THE "ANGEL" CHILD

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21470, 19 April 1933, Page 13

THE "ANGEL" CHILD

WARNING TO PARENTS I SOME UNORTHODOX ADVICE [rilOM OUR ow.v correspondent] LONDON, March ]4 "If your cliikl 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 weakmindedness." This is what Dr. Elizabeth Sloan Chesser told the mothers at a meeting of the Home and School Council of Great Britain. But this was only one of several un--orthodox pieces of advice to parents. Others were:—Do not scold children who destroy their toys—buy cheap ones on which they can experiment. Do not 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 be given an intelligent reason for doing things they were made to do. A London newspaper agrees that the angel child is either an idiot or a little devil in disguise. The writer, however, goes on to say:—"if many modern parents do try to bring their children up always to say, 'Yes, mother,' and No, mother,' like little lambs, they appear in our experience very rarely to succeed in the attempt. 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 bo pardoned as the lesser of two evils."