FALLACY OF OLD IDEAS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18888, 22 December 1924, Page 15

FALLACY OF OLD IDEAS.

There are a great many devoted unselfish parents who quite unwittingly cause their children untold misery by their dogged resistance to anything that savours of the new and strange. They hang on desperately to the old ideas, the old ways —they want, at .all costs, to keep things as they were in their young days. And the irony of it is that "these same parents have pinched and saved to give their children a better education than they themselves had, which means that unless the education has been sadly wasted, they are bound to scrap old ideas, old methods, They are bound to have a wider outlook,, a better grasp of life and its needs to-dav.

Would you buy a book for a child and then forbid it to open it? Yet'that is exactly the position of the parent who resents it whe:u a sou or daughter turns away from family traditions and sets up new standards, new ideals. If you want them to cling to obsolete ideas, to say with you: "It was good enough for my father, therefore, it's good enough for me," don't give them an expensive education, which is going to make dreadful rents in the old ideals. Don't give them a standard of refinement which you are gorng to dub "snobbish" when they try to live up to it. And in the case of those parents who are unable or unwilling to conform to new standard, new of, conduct, there must be (heartbreaking unhappiness. But the children giin't go back! The parents have, with their own hands, closed the door on the past and opened the door to the future.

Then, if the children can't go hack, and the parents want to retain their love and esteem, there is nothing for it but for them to try to keep step with the younger ones, to' try to see with their eyes, hear with their ears.

The parents who score best are those with a sense of humour. Those who can get a smile out of awkward situations can sit outside themselves, as it were, and view the land dispassionately. Such parents will always be on excellent terms with their children. They won't be relegated to the background as " old stagers."