MOTHERS WHO FAIL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 290, 8 December 1931, Page 11

MOTHERS WHO FAIL.

Hβ Victorian mother did her duty by her daughters. She dressed them, chaperoned them, and married, them off to the best of her ability and their good looks. It is true her methods lacked finesse, hut Caroline, Emma, and Maud were truly fond of dear mamma, states Lady Ingram. Women congratulate themselves on being far more enlightened nowadays, but is the modem mother, from her daughter's point of view, always an improvement on the Victorian brand? I doubt it! I know, for instance, a woman who has a son. and a daughter. The other day she showed me with pride her boy's prize poem, which had been published in the school magazine. "You are lucky to have two such talented children," I said, rather pointedly. She stared at me in surprise. She had not even heard that 3ier daughter had won a scholarship at the Royal College of Music. "How secretive of Joan," she said, complainingly, "she knows quite well I do not approve of her strumming. It always upsets Peter when he is trying to-write!" Could anything be more grossly , unfair? Yet this mother is typical of a largo class of women who lavish affection on their sons, take no interest in their daughters, a.nd then declare that boys are so much easier to manage than girls! A young friend of mine has just got «»gaged to be married. She is 18, her fiance is 42. They seem to have little in common. "Are you euro Charles is really the right man?" I asked. "He is, if I don't want to die an old maid," she replied, bitterly. "Mother frightens away any boy who comes to the house. You see they come only to eee me. Charles has sense enough to make "P to mother, too!" Modern mothers or the Ever-Young Brigade are always spoiling their daughters' chances by their unwillingness to take a back seat. They °hng to a lingering conviction that Mother knows best what is good for a ?"■!• This is a moot point, for the girls or to-day have a set of completely changed values. Security and comfort do not attract them in the' least. Tliey believe that life can only bo through new sensations; they want to team only by their own experience. Present-day mothers fail to cope with their daughters because they do not face these facts. Behind the modem girl's "mow of self-sufficiency there is a waving for love and sympathy. However modern she may be, she keeps tucked away somewhere the image of aj i ideal mother; not a mother who wants to bo "all girls together," and manages to grab the best of everything that is going; nor a mother who stands coldly aloof from everything she does not take an interest in herself. The mother who is always there with a helplnS hand, who is hunion and makes allowances, who knows and understands without fussing and asking questions — the mother, in fact, with true love and sympathy—has no failures with her daughters.