She will work for her children and will make them wish to work with her, teaching them the true value of work and sacrifice.  She will play with them, for their pleasure and development, and she will also play, in her own way, for her own rejuvenation and her soul’s good.  She will study each member of her family as an individual problem, and, abandoning forever the idea of pressing any child’s soul into the mold that she might choose, will rather strive to aid its growth toward its natural ideal.  She will strive to hold and to be worthy of her children’s confidence, that they may turn to her in those times that try their souls.  But she will always respect the personal liberty of either child or husband to live his own life.

She will interest herself in the interests of husband and children, that she may remain a vital factor in their lives; and she will make the home so delightful as to reduce to a minimum the scattering influences that tend to destroy home life.  She will weave intangible but indestructible ties of affection, holding all together and to herself.  She will keep her interest in the outside world, so that she may better prepare her children to live in it and may resist the narrowing influence of her enforced temporary withdrawal.  She will take some part in civic work and social uplift, and, when her years of child rearing are ended, in the leisure of middle age she will return to the less circumscribed life of her youth, bending her matured energies to the world’s work.

The father of this ideal family will be first of all a man happy in his work.  The plodding, weary slave to distasteful labor can be ideal neither as husband nor as father.  Overworked fathers are quite as impossible in our scheme as overburdened mothers.  In ideal conditions the father will have time, strength, and willingness to be more of a factor in the home life than he sometimes is at the present time.  More than that, his early education will have included definite preparation for homemaking, so that his cooeperation will be intelligent and therefore helpful.  He will know more than he does now about the cost of living and he will assist in making a preliminary division of the year’s income upon an intelligent basis.  He will recognize the necessity for equipment for the homemaking business and will contribute his share of thought and labor to improving the home plant.

He will be a companion as well as adviser to his boys and girls and will retain their respect and love by his sympathetic understanding and his remembrance of the boy’s point of view.  In all his dealings with his children he will be careful that interference with his comfort and convenience or the wounding of his pride by their shortcomings does not obscure his sense of justice.  He will be a student of child nature and will keep in view the ultimate good and usefulness of his child.  He will regard his fatherhood as his greatest service to the state.