IT ISN’T THE FAMILY’S FAULT.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19239, 1 August 1924, Page 10

IT ISN’T THE FAMILY’S FAULT.

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. I hey 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 hotter 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-day. Woufd 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 when a sen or daughter turns away from family traditions and sets up new standards, new ideals If you want them to cling to obsolete ideas to sav with you : "It was good enough for my father, therefore it's good enough for me," don't, I beseech you, give them an expensive education, which is going to make dreadful rents in the old idoak. Don t give them a standard of refinement which you are going to dub "snobbish when they try to live up to it. I don't know who suffers most in a home where the parents are illiterate and the children have had the advantage of a firstclass education. It is nothing less than torture to live in the close intimacy of home life with those whose, every word and action catches us on the raw. And in the case of those parents who are unable or unwilling to conform to new standards, new ideals of conduct, there must be heartbreaking unhappiness. But the children can'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 back, and the parents want to retain Dieir love and esteem, there is nothing for it but for them to trv to keep ster> 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. Thoso 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."—Joan North, in Home Cba.t.