In terms of the family and industrial and commercial enterprise, it is evident that the family has an important relation to the industrial activities of society, and industry an important bearing upon the family. Primitively, all industry had its center in the family. Modern industry is but an enormous expansion of primitive housekeeping: the preparation of food, clothing, and shelter by the primitive family group for its own existence is the germ out of which all modern industry has developed. The very word economics means the science or the art of the household.
In primitive communities and in newly settled districts, the family often carries out all essential industrial activities. It produces all the raw material, manufactures the finished products, and then consumes them. But with the growth of complex societies, there has been a great industrial division of labor, and the family has delegated industrial activity after activity to some other institution until at the present time the modern family performs scarcely any industrial activities at all, save for the preparation of food for immediate consumption. Even this, however, has been lessened by restaurants and the proliferation of ready-to-eat meals.
All that need be said at present about the delegation of the industrial and commercial activities of the family to other industrial institutions is that the movement is not one which need cause anxiety so long as it does not interfere with the essential function of the family, namely, the birth and rearing of children. Even though children can no longer learn the rudiments of industry in their home, it is still possible through manual and industrial training in our public schools to teach children such things. And the removal of industries from the home, even such essential industries as the preparation of food, is to be regarded as a boon if it gives more time to the parents for the proper care and raising of their children.
But the removal of industries and commercial interests from the family group has not always had the beneficent effect of simply giving more time to the parents for the proper care of their children. On the contrary, the removal of these industries has often been followed by the removal of the parents themselves from the home and consequently, the practical disintegration of the family. This has been particularly the case when both parents have gone into factories and their time is largely consumed by the increasing desire for money. Under such circumstances, children have often been neglected, allowed to grow up on the streets, and permitted to unintentionally develop into unsocialized individuals.
The labor of relatively young children has sprung up in large part due to the same general causes. While child labor may have the merit of giving the child some industrial training, it has been shown to hinder the child’s physical and mental development, ultimately failing to prepare the child for citizenship in any higher sense, and so must be regarded generally, while not in all cases, as an evil.
Industrial and commercial considerations must be subordinate to domestic considerations: the considerations of the welfare of parents and their children in the family group. One trouble with modern society is that industry and commerce have become a dominating special interest that frequently does not recognize its socially necessary subordination to the higher interests of society. There can be no sane and stable family life until we are willing to subordinate the requirements of industry and commerce, or said another way until we subordinate the pursuit of the almighty dollar to the requirements of the family for the proper rearing of children.
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