THE FATHER’S PROBLEM’

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXV, Issue 12133, 22 September 1936, Page 3

THE FATHER’S PROBLEM’

Many Americans who came through the trials and tribulations of the past six years or so without losing their last shirt or their sense of humour are now finding out that their troubles are not over, even though the depression may be. If these survivors of the lean years were old enough to have something to lose when the crash came, they are old enough by now to have a full-grown son on their hands, and maybe two or three of them. Very likely they’re nice lads, too, but a lot of their dads haven’t any idea what to do with them. It used to be that any citizen of this country who earned a comfortable living, maintained a mortgage and supported a six-cylinder car believed that the way to get rid of a boy when he grew out of high school and started shaving three times a week was to send him to college. That disposed of him for another four years, by which time something might turn up. Nothing much turned up for many of the boys whose fathers were working their way through college when the depression fell on top of them. Even an extra dose of expensive education can’t earn a job when there isn’t any. That soured some people’s appetite for higher education, 'but most of the colleges and universities stayed in business. For it was still a serious problem to decide what to do with a boy when high school couldn’t hoM him any longer and there was nowhere else for him to go. And the well-meaning American father, if ho could afford it. si ill sent his sou back to school to keep him out of mischief and to postpone the day when he must be found a job and persuaded to work at it. But thousands of young men keep coming out of the colleges, and millions of boys out of the high schools, and it is still a mean problem to decide what to do with them. College degrees are worth about a dime a dozen in the open market. A high school diploma is a nice thing to have, but no guarantee of a job goes with it. Thousands of lads are looking for work and millions of men need it worse than they do. So what’s >o be done with a boy? Perhaps it’s too late. Boys arc made or marred, for better or worse, much sooner than their fond parents think, or no father with a teu-year-oid son would be able to sleep at nights for worrying about him. But taking the lad of eighteen or twenty for what he is, how can his dear old dad give him a friendly pat on the back or a kick of encouragement where it will do him the most good? Nobody’s answer-will fit a million cases. But it ought to be nearly every father's business to convince his son that things are not so black and tough as they look. They are certainly no worse than they were when dad recited The Psalm of Life in the closing exercises of the Little Red School House, and then went to work in the livery stable or the crossroads store for four dollars a week. The present generation of job-seek-ing youngsters is pessimistic and cynical,' but it hasn’t much business to be. An able-bodied and healthyminded boy is a natural optimist.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE BOY “UKACE HIS NERVE, ENCOURAGE HIS OPTIMISM” (Prom “The Houghton Line”)

And perhaps it is"'no fault of his if he isn’t. For half a dozen years he has heard his elders crabbing and groaning, crying calamity and cursing fate He has seen his father scared stiff by all the devils of depression, and heard him moaning and complaining that things ain’t what they used to be. He has read little but pessimism in the papers, and been shouted at by everybody that the world is one big headache of injustice, cruelty, greed and discouragement. And if he believes it all, or thinks he does, when he comes out of his ’teens and finds no job, whose fault is it? The first duty of fatherhood these days is to knock this pessimistic nonsense out of the heads of the younger generation. And some of us may blame ourselves for letting it breed and brood there in the first place, to blight a young man’s ideals and ambitions before he knows what it's all about. There is something else due to a boy from his dad, if the father will talk and the son will listen. These youngsters are carrying another curse on their shoulders, beside 4he pessimism of the times, and it’s the old man’s business to lighten the load. Somebody, or everybody, has been playing the boy for a sucker. He has been Kidded by publicity hounds, ballyhoo barkers, motion picture promoters, and headline writers for the newspapers to believe that life is a racket. It is an excuse for making money and spending it. It is a grab bag where the greediest hands snatch the biggest prizes. Like hell it is. Life is a long job of work, and comfort and peace of mind come from sweating at it. And it can begin anywhere and still get somewhere. In ancient times, when you and I were young, a kid didn’t start fretting about his career until he had showed he was fit and able to have one. Successful men of nowadays started out by taking the jobs they didn’t like and quitting them for better ones. Any job was the first rung on the long ladder. Best cure for what ails the boys to-day is a stiff dose of common sense about their own unimportance in the scheme of things. They haven’t much to sell, and they aren’t worth what they want to be paid. They can’t earn what it takes to support them in the style to which they would like to be accustomed, and it may do them a lot of damage if they get it. The thing to do with a boy is to brace his nerve, encourage his optimism, and tell him to take any job he can get and like it. There aren’t too many of that kind of jobs in these muddled times. But there are a darned sight more of them than of the other kind. The boy will break through Ihe discouragement of a world which doesn’t want him is the lad who is looking for a job, not a career. Maybe the career will come later. And if it doesn’t, there’s still the job. Life was laindoiu t hta

Life was laid out that way a long lime ago, or else our own sadder and .riser experience meant nothing. There’s nothing to shotv that the system has changed much since you and I were young.