is usually the cheapest in the long run. It means fewer replacements, longer use and better appearance from the start. Analogist to wasting money on second grade goods is the purchase of imitations of articles you can't afford. Don't buy things that require expensive upkeep. Washing is cheaper than dry cleaning and if you have washable clothes and furnishings that can be handled at home you will not be stranded in a period when you have to cut costs by doing the work yourself. Buy from well-established merchants. Their reputation is valuable to you and to them alike. Avoid the fly-by-night shop and its vaunted bargains. I have known brides who spent their meager food allowances on useless trimmings. Such ignorance is inexcusable. No woman these days need go without competent advice on food purchases. She has only to consult her favorite magazine. Most budgets allow something for the theater, social affairs, weekends, vacation and travel for pleasure. The proportion of your income to be spent on recreation is a matter about which we must not be dogmatic. You must figure out what you want most. In the first place, recreation requires the allotment of time and money to do things which you most enjoy and these will differ for every couple. We may easily overemphasize the kind of recreation for which we pay money. It is true that theater tickets, phonograph records and the like are expensive and offer a passive form of entertainment, more appropriate for older people. When you are young and trying to be happy on little money, it is foolish to believe that you have to buy your fun. Whether or not you have a good time depends not on how much money you spend but on whether you and your husband are fundamentally good companions. Have you the spirit of play and the ability to enjoy things together? Then you have one of life's most precious gifts, preserve it by exercise. Wherever you live there are inexpensive ways of getting into the woods, picnicking together, walking, swimming and enjoying all sorts of outdoor sports at very little cost. Such recreation is good for you physically and great fun besides. Many young couples spend so much emotional energy on their children that they lose the invaluable habit of running off to play together. Wherever you cut expenses, do not neglect to go off together frequently as you did when you were engaged. No money is better spent than the small fee for hiring a person to look after the children while husband and wife take a picnic lunch together, a long walk or do whatever it is they most enjoy. Too common today are people like Mary and Jim who in their eagerness to do all that books and lectures recommend for little Peter got so involved in his welfare that they lost all their sense of fun. They are today thoroughly dull people, no longer interesting socially. Jim has failed to rise in his business for he mislaid the spark of enthusiasm which made him an asset to his employer. Most unhappy is poor Peter who has become a genuine problem child. Entertaining may seem important to you but young couples are not expected to engage in any sort of formal social activity. Avoid expensive dinner parties and substitute informal gatherings where both the preparation and the cost of food will be slight. If you are original and vivacious hosts, your guests will have a jolly time. Your budget should provide something for medical service. Remember that the largest dental bill comes after a period of neglect. You should not have to spend much in fees for the family doctor. Select one with care and talk over your circumstances with him in a friendly way. Don't be afraid to ask him what his fee will be. It is a false kind of pride that leads one to hesitate in discussing professional fees frankly and fully. Investigate the three cents a day hospital plan in your community. No more serious question of expense will confront you than the cost of children. The direct expense for hospital and medical care incidental to the arrival of a baby varies in different parts of the country, but it is safe to say that in cities it will be somewhere between $100 and $200 as a minimum. However, you need not expect to enjoy the frills of a private room and special nurses and think the doctor will take care of you for a nominal fee. There is no reason why he should. Having a baby is not a disease and you will not need to have fussy care. You should, however, put something aside for those extra expenses which are almost certain to occur. During the baby's first year, regular medical care should be provided. Your doctor may suggest a contract under which you would pay him a specified amount to keep baby well and receive his services whenever you need them during that period. Under such a plan, you may pay anywhere from $50 to $300 a year. If you prefer to pay by the visit, you take the risk. It may cost more or it may amount to less in the course of a year than it would under the terms of a definite contract. It is easy to be extravagant in buying unnecessary clothes and toys for the child. Remember that a baby is happiest in the simplest surroundings and that the only two things you can give your child which are of permanent value are good health and an acceptable social attitude. If you have the sort of home which leads him to develop a friendly, happy disposition and teaches him the necessity of living honestly and sincerely with no attempt to conceal mistakes, you will give him as much as any parent can give any child. It is for yourself and not for your possessions that your children may arise up and call you blessed. It is important to you both to keep up your appearance in order to be as attractive physically and mentally as before you were married. But you may have to be very ingenious and devising shortcuts to this end which the permanent wave you plan for or the new suit you hope to buy is deferred by the need to put some more money into your husband's preparation for his business or profession or by any other emergency which might arise. The pluck with which you meet these disappointments is a measure of your fitness for marriage. In my own observation, among the young business and professional group I have seen less genuine lack of money than fretful stupidity which was expressed in poor management. A lack of imagination and resourcefulness often paves the way to tragedy. We are living in a fascinating age but under a complex economy that makes many demands on our spirit of pioneering and adventure. It was picturesque, daring perhaps, to leave comfortable homes and settled communities as our great grandparents did, adventuring into new country. It sounds romantic to live in a sod house and wrestle with nature. The truth is that they pretty well had to do these things to carve out a niche for themselves in their economic system. We young married people may have to live in a walkup and an unfashionable part of town but the same spirit of daring adventure and the identical will to make a go of things animates us. If you have that spirit, you can afford to get married and I can assure you that the rewards of facing your problems and seeing them through together are high. Such a marriage is firmly rooted and when its buoyant young love matures its flower is an enduring happiness that nothing else can equal. End of chapter six, recording by Leanne Howlett. Chapter seven of the Good House Keeping Marriage book. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Scott Sherris. Children of course, by Jesse Marshall M.D. Nowadays we hear much about planning, town planning, city planning, nation planning. The elder and younger statesmen are going to see to it that we are well housed, well fed, suitably employed according to our abilities and provided for in our old age. Good. This, as I understand it, has always been the American plan. I am sure that no American who is willing to work deserves less than the fullness of the earth and I shall assume that this country is going to be well enough planned to enable you to raise a family with suitable planning. For family planning is the most important planning. Indeed, the whole point of national planning is to enable us in turn to plan the nation. The nation rests on the family. Your family rests on you and your mate. What are you planning to do about it? How, when, and why? In our children, we live over our own childhood and project ourselves into the future. Until our own children come along, we tend to forget that the world, to which we are now so thoroughly and sometimes we're assembly accustomed, once struck us as a thing of mysterious glamour promising an endless opening vista of keen excitement. And yet, if life's to continue worth the living, we must continue to hold on to that early attitude. We must continue to find ecstasy in simple sources. And often, it is our children, easily yet deeply pleased, ceaselessly busy with their paints and blocks and animals, ready for every new adventure, never jaded, never dull, who must remind us, their elders, how to get the most out of life. In their love for flowers and animals, paints and song, we may rediscover the submerged or forgotten purpose of our own lives. Or our talent may be for building happy lives from the ground up, in which case the children themselves are the answer to our search for pure-hearted, never-flagging excitement. As for projecting ourselves into the future through our children, reaching ahead through them in order to effect, if possible, generation after generation of people yet unborn, this is a kind of immortality snatched from death and a satisfaction, though composed entirely of hope that parents prize. Strong, souled people feel that their personalities are worth perpetuating, especially in conjunction with their beloveds. In proportion to their love of life, to the strength of their joy, and the clarity of vision of even better things, people find one lifetime all too short to fulfill the expanding urges within them. In their children, they see human beings who may carry on their work, or at any rate, transmit their traits to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Just at present, people who have found life good, the ideal parents feel the need of entrusting the future to people like themselves, the desperate need to keep power from falling into the hands of morbid madmen who, under the pretext of enlarging life, precipitate horrible wars precisely because they themselves, starved or pressed or humiliated from the cradle, have never found life good. Yes, our children can make all the difference between a life full of hope for the future of the race and one of pessimism and despair. It is this sense of children as carrying something of ourselves, our tempers, our hopes into the future, which is at the bottom of what we call the eugenic urge, the desire that is to beget good stock and pass on only the best in us. About the obvious pleasures that children bring, the fascination of seeing their characters unfold, the happiness of festivals like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, which without children lose half their charm, it is not necessary to speak. For our purposes, however, the point is that there are literally dozens of reasons why nearly all of us want children. The problem is when to have them and in what numbers. For modern man likes to know what he is about in this world and to direct and control his destiny in the light of other knowledge and experience. The time for the first baby is a question of readiness on the parent's part. Are they ready physically, psychologically, economically? These are not, of course, three separate ways of being ready. They are interdependent ways, but they offer suitable heads under which to discuss the subject. Economic readiness is of utmost importance. Insecurity of employment, insufficient means to provide the mother and baby with medical supervision and good food, or looming debts, are in themselves sufficient to prevent prospective parents from attaining the other kinds of readiness, physical and psychological. On the other hand, young people with steady incomes should not postpone having children merely because those incomes are not high. Three can live almost as cheaply as two, especially in the child's first years. It is the expense of hospitalization and doctor's care during pregnancy and throughout the first year or two following the birth that sometimes threatens to unbalance the family budget. This additional expense must be provided for. It need not be great, a matter of a few hundred dollars, often less in various parts of the country. The doctor's fee for prenatal care and delivery will correspond roughly unless he is a senior specialist of great reputation, by no means a necessity for healthy people, to the expense for hospitalization. The latter can frequently be obtained for $100 or less, though rarely if ever in a big city, making the total cost of getting the baby about $200. In many parts of the country hospital schemes into which you make a monthly or yearly payment, make it possible to get two weeks hospitalization for mother and baby with semi-private room, use of delivery room, and nursing care for about $10. This affects an obvious saving and has done a great deal to bring children within the reach of all. During the first year or so, the mother needs to be quite free to call on her doctor for service or advice whenever she wishes. Sometimes the doctor will be glad to arrange a flat charge for a year's attention, say $100 or more or less, depending on the family's income. Such an arrangement often does the parents a great deal of good, putting their minds at rest for they feel they can call on the doctor in all reasonable emergencies, ask him all necessary questions, expect periodic visits to their baby, and receive all necessary vaccinations and immunizations for a fee they can't afford. The sum may be paid in monthly or quarterly installments. Money for the child may be saved out of monthly earnings. This well-known phenomenon is called saving for children. Very often, the parents of the married couple are glad to help them with the extra expense involved in having their first child. I do not mean by loans, for it is not good for young people to be in debt, even to loving creditors, but by actually undertaking to pay the hospital and the physician. If people are ready for a baby in all other ways and only money keeps them from parenthood, the prospective grandparents often feel at their duty to help in this way. Dr. Josephine Hemingway Kenyon, director of the Health and Happiness Club of Good Housekeeping, has often made the wise suggestion that fathers give, in addition to any other wedding present, a $500 or $1,000 bond called the baby bond to be kept to meet the expenses of bringing the first baby into the world and protecting its first year of life. This idea appealed so strongly to some parents that Dr. Kenyon went even farther, suggesting that young parents who can afford it take out a 10-year endowment policy of $1,000 for their 13-year-old children to be available when these children are 23, if needed, to help them start their own families. The question of the right age for parenthood is naturally of importance, but it depends on many factors, chief among which, after the economic problem has disposed of, are physical and psychological health. Sometime between 23 and 28 seems to me to be a satisfactory time for a woman to bear her first baby, but any time up to 35 presents no difficulty, provided the physical and mental conditions are healthy and propitious. Plenty of women of 40 and over have been known to go through first and subsequent pregnancy successfully, but there is no reason for postponing children to this age except failure to find the right mate earlier in life. People who have their first child when over 35 are themselves over 50 when the child goes to adolescence, an age which may make it difficult to help the child meet its crucial problems in the tone of one good friend to another. If you cannot have your children before 35, you must make every effort to remain young enough for spiritual companionship with them. The best age for parenthood is to be determined, not in terms of years, but of physical and psychological health and happiness. In marriage, psychological health and happiness are largely dependent on love. It is of the utmost importance that every child should be a love child in the best sense of the term. Love is a splendor that eludes definition, but it is characterized by an inexhaustible desire for the beloved's company and a steadily burning fire of enthusiasm and admiration. So-called disillusion in love comes from the failure of these emotions. Young lovers, through plenty of courting and companionship, should try to make sure of the lasting quality of their love. This is sometimes impossible, however, and for this reason and others, I think it is just as well for married people to wait a year or even two before having their first child. In the happiest marriages, there are many adjustments unforeseen before the wedding to be made, and it may very well be that only in the continued intimacy of marriage can the strength of love be tested. Only there can love gutter out or prove itself stronger than death, so much stronger indeed that as it deepens and widens in fullness and power, it turns of its own accord directly toward the creation of more life. In other words, the best time to have children is when the lovers, sure of themselves and of each other, feel an imperious need to stamp the gold of life with each other's images. I feel no hesitancy in urging married couples to take a year or so to make sure of their love, if only for the children's sake. Economic conditions being adequate, there is no reason to suppose that real lovers will put off having children until it is too late to obtain the best eugenic results. To paraphrase the poet, we may say that those who restrain their desire for children do so because their desire is weak enough to be restrained. Such people will probably not make good parents. True lovers will beget children after a year or two, nor will they mind taking a few so-called sacrifices as of parties and new automobiles for the sake of having children. They recognize the distinction between entertainment and joy. Man may be a laughing animal, but he is more essentially a creative animal. His deepest pleasures are simply the byproducts of his activity. In building a home around a family of children, both men and women often find the deepest of all possible pleasures. And when it is in this spirit of vital affection that the child is begotten, we get, as the eugenists say, a vital fertilization. The chances are that children so begotten will themselves be capable of strong, sound, deep-seated feelings. As Dr. Kugelmas says in Growing Superior Children, the degree of emotional devotion of one parent to another is reflected dominantly in the transmission of the more vital elements in the constitution of the progeny. To the question of physical readiness for childbirth, I come last, but not because of least importance. Without physical health, the parents cannot expect to beget healthy children, nor indeed can they, in many cases, manage even to bear them. As everyone knows, women afflicted with tuberculosis, heart disease, and kidney changes should probably refrain from bearing children. But this is a matter for the doctor to decide. Some people, if their troubles are not severe, may safely bear at least one child, sometimes two. They should put themselves in the hands of a good physician and rely implicitly on his findings and advice. Sufferers from venereal diseases should not attempt to beget children till they have been given a clean bill of health, nor should children be begotten when the body is weakened by temporary disease or during the stage of debilitating after-effects. For disease and fatigue affects sex cells unfavorably. So do mental strain, depression, and overexcitement. Unhealthy physical and mental states in the parents lead to debilitated or deficient offspring. They open the way to the operation of undesirable hereditary factors, which generations of self-controlled parents have been driving into the background and attenuating to the point of disappearance. It is possible for the father, too, to weaken his vitality by excessive sexual activity. In fine, the best time for conception to take place is when the lover's sense of well-being, physical as well as mental, is at its fullest. Full-bodied passion, which we may think of as a kind of crisis of love and health, will give us offspring to be proud of. One thing we cannot plan, however, is the sex of the child to come, nor should we, in general, wish to. It was the limited sphere of feminine activities that once tended to make girls a debit, boys a credit. Nowadays, girls have just as many opportunities of becoming interesting human beings as have boys. It is a favorite theory of my husbands that they may, and often do, become more interesting because they can do not only everything that boys can do, but one thing more. They can bear children, a humanizing experience of the greatest possible value. Should you wish to know what your chances of having twins, I must remind you that the tendency to give birth to them is an inherited trait, especially through the father. Twins are much more likely to be girls than boys, and to be born later rather than earlier in the mother's married life. Thus, it is three times more likely that a woman of 38 will give birth to twins than that a woman of 24 will do so. Should you fear that the unpredictable appearance of twins will unbalance your baby budget, you can, for a moderate sum, ensure yourself against this chance with many of the larger insurance companies. The insurance must be taken out before the existence of twins in the uterus can be diagnosed, that is, in the first two or three months of gestation. One twin birth occurs to about 90 single births, one triple to about 8,000, and one quadruple to about 650,000. In all medical literature, only about 30 cases of quintuplets have been recorded. Multiple births are not only rare, but the babies are often so delicate that they are extremely difficult to rear. We can be well pleased if our first pregnancy eventuates in a single healthy baby of either sex. All the reasons for wanting the first child apply in the case of the second, and to them are added more. What was in the first instance, simply a hope and a vague, powerful urge has now grown into a conscious desire based on the self-knowledge and experience gained from loving and looking after the first child. We have had a real taste of the joys of home and family building, and now nothing short of economic catastrophes likely to stop us from building higher. I assume, of course, that the mother did not encounter any severe difficulties in giving birth to her first child. If she was in good medical hands, she probably did not, though certain unusual formations of the pelvis may have made her labor longer than usual. I do not say more painful because medical science has found ways of minimizing the pains of childbirth. Even if it was found necessary to deliver the first child by cesarean operation, a woman in normal health can without danger bear at least two children by this method, and at the very least, a family should include two children. Quite apart from the parent's natural desire to go on expressing their mutual love by building a full-voiced home on the foundations laid by the first child, it soon becomes apparent that this first child, for the sake of its own social and moral development, needs a little brother or sister. It needs companionship. It needs to share its toys and its parents. Otherwise, it will tend to grow self-centered. By being too much with grown-ups, it may become moody and negative. After the question, can you afford it? And I sincerely hope you can. The next question facing the mother who wants a second child is, when can I bear it with a maximum amount of benefit to it, to my first child and to myself? Clearly, if it is to be a playmate for the first child, you will want to have it as soon as possible. But in fairness to both the mother and the child to be, there should elapse a period of about two years between the birth of the first and the conception of the second offspring. Less time than that will seldom allow the mother who put so much of her best blood and bone into building and nursing the first baby to recover fully her maximal physical health and strength. All authorities are agreed on this point. There may be exceptions, of course, and there are always mothers who by reason of having married late, perhaps, are anxious to have as many babies as quickly as possible. But most women neither can nor will nor should produce children in this fashion. There is too much risk of weakening the mother's body and of begetting poor stock. Later children may be spaced to suit the desires of the parents, a recovery period of two years or more always being allowed the mother. But will there be any later children? Dr. Ellsworth Huntington in his contribution to this volume has told us that most of us who are not shiftless and incompetent on one hand or wealthy and well-established on the other belong to a group in which the average number of children, including those who die young, is fewer than three. Dr. Huntington rightly deplores this rapid fall of the birth rate, especially among intelligent, far-sighted, industrious, progressive people whose ideals of family lie for high. The trouble with a family of fewer than three is that it cannot be counted on to project very far into the future those sound souls that good biological inheritance, which the parents flatter themselves are so definitely worth preserving. A family of two or even three children will not, on the average, produce two who, by becoming parents, may be thought of as replacing their father or mother. Thus a family of fewer than four children may be said to be dying out. This is a sorry state of things for those parents who, as I said above, like to think of themselves as affecting the destinies of the race by transmitting their best characteristics from generation to generation. When intelligent people are forced to limit their families to one or two children by lack of money, it is a great pity. There is a great abundance of good things in America, but we do not seem to be able to get these things distributed in such a way as to do the most good. We are all working for a better world, but are we working hard enough? I sometimes think that we are not working so hard as we might because our stake in that better scheme of things is not large enough. If we dare to have three or four children with all the sacrifices implied, I wonder whether this fact would not sharpen our scent on the trail of the better America. Lord Bacon said that those who have children have given hostages to fortune. But I am inclined to think that those who have made large and important bargains with chance are just those who will move heaven and earth to guard against mischance. One aspect of the better America, proposed by the American Eugenics Society, will perhaps be the adoption of a sliding wage scale characterized by a rise in pay upon marriage and with the arrival of each successive child. That thoughtful people of our time, whether rich or not, will soon return to having families as large as our grandparents is extremely unlikely. To bear 10 or 15 children would probably kill most modern women or so completely wear them out that the remnant of their lives would not be worth living and families of this size would similarly exhaust even unusually large pocketbooks, leaving most fathers insolvent. Though it is probably true, as economists say, that our land and its resources, if more equitably distributed and scientifically exploited, are capable of supporting many more millions of Americans than at present, there seems to be no good reason for stepping up the modern middle class family beyond four or five children. The reader will notice that I have been going on the assumption that people can have children and find specimens and that to order when and as they please. This is to a large extent true. The key to the mystery is the doctor. Modern medical schools and modern law have entrusted into his hands not only the physical but the mental well-being of his patients. The tight interlocking of the body and spirit has been everywhere recognized and the impossibility in many illnesses of healing one without treating the other. Positive well-being in the body, so important for the beginning of strong children, is practically inconceivable apart from positive happiness in the mind. Thus it has become a prime tenet of eugenics that babies must not be conceived under conditions of excessive mental worry or strain. Children be gotten in deprivation or the fear that they are going to lower the whole family's standard of living to a painful pinch are not going to have much chance even while in the womb to turn out fit and strong. Judicious limitation of birth for reasons of health, the whole health of the parents in behalf of the best possible grade of offspring has therefore become a routine part of the physician's service to his patients. Every married couple should put themselves in the hands of a physician whom they respect and admire making him an indispensable third partner to their family planning. This crucial role of the doctor in eugenics is one of the few really deeply encouraging signs of our times. The woman asked the doctor by Dr. Emil Novak of Johns Hopkins give some idea of the role the modern physician may play in helping parents plan the vigorous citizenry of the future. When the married lovers are ready to have their children it is naturally with the woman that the doctor is most concerned correcting structural or functional deviations or mild organic disease before the pregnancy has advanced too far seeing to it that the glandular mechanisms do their important work, that nutritional intake is sufficient, that digestion is kept successfully functioning, that metabolic processes are raised to more than ordinary efficiency and that the body is kept free from all toxins and infections. After the birth of the child the doctor will not only look after the child but also see to it that the mother suffers no adverse after effects and is restored to her maximal health and efficiency as soon as possible ready to bear her next healthy baby when the time shall come. Should a baby be conceived unexpectedly the doctor is often the best person to help the parents handle the untoward situation. He can give the mother's physical condition that special attention in which it will probably need if she has born another child quite recently. If the objection to the child arises from economic or psychological unpreparedness there is no one better fitted possibly than the modern physician for changing negative fear to positive desire. By the force of his own enthusiasm for new life by his vision of the modern family by a skillful combination of his common sense and psychiatric training and by his ability to arrange fees within the range of his worried clients he can usually turn the unplanned conception into a happy accident. It is often to the physician too that the father must look for practical guidance and encouragement in those unforeseeable cases when the mother perishes in connection with childbirth. It is he who is in the best position to prevent the father from unconsciously attaching blame to the unoffending child and harboring an undefined resentment which may adversely affect both lives. The doctor can help the bereaved father to cling to his dream of family life, can assist him in building a happy home for his motherless child or children or can advise him on problems which may arise out of finding a new mother for them. Another important function of the physician is to give aid to couples who have difficulty in beginning children. The question of sterility comes up frequently in our time especially among cultivated and intellectual people. Persistent failure to conceive, we term absolute sterility. Persistent failure to carry a pregnancy to a successful end, we call relative sterility. The latter is an obstetric problem and can usually be dealt with successfully. So kind of former in about 40% of the cases. We must remember the rule formulated by Matthew Duncan that the marriage of persons between 20 and 30 cannot be regarded as sterile until at least four years of normal, happy, sexual intercourse have elapsed. I have known half a dozen instances in which a child was born after five, six, 10 and in one case, 15 years of complete failure to conceive. In these special cases, stop. In these cases, no special efforts were made by the couple to bring about conception. Couples who wish to make a special stop. Couples who wish to make special efforts should have complete physical examinations, both husband and wife, for though failure to conceive used to be attributed solely to the wife, we now know that in about 30% of cases it is the husband who is the cause. Many remediable physical conditions may be responsible for sterility and the doctor by correcting them has a wonderful chance to contribute to human happiness. Many families feel the tragedy of not having children and yet do not realize the need of finding out what the trouble is. They just drift along assuming that nothing can be done and often they could be made fertile. This subject is ably discussed in Human Sterility by Dr. Samuel R. Meeker of the Boston University School of Medicine. When the doctor decides that there is practically no chance of a couple's having children of their own, their strong family urge may lead them to adopt some. They can find useful information in E.G. Gallagher's The Adopted Child. It often happens that people get as much satisfaction out of adopted children as they could have got out of their own, finding cause for pride, inspiration, and comfort in their unfolding towards maturity. The question of whether we should adopt children when infants or later, at some age under six, is worth considering. It may seem at first glance that only infants raised from the cradle can really take the place of children of our own. While this is partly true, there are drawbacks to be considered. To begin with, the supply of infants for adoption is not by any means large enough to meet demand. Second, more than half the number of small babies available are illegitimate and one can often learn little about the parentage. Though various child-placing agencies find it difficult to allocate those children who do not become available for adoption till the age of three or four later, there are many things to be said in favor of taking an older child. More often they are legitimate and more facts about the parentage can be ascertained. Also, it is possible to apply intelligence tests which will disclose whether their intelligence is normal or above. Often those parents who want to adopt children tend to be intellectual and will find greater happiness in and give greater happiness to a child who is of normal or superior intelligence. You may object to the older child's early environment thinking that it may have permanently injured even the fairest of capacities, but psychologists tell us that this is not really the case and that the unhappy effects of poor environment during the first five years of a child's life can be removed and the child reconditioned without too much trouble. Couples who are no longer young should, perhaps, adopt older children in order that they may stand in the most helpful age relation to them. Children adopted as infants should always be told that they are not the flesh and bone children of the foster parents. This information, which is bound to come to them, will come with less shock from the parents themselves. At the age of five or six, when they first begin to be interested in where children come from, is a good time to tell them. It is agreed that the foster parents should use the word chosen rather than adopted. They chose their children out of all the thousands available just as the foster father chose his wife and the wife her husband. This attitude toward the question makes for a feeling of family solidarity and loyalty no less profound than that between other parents and children. Everything must be done to prevent feelings of inferiority from growing out of the adoptive relationship. The children must never be reminded of the fact of adoption. The parents must not expect more gratitude from them than they would from offspring of their own, and they must never, never shout thanks to God in a moment of anger that the children are not really theirs. To do so is not to play the game. After all, under most state laws, children may be adopted on trial for a year. If the children are kept after that date, the parents bind themselves in law and in morality to bring them up exactly as if they were their own. I keep using the plural throughout this paragraph, because I assume, of course, that you will adopt at least two children if it becomes necessary for you to plan in this way your version of a splendid American family, strong, loving, and creative of an ever finer future. End of Chapter 7. Recording by Scott Sherris, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Chapter 8 of the Good Housekeeping Marriage Book. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Scott Sherris. Detour Around Reno by Dr. Hornell Hart. David and Ruth have been married four years. The first few months were glorious. They had to make minor adjustments, of course, but they had thrilling times together, and it was a wonderful thing to have someone you belong to, someone so comforting and lovable. Yet lately, there have been difficulties. David believes in saving money. Ruth thinks that you live only once and that you ought to spend your money wisely, of course, for the nice things and the great experiences, especially since there is no telling when the bank will fail or when the bottom will drop out of the stock market and you will lose all you've invested. David likes to get away from the house at night, to see friends and keep up with really good movies. Ruth prefers nightclubs and gay parties. David thinks Ruth ought to be more careful about those white lies and those extremely decollette dresses. Ruth thinks David is rather a prude and mighty inconsiderate in the way he keeps picking on her. And then there is Junior. Ruth believes in loving one's children wholeheartedly and trusting that affection and understanding will bring them through all right in the long run. David thinks that right from the cradle, youngsters need to build character and learn that they have to obey. Two days ago, there was quite a quarrel when Ruth ordered the new electric stove without consulting David. And on the same day, he discovered that she had accidentally overdrawn the bank account. Neither one has spoken it, but the word divorce has been saying itself behind those set lips and those coldly polite faces. This falling out between David and Ruth represents one type of marital conflict. A man and a woman differing somewhat in temperament as any two people differ, more or less, find themselves being hurt by the other's ways of acting. Each allows a sense of antagonism to grow up. This makes them more ready to resent the next difference in opinion or purpose. Once started, the feeling of enmity can grow like a snowball until neither one is willing to believe in the other's honesty, fairness, or decency. This road leads straight to Reno. But there are other ways of falling out in marriage. For example, there is the experience of Henry and Mary. They had a queer sort of engagement. They enjoyed each other's friends and had wonderful times playing tennis and going to shows together. But when it came to love making, Henry always felt that he had made a clumsy fool of himself and Mary always felt a turmoil of baffled emotions. Their honeymoon was a ghastly failure. Of course, Mary knew that there was such a thing as sex, but her parents had given her a feeling that the less people had to do with such things, the better. Her marriage night felt her with a feeling of blind revulsion. She tried honestly to overcome it through the months that followed, but she had to force herself to respond to Henry's caresses and he knew bitterly that she hated the relation which for him was a deep and urgent need. In the years that followed, they had four children and loved them dearly. They still enjoyed going out together, entertaining their many friends and taking part together in their church activities, but there was a grim disappointment back of it all and every now and then it broke out in harsh words which both of them regretted. Sexual frustration as experienced by Henry and Mary or arising from various other causes is a factor in many marital conflicts. Our next example illustrates another type of disharmony. Helen was really the one who brought about her marriage to William. She was a capable businesswoman earning a good salary. He was the only son of a divorced woman. His mother loved him dearly. He was her great source of comfort and the loneliness and disappointment of her own wrecked marriage. Helen saw the fine qualities in him and felt that he was being shut away from normal life because his mother wrapped herself around him. When the mother was laid up in the hospital for three months, Helen set about a well-planned campaign. They were married shortly afterward. His mother valiantly refrained from going with him on the honeymoon and arranged for them to live across the hall from her in the same apartment building. William felt sincerely that he must not allow his mother to be lonely and he could not understand why his wife showed irritation when the three of them were together four or five nights every week and throughout the summer vacation. But when he realized that it was not working out, they finally moved to the other side of town and limited the evenings with his mother to two or three a week. When they first married, William insisted that his wife give up her work and he also felt that he ought to manage the family's finances with his mother's constant advice. Helen longed for children and she surrendered her business career in the hope that she might have a family, but no children came and at last Helen found a new position not so good as the one from which she had resigned. She loves William passionately but she feels that his mother has spoiled the marriage. William loves Helen but feels that she is unaccountably hard and unfriendly toward his mother and he is distressed by her insistence upon earning her own income. The mother wants both to be happy and is willing to retire into the background but she believes that Helen does not really appreciate William. As a mother, she does not propose to see her son's life ruined by any woman. William's mother fixation is a somewhat extreme example of a fairly frequent source of conflict. In some cases, the bride suffers from father fixation and her husband suffers accordingly. Our fourth case illustrates another widespread type of marriage problem. Sam had had a gay and jolly life before he married. Mabel felt keen pride when she finally captured him from the other girls. He really meant to settle down and be loyal to her when they married. Their passion for each other was absorbing and wonderful for a while. Twins were born promptly and a year later came another child. The babies kept Mabel tied down rather closely to the home. Sam often found her with wildly straying hair and a must dress when he came home and her temper was apt to be on wire edge after nights of being up with the children. Sam always seemed to be sound asleep when the children needed attention. Mabel became careless about the cooking. The food was often burned, cold, lumpy, and poorly seasoned. She noticed that Sam always brightened up when a pretty girl was near. He used to go out often to play cards with the boys and Mabel twice found lipstick on his handkerchief. A nice medical student who rooms next door has now taken to dropping in to talk to Mabel. She wonders, since Sam is so free and easy, whether she might not also pick up a little thrill on the side and the neighbors have recently overheard some violent arguments between Sam and Mabel. Four typical cases of unhappy marriage have been sketched. A man and a woman who are allowing differences of opinion to grow into intense antagonism, a couple suffering from miscarriage of their sex life, a vigorous woman married childlessly to a mother-absorbed man and an overworked and rather careless mother married to a man who is always seeking fresh romance. By way of contrast, let us look at a quite different type of marriage. Charles and Anna have been married 20 years. Loving each other has been the great adventure of their lives, that and having their three children. They always regarded marriage as a partnership, 50-50 they used to say. There have been times of stress but they have always been able to talk their problems out together. There have even been outbursts now and then when they have gotten behind in their sleep and when each of them has been trying so hard to hold down the lid that it has finally blown off. But always these storms have cleared the air and afterward they have come closer to each other than before. Marriage for both is the great central core of life, focus of love, faith and joy. In spite of all that appears in the tabloid newspapers, the Charles and Anna type of marriage is far more typical than the experiences of the other four couples whose stories have just been sketched. In almost every marriage there are rich values to be preserved and possibilities of deeper and fuller joy than have ever been achieved. Our purpose in this article is to point out some of the practical steps which can be taken by couples who do have followings out to eliminate friction, to keep love alive and to discover the deeper and wider happiness which might be theirs. Five ways to go. No matter what crisis one confronts in life, there are the following five possible ways of reacting. One, one may acquiesce ignomely. That means to give in weekly to take it lying down as the boys say. If one is disappointed in one's wife or one's husband, if one's sex life and marriage is a failure, if one's in-laws intrude dangerously, if one's mate follows love outside of marriage or if any other catastrophe overtakes one's home, one can give way to hopeless lamentation and self-pity. There's nothing I can do about it. It's just a rotten world. Nobody ever gives me a decent chance. I suppose I've got to live along and pretend I don't care. Poor me. Two, one may evade cravenly. That means to run away like a coward. Many divorces are simply a blind and frantic attempt to escape from suffering. Some divorces, of course, are the best possible solution of a bad situation. But quite often the person seeking the divorce are really trying to run away from themselves. They have never learned how to live in friendly happiness with other people. If they marry again, they will promptly find themselves in new suffering because they have never solved the basic problems of their own personalities. Sometimes a cowardly evasion is mental instead of physical. The husband or wife retires into a private world and puts up an icy barrier against the partner. In any case, this type of solution is a blind attempt to run away from the problem instead of facing it bravely, trying to understand it and seeking the wisest and best solution possible. Three, one may attack vindictively. Most husbands and wives who are skidding toward divorce have convinced themselves that their marriage partners are villains. This person they married is to blame. He is selfish, heartless, cruel, disloyal, lazy and nasty. He has hurt me terribly, but I'll get even. I'm going to make him suffer the way he's made me suffer. I'll show him that he can't do that to me. Four, one may grapple courageously. This means to look the situation squarely in the face, to study it calmly, open-mindedly and thoroughly. It means to discover the real causes for the disaster, to take an inventory of all the possible resources and then deliberately and bravely to choose whatever line of action seems most likely to lead up out of the swamp onto higher ground. In any problem which we face, some of the conditions are almost completely beyond our control. One cannot do much, for example, to change the kind of mother whom one's husband has had, to reverse his inherited characteristics or to cure the economic depression against which he may have to struggle. But certain other conditions one can change, especially if one will, one can alter one's own ways of acting, of talking and even of thinking. The courageous grappler accepts without despair the unchangeable factors in his problem and sets about correcting the conditions which are within his control, especially his own patterns of living. Five, one may cooperate creatively. This means that one will still grapple courageously but not as a lone wolf. One will seek to understand the other people who are involved, one's husband or wife, one's children, one's relatives, one's rivals and all the other people who have any part or interest in the family problem. To understand means to be able to see the situation sympathetically through their eyes but without losing perspective. Cooperating creatively means teamwork. It means discovering what is the best solution for everybody involved and then working wholeheartedly toward that solution. The rest of this article is devoted to outlining some practical steps toward cooperating creatively when one has fallen out with one's marriage partner. If you yourself are confronting difficulties in your marriage, you may find it helpful to note down each of the following steps on a sheet of paper and then write in after each step the applications that fit your own case. See whether you can transpose these suggestions into the terms of your problem. If you start thinking about what you face in the light of these steps, you will probably find new ideas and fresh possibilities coming into your mind as you write. Those solutions which spring up in your own thinking may prove to be just the aids which you need to get a new grip and to start transforming your marriage into a thing of new beauty, joy, and power. 10 steps to marital adjustment. One, abandon all feelings of resentment. Emotional antagonism towards one's mate or toward other personalities in the problem acts as an effective barrier against finding the creative solution and against putting it into effect. What you hate, you cannot understand because you are ready to believe all evil of it and unprepared to perceive its good. Therefore, surrender all grudges, jealousies, and feelings of contempt. Emotions of enmity distort one's vision and impale one toward actions and words that are not wise. When one person feels resentment against another, the other is likely to feel resentment in return. This intensifies the first resentment and so the hatred grows. Someone has to break the vicious cycle. Don't wait for your marriage mate to take the first step if this joy-destroying process has started in your home. Forgive and forget. Let goodwill take the place of antagonism in your own consciousness even though your mate continues to carry on the old grudge for a while. Two, eliminate needless irritants and antagonizers. Make careful and thorough study of the things that are hurting or distressing or thwarting your mate. Here is a checklist which includes some of the most frequent annoyers in married life. Stop criticizing your mate, above all in the presence of other people but also in private. Carefully avoid every action or situation which makes your mate feel inferior or which brings him unnecessary failures even in small things. Don't insist on playing bridge if he is a poor player. Don't cultivate witty conversations with brilliant people if he feels like a dub in such company. Don't throw him into contrast with people who are stronger, more successful or better educated than he. Avoid those situations in which you demonstrate your own superiority over him. Study to eliminate the topics of conversation which are annoying to him. Stop bringing up the subject of his shiftless relatives, the time he went bankrupt, the occasion on which he made a fool of himself or that political or religious question on which you always quarrel. Replace those items of household equipment which keep causing unnecessary pain, labor and irritation, that leaky faucet, that worn out washing machine, that broken light switch, that asthmatic vacuum sweeper, that torn rug, that decrepit snow shovel, that ready to be junked lawnmower. Avoid inflicting unnecessarily on your mate people or pastimes which bore him. Don't drag him to teas or concerts or to prize fights if these events pain and torture him. Form the habit of keeping all appointments with your mate on a punctual minute. But, unjust as this may seem, do not demand that your mate do likewise. Never read at the table unless your mate also has something interesting to read and agrees to the arrangement. Bring your mate into contact with your relatives so infrequently and under such favorable circumstances that their liking for each other will flourish rather than perish. Do not try that dangerous experiment of flirting with someone else in order to keep your mate interested in you. Never repulse your mate's sexual advances in a way which will seem unloving, contemptuous, or irritated. If you cannot respond fully at the moment, be sure that you express unmistakably your respect, your affection, and your comradeship and make it clear that the necessary sexual denial is a mere postponement. Watch to see whether you are needlessly violating your mate's ideals of courtesy, decency, good sportsmanship, generosity, or honor. See whether you can discover any other way in which you have been unnecessarily irritating or hurting your mate, and make a clean break with that joy-destroying habit. Three, find ways to do new, joyful things together, even in seemingly trivial ways. The long checklist under item two is largely negative. Add the positive side. Buy your mate little presents from the 10-cent store and occasionally from more expensive places. Make a private list of the small things that please him most. Yellow junk wheels, Olivia de Havilland, dipped caramels, picnics, chicken pie, Bill Smith, ice box snacks, Beethoven records, bestseller novels, theater parties, grape juice with ginger ale, odd china, or whatever they are. And make a habit of springing small but delightful surprises. Cultivate the friendly little family jokes that grow up wherever people enjoy each other intimately. Have children together if you possibly can. Have them deliberately by mutual agreement. Have as many as your mate can wholeheartedly agree to and throw yourselves into the great adventure of giving them the best possible start in life. Remember that the finest things you can give your children are courage, self-respect, faith, understanding of beauty, comradeship, and the eager desire to serve their fellow men. These great endowments can be given to one's sons and daughters, even though one has a severe struggle to give them good clothes and an education. Often the financially hard pressed give their young a far richer heritage than do those who are wealthy but neglectful. Five, understand your mate. Set about that job as though your life depended on it. Your married life and its happiness do depend on it. Understanding one's wife or husband is far more important than earning a college degree and even more thrilling and absorbing if one goes about it the right way. Spend time alone, quietly, affectionately, and dispassionately thinking about your mate. What have been his great emotional experiences in life? What are the main drives that determine his ways of acting? What are his deepest aspirations and longings? What are his unrealized possibilities? What are the things that have most thwarted him and kept him from achieving what he has hoped to do? Sometimes the process of understanding oneself and one's mate calls for expert help. Skilled marriage counselors are available increasingly in our larger cities but be sure to go only to those who have demonstrated their skill and training by helping other people whom you know and helping them over a considerable period of time. Sometimes magazine articles will help. Excellent books on marriage and family life are available at public libraries. Six, discuss your vital family problems with your mate frankly but do not argue endlessly. If there are tensions in your married life bring them into the open, honestly and courageously. Don't try to convert your mate to your point of view. Try to understand his point of view. Try to understand each other. But after you have cleared the air and shared your ideas and your problems, do not rehash and repeat and go back over and over again until you are both weary and rebellious. Marriage is a partnership, not a debating society. Seven, discover areas of agreement and develop together joint programs of action on which you can work together enthusiastically. The projects and purposes of a husband and wife often conflict even when their desires and motives are in harmony. Very well, go back of the purposes to the underlying desires and build new projects and purposes on which you can unite. Suppose that one of you wants to go to the movie down on the corner and the other just hates the idea. Very well, that is a conflict. But if you search open-mindedly you'll probably find some underlying agreement. Perhaps, though you disagree about this particular movie, you're both craving to see some good movie and if you look up the advertisements you can find one that will delight you both. Or perhaps the essential desires of each will be fulfilled best if you stay home tonight to catch up on your sleep and then go to a movie tomorrow night. Or perhaps one of you dislikes the idea of any movie at all but both of you want to go out for the evening. The doubtless you can find some other entertainment that will satisfy both. Somewhere, back of the surface disagreement lies a deeper argument if you will seek it patiently and lovingly. And this applies not only to a little dispute over movies but to all the greater controversies that husband and wife confront. Where shall we move? How shall we get along on the family income? What religious training shall we give the children? Shall Mary be permitted to have that Jones boy come to the house? No matter how perplexing the disagreement may be there is a best possible solution for all concerned if we will seek it understandingly and in the spirit of love. Eight, surrender non-essentials. Many a marriage has gone to smash because husband or wife or both clung as a matter of principle to a point which could easily have been given up and forgotten if both had centered on the great underlying essentials. Do not acquiesce ignomely on vital matters but do not wreck your own happiness and that of your mate over some comparatively minor issue that was never worth the tears and the agony which it caused. Nine, agree to live and let live. Cultivate freedom for your mate, your children and all the people involved in your family problems. To be oneself is one of the most precious rights of a human being. We need it for the fulfillment of our own life. Our loved ones need that same freedom for the fulfillment of their lives. Now, freedom is not defiance of the law but voluntary fulfillment of law. The better we understand each other and the laws of life the more likely we are to find that freedom which brings the fullness of joy. By one of these strange paradoxes we never fully win the love of our dear ones until we cease demanding it. Ten, put the welfare of your family first and stop fretting about yourself. Although this rule comes last in our list it really comes first in the search for fulfillment of personality in family life. What do you really want from your mate and your children? Are you after comfort, security, affection for yourself or do you want above all things that these loved comrades of yours shall find the road to the abundant life shall experience richly and grow fully until they find their true places in the master pattern of our world adventure? Answer that question honestly. Live up to your real decision and if with all your heart you seek the joy of these others your love will be met with a high tide of love and even out of anguish you will win your way into the meaning and the glory of existence. End of chapter eight recording by Scott Sherris, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Chapter nine of the Good Housekeeping Marriage Book. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Robin Cotter, April 2007. The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book by William F. Bigelow. Chapter nine, Sex Instruction in the Home by Frances Bruce Strain. A young woman who has won a place for herself as an artist tells the story of her first nude drawing. She was of scarcely more than kindergarten age when, one day before supper, her fancy produced a sketch of her ten-year-old brother in nature's own attire. Pleased with the result, she took it to the supper table and gave it to him, a picture I've made of you. Brother looked, glanced swiftly at mother and started to pocket the sketch. Mother said, mother fashion, let me see it. And then, after seeing, also started to slip the picture out of sight. Father held out his hand, let's have a look. Around the table, the drawing passed from hand to hand. No one praised, no one spoke, no one smiled. When one of the younger children started to say something, he was abruptly told to eat his supper. Heavy hung the weight of unexplained guilt over the five-year-old artist. After the meal, her mother took her quietly aside and said, when you draw a picture of a boy, you don't have to draw everything. It was years, the artist confessed, before I could draw comfortably a male nude. Many of the young men and women among our readers, who are concerned with love and marriage, have undoubtedly become aware of inner handicaps of their own, handicaps of thought and feeling, which they recognize as their heritage from a generation of other mindedness in regard to matters of sex. There were silences that caused wanderings, punishments that were not understood, prohibitions which built up timidities over a long zigzag trail of unrest and fear through childhood up to maturity. We hear young people say, because of their own experience, I'll see to it that my children don't go through what I went through, and they do see to it. Mothers of school-aged children of kindergarten and nursery-age children, mothers of babies, even mothers in their first pregnancies, come with their questions in order that they may start right. At what age do you begin explaining life to children? How much do you tell? How much do you explain their own growing up changes? How do you keep them from talking to others? Does telling lead to trying out things with each other? My little girl doesn't ask questions. How make her healthily curious? My little boy has a bad habit. How deal with it? These are representative questions, and they strike deep into the heart of education as we see it today, for sex education is no longer merely a matter of biological instruction. Knowledge of human reproduction is an essential in every instance, of course. It is the basic science back of the whole sexual life, but just as the physical aspects of marriage are for men and women today subordinate to the psychic and intellectual aspects, so in a sex education program, especially one in the home, biological information is far from being the element of greatest importance. More significant is the guidance and nurture of the emotional life of your children, their emotional natures as a whole, and especially those aspects of their emotional natures, which have their roots in the sexual impulse. Frustrations of childhood, failures, hurts, jealousies, misinterpretations of childish love affairs play episodes for which society has such swift punishment, clandestine sex knowledge. These are the experiences which leave their blight on the later love responses. Life as a whole with its conventions and social codes does not present an open highway to the goal of sexual maturity, but forward-looking parents can, by granting knowledge, understanding, and a sympathetic interpretation of the various phenomena of the sexual life, prevent many of the hazards of the past and provide a better assurance of happiness for their children. Because the biological aspects of sex teaching are concrete, something one can lay hold of in a tangible way, we shall consider them first. There is no set age to begin sex education. There is no set place to stop. There is a time to begin, and that time is indicated by an expressed interest on the part of your young son or daughter. A question, a comment, an observation, a wish, the time to stop is when his interest stops. Don't run ahead of him. Usually interest is stimulated by some incident in the neighborhood or at school. A tank of young guppies, a nest of baby mice in someone's cellar, a new baby home from the hospital, a word in the newspaper. With many very young children concerned about their own origin seems to arise spontaneously. Where did I come from, mother? It is a natural question, yet it has a certain mystical quality coming as it does from within and reaching back into the unknown. The greatest number of questions arise between the ages of four and six. After school entrance questions recede gradually until by the ninth, tenth, or eleventh year children have reached what is called the questionless age. This is not an indifferent age, quite the opposite, but spontaneous questions are less frequent. Possibly they are crowded out by other interests, possibly bits of desultory information satisfy for the moment, and there is always the gradual adoption of reticence which takes place as children grow older. At adolescence there is a keen revival of interest but more resistance to open family discussion than in the pre-adolescent age. Matureing children are touchy, sensitive, self-conscious, modest, seclusive. They run to cover a too intimate topic, especially in the hands of adults who are inclined to strike a wrong note, to be preachy and teachy and inquisitive and, in terms of the young adolescents themselves, too darn sexy. No matter what the age, whether preschool, elementary school, or high school, if questions are asked or interest is shown, explanations are given in accordance with the age, understanding, and general background of the child. The questions the children ask are as the sands of the sea, yet sifted and analyzed, they reveal a fairly uniform structure on which one may build. It is a four-square structure of pregnancy, birth, fertilization, and mating in the order named. They start with a concrete situation. Where did Mrs. Holmes get her baby? And the three others follow in logical sequence. Of course, the pattern varies somewhat. Well, where did Mrs. Holmes get her baby? You know, and I know, yet the thought of getting it all said to this young cherub in a brown snowsuit makes us a bit fluttery. We didn't think that it would. Oh, the baby. All babies grow inside their mothers. How unbelievably simple. No birds, or bees, or butterflies, or seeds planted under mother's hearts. Just all babies grow inside their mothers. Six words. Of course, you may touch up the story. You will not want to leave it so stark and bare. They grow in a little place, just made for them to grow in. It's in here, the places, in mothers. And you give a friendly pat against your side. Many children ask where the place is, and many think it is the stomach. Other children have said so. The place is called the uterus, U-T-E-R-U-S, and is a little sack that stretches as the baby grows. You don't have to say all this. Whether you do or not depends upon your child. Some children, the younger ones, may let you off without a word. Others must have more detail. It's all an individual matter. Anyway, you keep on answering as long as the questions come, and no longer. Sometimes enthusiasm runs away with us. We need not be surprised, once the matter of pregnancy is established, to be confronted with a swift second question. How does the baby get out of the mother? Sure enough, how does he? About five years ago I put this question to a class of high school senior girls and requested written answers. They are born. They leave the mother through an opening. They come from the mother in some way. These were the best answers. Most of the others read, I'm uncertain about it. It's very hazy in my mind. I wish you would explain exactly. I've always wondered, and so on. An explanation of the process of birth is the second foundation square of the whole structure. Pregnancy is the first. One depends upon the other, so we say. In every mother there is a passage that leads from the place where the baby is growing. When the baby is ready to live by himself as a separate little person, he is brought down the passage and out through an opening into the world. This coming into the world is called being born. Another word for the same thing is birth. Your birthday is your being born day. Many mothers like to adopt a bit of drama that can be done with the hands and arms to illustrate their verbal explanations. The pantomime makes the story simpler and helps relieve self-consciousness. Suppose the baby grows in here, you say, cupping your hands together with the wrists straight and parallel. Between my wrists is the passageway leading to the outside. When the baby is ready to be born, the passageway widens and lets the baby through. It's a good deal like swallowing, only the other way around. Your food slips down a passage into your stomach, out of sight. The baby slips down a passage into sight. There is your story of birth in a nutshell. Little boys and girls too are often troubled at the thought of birth. It seems an impossible feat, so you explain the contraction of the muscles, the size of a newborn baby, about as big as your Molly Lou doll, the position of the baby, all folded up like a little jack in the box. Most conscientiously you leave an impression of the naturalness of the birth process. Not for worlds would you create any feeling of distress or anxiety. Neither do you as the mother seek to appropriate all the laurels. The children do not owe you love and obedience because of what you went through for them, and that is the reason I love you so, leaves father a bit out in the cold. No, birth should not be presented as a sacrifice or an ordeal, but as a fulfillment, a joyous fulfillment which mother and father, together share. The two remaining foundation squares, fertilization and mating, take more courage to answer. They strike so closely into the heart of existing relationships. You are fearful too, that the knowledge will be misused, that it will lead to sex play and experimentation. You don't know how to phrase the answer anyway. There are some things you just can't put into words. Let's see if one can't, and much more simply than you imagine. Your Phillip or Philippa, who has just learned that the babies grow in their mothers, says, I wonder what makes the babies start? How do they get in their mothers in the first place? Babies are not babies from the very start, you answer. They have to grow before they are born, just as you grow now after you are born. Each baby starts at first from the union of two tiny particles of living matter called cells. One cell is in the father, one is in the mother. These two particles must come together and unite away up in the mother where the baby is to grow. When they do, then the baby begins to take form. Now for the next step, mating. No, it's not so difficult at all if you have not neglected to build up a foundation for it as you went along. For an understanding of the act of mating, the children must first be familiar with the differences in body structure, that boys have an outer organ and the girls have a long, slender inner passage. Knowledge of the first, they acquire in the come and go of daily home association, of the second when they learned how a baby was born. In a discussion of mating, it takes usually just the nearest reference to these structural differences for children to see immediately the mechanics of mating. Yes, these two parts fit closely together so that the father cells, sperm cells, are able to pass over to the mother and up to the place where the baby is to grow. To many, this will seem a very cold, stark and inadequate presentation of a deeply psychic experience. In these first explanations of human reproduction, pregnancy, birth, fertilization and mating, I believe it would be out of place to try to bring about any considerable awareness of either the sensuous or the emotional involvements in the act of procreation. That knowledge comes later. But the feeling which all our first teaching conveys is important. It is especially important in relation to the three major experiences, pregnancy, birth and mating, about which so much resistance has centered in the past. Our teaching should carry with it a natural acquiescence to nature's own plan, rather than any outward expression of our own mental philosophy toward it. Most children, given a knowledge of the basic facts of reproduction, usually grant them a ready and happy acceptance. Those parents who meet their children's questions and other expressions of interest as they arose, and also those who were not able to, seek as junior high school days approach, the assurance that their children are ready for that wider experience. I don't know how much she knows. She doesn't say anything, and she doesn't want me to. Certainly the last thing one does is to probe or question. If you have reason to feel that something must be done, you may go about it in several ways. One, you may take the initiative by introducing into family conversation some topic of current interest which will promote questions, incubator babies, the deion quintuplets, child marriages, the recent 13 year old father. Two, pets are marvelous biological laboratories, white mice, rabbits, puppies, snakes, turtles. Of course there must be mates and matings. Three, well chosen books, not only sex education books, but simple biologies and nature books as well, open up thought and discussion. Four, visits to the zoological gardens, to natural history museums and art galleries are valuable teaching experiences. If the subject is not marred by too much realism or sentiment in moralizing, older children will respond with interest to a discussion of human reproduction. Even when a child is approachable, if your own emotional balance is insecure, it is perhaps well to work out these objective and tangible activities with the children as with a fellow student. The joint interest is a way of achieving in the end greater poise for yourself. Before we leave the subject of the biological aspects of sex teaching, a word concerning preparation for maturing. In general, experience shows that explanations of the outward phenomena, which mark the onset of adolescence, menstruation and seminal emissions, should be made to both boys and girls long before they are likely to occur at 10 surely, or even earlier if questions arise. Many children become acquainted with them through older children at school and receive not too pleasant impressions. In pre-adolescence, the whole matter can be presented so that it is accepted objectively and impersonally. With both boys and girls, there is often a feeling of prideful expectancy, and some day you may expect to hear a joyful announcement. Mother, oh mother, it's come! At this point, I should like nothing better than to leave our teaching to do its good work for the children. But in the minds of parents, there is an ever-recurring anxiety, the use to which the children will put this new knowledge. Ideas are not, we know, so horrific. They tend to translate themselves into action. Will the children talk? And won't they start experimenting? The matter of talking outside is rapidly taking care of itself through the general adoption of sex education teaching by most young parents. Nobody runs around telling what everyone knows. It has become a commonplace. Occasionally, one may caution young school-age children not to say much to the other children, but if they do in their enthusiasm or in a casual moment, no great harm is done. Certainly one does not punish for it. Children who are over-weighted, either with too much sex knowledge or with fears and cautions are usually the neighborhood offenders. One father recently told me that he didn't dare give his son the usual terms for his reproductive organs because he would go straight out and shout them from the housetops. As a matter of fact, that was just what the boy was doing with the substitute terms. Realizing that a wooden gun is as good as a real one when it frightens everybody, the child used his substitute terms to shock his father and the world at large. In reality, there are no substitute terms. Everyone knows them for what they are and in addition as confessions of weak courage. Modern sex teaching is filling the great need of other days in its adoption of correct terms for the function of the body and its organs as they apply to elimination and reproduction. It is an informal sort of thing which comes along like a little companion of the more important topics. Strange that so much that is visible should go nameless while hidden things like heart and stomach and lungs should be known. A young five-year-old who adored his pretty nursery school teacher took constant note of the beauties of her person. Her eyes were so blue and her hair was so wavy and her throat was so smooth and when she bent over, you could see her lungs. In all this provision for your children's understanding, one thing we counsel against, it is the choice of another person, friend, nurse, minister, doctor, to take your place, unless that person has had special sex education training and possesses those personal qualifications which fit him for the task. A scientific background is not enough. In the near future, we shall have college-trained leaders, not only trained but college-sanctioned and selected. Until that time, there is no layperson so well qualified to teach children as their own intelligent fathers and mothers. They are able to establish a valued inner and progressive bond of confidence when their teaching has been happily and wisely carried out. After all, in this age of transition, when so much is counted good that once was counted bad and so much counted bad that was once good, it doesn't matter much what our words are so long as they convey reassurance, dependability, and a sense of the rightness of living with rather than against the best of nature's plans. Does sex instruction tend to start misconduct, suggest to children that they undress each other, play father and mother, and does it impel to two free speech and behavior? No, on the contrary, sex teaching, wisely carried on, has proved itself to be the best preventives. It has a stabilizing influence and leaves the minds of the children free to turn to other interests. My experience shows a high correlation between sex misconduct and lack of adequate sex instruction. Usually in childhood, sexual misconduct is not sexual at all in origin. It has any number of causes and any number of guises. Most frequent of the causes are seeking to know, emotional stress, lack of a good time, sex activity and others, premature sex experience. Children who do not live in a cloud of mystery, whose mental horizon has been cleared by simple explanations of observable facts, the differences in physical structure of boys and girls, for example, are not likely to be the aggressors or even onlookers in any neighborhood undressing episode. It holds nothing for them. On the other hand, a child may have a very clear idea of sex differences, may have dressed and undressed freely with sister or brother, and still be active in undressing episodes as an emotional outlet. One such boy was mother-bound. He had been brought up a goody-goody. In order to demonstrate that he was no sissy, but a thorough-going he-man of eleven, he headed a gang of girl tormentors. Sex misconduct as recreation, as something to do, has a long record. In a dull and dispirited world, girls and boys find the thrill of adventure in games, clubs, and play of all kinds, with sex in its most unsavory form as the central theme. A little nine-year-old, who has been a frequent offender, was asked what in all the world she would most like to do. Promptly, she answered, Go roller-skating. Which would you rather do? Go roller-skating or play father and mother? With shining eyes, she answered, Oh, go roller-skating. There was no doubt of this child's sincerity, no doubt of the drab, pinched quality of her meager opportunity for childish fun. Sex activity often has its origins in a home situation. In these days of apartment dwelling and the crowding together of many families, a child must be very inattentive indeed, not to have gathered through conversation and observation, much first-hand knowledge of the adult sexual relationship. Children should, of course, be aware of the love of their fathers and mothers for each other, as well as for themselves, but love-making in its final forms is baffling and disturbing to their emotional natures, and observation of it often leads to sex misconduct. The most serious type of sex activity is that caused by a premature sexual experience at the hands of some adult, often an elderly and trusted person. Even if the episode occurred but once and the offender left, never to be seen again, a psychic injury or trauma frequently, not always, results and manifests itself in obsessive sex behavior. When premature sexual experience is the motivating factor in sex misconduct, most careful guidance is necessary, lest the future love life be endangered. After relieving the child of feelings of guilt, the conduct of the older offender must be explained in terms of his senility or his mental state. He is not normal. He should be in a hospital. It is the importance that this person's abnormal conduct does not represent in the child's mind the natural sex pattern. Faith in love-making and faith in love partners must be held intact. Yet there should be no discussion of love and no real sex teaching at this critical time. Sex instruction is a post-convalescent therapy. It should not be used as an immediate or first-aid remedy for fear it may become associated with the most distressing memory. Above all, family conversations and speculations should be abandoned. For children are sensitive to talk, they do not even hear. A child who has suffered a premature sexual experience at the hands of an older person needs all that his family can give him of thoughtful consideration and reassurance. Yet he should by no means feel himself a hero. Once the story is told and accredited, it should sink into a friendly silence. Whatever form sex misconduct takes, whether peeping and undressing, playing father and mother, using vulgar words, making offensive drawings or writing unsavory verses, urinating in public, punishment in any of its many forms tends to decrease the quick chances of recovery. Humiliation, bodyguarding, I never can trust you alone. Confinement, lock you up. Emotional scenes, you've disgraced your family. Threats, I'll send you away. Strike deep into the emotional nature of the child and destroy that integrity of spirit and belief in himself, which he needs for his restoration. Persistent probings and grillings will also block progress. Correction of any type of sex misdemeanor requires insight, forbearance, a vast amount of emotional poise and an understanding of contributing causes. If lack of wholesome sex knowledge is the cause, then wise sex instruction without reference to past sins is the remedy. If fixations, jealousies, or a too strict moral code at home are responsible and they often are responsible not only for the more active forms of misconduct, but for masturbation, thumb-sucking, and other bad habits as well, then the cure rests with the willingness of parents to modify their own attitude and exactions. If the cause is a recreational lack, new activities, new scenes and companions, new interests must be supplied to break up the old associations and supply the needed zest for life. If observation of adult relationships has taken place, a careful explanation and interpretation of the act of mating is necessary to lift the relationship into its legitimate and acceptable place. The most difficult phase of sex education is the interpretation and guidance of sex activities in childhood. Our traditional codes and sanctions have measured their punishments out of all proportion to the offense. In order to meet this type of conduct constructively, one must avoid severe punishment, the awakening of a deep sense of guilt and set oneself to work out a quiet regimen of rehabilitation. Best of all, one comforts oneself with the knowledge that, except in cases of psychic trauma, studies reveal that there is little relationship between early sex play and later delinquency. Wise parents of today build a solid foundation for the sexual happiness of their children. No longer do they withhold knowledge of love, mating, and the renewal of life. They equip themselves with the thorough understanding of the emotional nature of their children and of the technique of presenting sex instruction. We of this generation are seeing changes in thought and patterns of sex teaching and ethics. Codes and sanctions are in transition. It is not that in the years to come we shall have more knowledge or more freedom purely for the sake of knowledge and freedom. It is that we and our children and our children's children, who are tomorrow's men and women, shall live with more serenity, more wisdom, and more joyousness in their love relationships because of the foundations which we have built. End of chapter nine.