Responsible Parenting by Mom

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Commander of the first African-American Unit  to fight for the Union in the Civil War, radical visionary and supporter of women’s suffrage, said in the essay titled:  Ought women to Learn the Alphabet? 

“There are duties devolving on every human being—duties not small nor few, but vast and varied,–which spring from home and private life and all their sweet relations. 

The support or care of the humblest household is a function worthy of men, women and angels…From these duties none must shrink, neither man nor woman; the loftiest genius cannot ignore them; the sublimest charity must begin with them. 

They are their own exceeding great reward; their self-sacrifice is infinite joy; and the selfishness which discards them is repaid by loneliness and a desolate old age. 

Yet these, though the most tender and intimate portion of human life, do not form its whole.  It is given to noble souls to crave other interests also, added spheres, not necessarily alien from these:  larger knowledge, larger action also; duties, responsibilities, anxieties, dangers, all the aliment that history has given to its heroes.  Not home less, but humanity more…”

There’s an argument for what responsible parenting is all about. 

Love,

Mom