PRECOCIOUS YOUNGSTERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 307, 27 December 1924, Page 14

PRECOCIOUS YOUNGSTERS.

WITATS WKOXG WITH THE HOME 7 (From Our Own Correspondent/! SAN FRANCISCO, December 3. cx>me idea t.f the average American precocious child may be gathered from a striking method pursued in Chicago, showing that behind the somewhat vacuous features of the average yowth of sixteen lies a lirain packed with potential dynamite and jammed with caustic Criticism Of its owner's parents, if only the truth were known. The veil of mystery which shrouds the thoughts of masculine youth, namely bora in the dangerous and different apes between 14 and IS, were torn aside when 27."> youngsters chewed their pencils a while and then wrote, freely and frankly, their ideas on "what's wron£ with the home?" They wrote in answer to a questionnaire by *Rev. Clinton D. Cox, of the Drexel I'ark I'resbyterian Church, Chicago, who recently paged their mothers and fathers with the same searching query. The minister read the boys' -answers at his church and they provided some enlightenment on the subject, as viewed by the youngsters. "A boy wants the kind of mother who can keep a secret, not one who will tell the. neighbours everything he tells her," was the first bomb hurled by an indignant youth. Fathers had previously said the homo was a "storm centre." Another angle on this came in a boy's declaration that "•home had become a. courtroom, the dinner table a trial scene. Every member of the family tries the job of raising the boy." "Deliver mc from the mother who is constantly holding up another boy as an ideal!" -was one fervid prayer. "The girl's word is always taken for anything: and the boy's word ia always doubted in everything," wrote another youngster. "I believe," another youth wrote coldly, "that parents should be willing to ackknowledge it when they are wrong. They fail to do so." Stem f-athers and fond mothers, sitting in judgment on the "kids" usually in America do not stop to consider what "sonny" thinks about as ihe hears their words of wisdom, but sonny thinks just the same. Consider, for example, the cynical bitterness of the boy who wrote, apparently with inside information: "People who themselves led the wildest life before marriage make the strictest parents, I find."