THE ANGEL CHILD

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 82, 7 April 1933, Page 11

THE ANGEL CHILD

UNORTHODOX ADVICE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, March 2. "If your child is a little angel, beware. If ever an angel child is brought to me the first thing I do is to examine it physically, and then I try to discover if its angelic behaviour is really guile, or if it is due to weak-mindedness." This is what Dr. Elizabeth Sloan Chesser told tho mothers at a Home and School Council of Great Britain mooting. But this was only one of several unorthodox pieces of advice to parents. Others wore: Don't scold children who destroy their toys—buy cheap ones on which they enn experiment. Don't try to make children polite. If they behave like little lambs they will merely become hypocrites. Let children argue. It is not rudeness, but merely satisfying curiosity. Children, Dr. Chesser added, should always bo given an intelligent reason for doing things they were made to do. Tho "News-Chronicle" agrees that the angel child is either an idiot or a little devil in disguise. The writer, however, goes on to say; I 'lf many modern parents do try to bring their children up always to say 'Yes, mother,1 and 'No, mother,' like tyttle lambs; thoy appear in our experience very rarely to succeed in the nttempt. There was a time—but surely rather a long time ago now—when the over-polite child existed; and doubtless.its over-politeness was mere hypocrisy. But it is not the charge which we should have been disposed to bring against modern children. Their behaviour is not infrequently such that even a little hypocrisy might be pardoned as the lesser of two evils."