SELFISH MOTHERS.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17632, 8 December 1922, Page 2

SELFISH MOTHERS.

(By Barbara Dane, in London "Daily Mail.") What type of woman makes the best mother? I heard the question discussed a few flays ago by half-a-dozen men. Most of them spoke sentimentally of the devoted Victorian mother whose house was her world, who loved her children so dearly that she sacrificed herself for them a hundred times a day. "Ah!" said one of the men, echoing the words of the doctor in the charming lace-and-lavender play "Secrets" at tho Comedy Theatre, "we don't breed such women nowadays." Perhaps not. But is it not possible that it is as well? Unselfish women aTe often adorable. One loves their ready self-sacrifice, honours their devotion. But unselfish mothers do not make the best children. It is not the permanently unselfish mother who creates the best type of child. One might go further and say that it is the selfish mother who makes the best child. Children of unselfish mothers are generally self-absorbed and selfish. They are habituated to that loving spirit which makes a mother give her children almost all they ask for; in the end they demand parental selfsacrifice as a right. I have watched the growing up of children brought up in such an atmosphere, the children of mothers with such big mofher-hearts that Dickie and Mary and Teddy and Joan lost the loveliest attributes of childhood and became selfish little people without a thought for the feelings of others, for their preferences and their hopes. And I know other households where jolly, kindly, but undirguisedly selfish mothers have, by very reason of their own selfishness, taught their children to be independent, self-reliant, careful of the wishes of others. Victorian upbringing is of little use in a Georgian age in which the struggle for success in life is so immeasurably keener than it was when horse-omni-buses crawled about London. The ideal mother of her own day, the Victorian mother is not ideal in 1922. I imagine that the perfect modern mother is she who is clever enough to assume a selfishness she does not feel, who is sweetly knowing enough to exact those little attentions and sacrifices from her children of which the "unselfish" mother never dreams, whose gentle and intelligent

selfishness is the beat promise of her little family's future. It is the mother who takes as well as gives who is possibly the best mother for the timeß in which wo live.