MORTGAGING CHILDREN'S LIVES.

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXI, Issue 3162, 11 May 1931, Page 7

MORTGAGING CHILDREN'S LIVES.

By Gwendoline Pitkin.

Some parents only lend their children their lives; they mortgage their happiness from the start; they say, in effect—" We've given you everything that you can wish for; we've lavished large sums of money on your education; we've sacrificed for you, and now it is your turn to repay us, not in money, but by complete abnegation.' Youth should start life unfettered; it should be allowed to spread its wings and feel the stinging winds of the world on its face; it should joy in the freedom and thrill with the knowledge of its self-reliance. It should not be pinioned by parental authority that would destroy happiness and ambition alike.

"Good" parents are always the most difficult. To them, their children represent the entire world, so that their love, with its continual sacrifice, is m reality the most selfish thing in the world! That may sound contradictory, but it is nevertheless true. For those so-called sacrifices are nothing more than a pandering to their own vanity and in no way made in the right spirit. There are so many children with mortgaged lives who find, when they reach maturity, that they cannot assert themselves or realise even the most trivial desire. Their future is chosen for them "wisely and with their ii.terest at heart." They cannot rebel without being reminded of all that has been done for them, and their existence becomes a nightmare of trying to keep their actions within the limit of parental approval. If they have the temerity to venture in search of innocent pleasures, they are burdened by the memory of the chilly disapproval which marked their departure. I know of two girls who, when they started life, wanted to go in for the scholastic profession. That meant years of study and stiff college fees. Finally, their father agreed to give them the assistance they required provided they gave him their promise not to marry for many years after achieving their ambition and thus wasting his perfectly good money! They fell in with his wishes; they reached the top of their profession. To-day they are both spinsters—not .from choice, but because of that duty they owed to their father!

So much for parental sacrifice! If that father wasn't prepared to invest his money in the future without placing a mortgage on their lives, he should have refused their request in the first place. The interest he demanded was their freedom —their happiness.

And if parents are willing to make sacrifices, they should be willing to "give" those sacrifices as one gives a gift to a very dear friend—without thought of any return being made and content so long as that same gift gives pleasure. Children are always accused of be lug ungrateful. If they want to marry young or against their parents' wishes, tbey are always reminded of yesterday —reminded of the years of care during their childhood; of material comforts they have enjoyed. If they want to plough a lone furrow, it is the same — always that suggestion of rank ingratitude and insensibility to all the sacrifices that have been made on their behalf.

There is a hackneyed phrase beloved of many parents that illustrates their narrow-mindedness in this connection: "It,is always the parents who do the least who get the most consideration." But what is meant by that word, least? From the children's point of view it may mean the utmost. Those parents may have given sympathy and understanding in the place of material offerings. They may have realised, with a sweet, wisdom, that sooner or later their children must run ahead of them in the race of life; yet they smile instead of assuming an injured and aggrieved air. Their gifts may be no more than the reflection of a fertile imagination which brings them down to a level where their sons and daughters may reach them and, reaching, love them for their human understanding of the frailty of youth. Love cannot be commanded, and no modern child is tremendously impressed by the old-fashioned, melodramatic vaporings about the sacredness of all parenthood.

. Looking at my three-year-old son, T don't think I should mind emulating those parents who do the "least." I know only that I shall ask nothing more than to be his friend. I want him to love me as a woman in whom he can confide his 'troubles, his failings—not as a mother of whom he is coldly afraid. "When he reaches manhood I know that I shall have to stand aside while life catches him in a net of exquisite joy and sadness alike. I know, too, that I would not mortgage his life for a second. I want him to be free, unfettered —I want to help without dreaming of or expecting gratitude. Yet in my heart will be a little hope—the hope that when I reach the sunset years and he looks back along the road he will remember me and, remembering, will say that not once did I fail him. . . . And, if he can say that, I shall feel that my life will not have been In vain; and the sacrifices I may have to make will be sacred and guarded forever from his knowledge. . . . After all, he did not ask to be born.