YOUTH OF NEW ZEALAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 116, 19 May 1933, Page 6

YOUTH OF NEW ZEALAND.

IS IT BEING SPOILT? (To the Editor.) In a recent address in Auckland, the Governor-General stressed the point that the peoples of the world would shortly be called upon to consider how to employ their leisure time, as there would bo considerably more leisure for everyone to employ in some cana. city in the near future. We have now the school holidays, and, looking round one, even from one's front and back door, one comes to the conclusion that the spare time of New Zealand youth is idly, wastefully and even criminally employed. Big boys," big girls— what a lot of useful, happy little duties thev could be doing for home and mother if the parents were not so stupidly, wickedly slack and 'indifferent. I asked a big girl sitting on my back fence, dressed quite expensively in gym. tunic and blouse, did she never do and little jobs to help her mother; but she gave a loud yell, swung a long black-stockinged leg over the fence, executed a. series of jumps across two or three yards to jpin some other equally idle big girls. Boys who could be cultivating a little garden plot hang round loose-mouthed and yodelling in the°streets, Children from expensive-looking homes sit on the sidewalk and look for mischief. Not the fault of the children, but the fault of. the parents who wait on them hand and foot" dress them unsuitably and turn them into those inefficient, bored young assistants,, who gpssip in groups in department stores and who exchange a badly-managed childhood for badly-managed young man and womanhood. They have never been trained to work, and when the time of parental spoiling is over they Jace the world unequipped for theii labours. If I were a mother? Well, lam a ' mother, and out of my own experience I would take that girl off the fence, put a little apron oil her, teach her to make a batch of scones, wash up the dishes, shine the floor, and to bring mother a nice cup of tea on a tray when she was tired. I would bring the boy off the street, give him a plot of garden to cultivate and be responsible for, allow him an hour to two's play in the day, and impress him with the fact that the family wagon is pulled along by all the members, and even the youngest member of the team can help, according to his weight and strength; but I am not the mother of all these mis-managed little people, and I can only feel sorry and come inside and shut my door. A.C.A.