PRIMROSE PATHS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19964, 4 December 1926, Page 9

PRIMROSE PATHS.

MODERN PARENTHOOD. Wordsworth did fathers no good when he proclaimed that the child was father to the man, and the better philosopher ot the two: and that the longer we live, on the whole, the worse we become (writes Violet Bonham Carter in ,Good Housekeeping). Children are quick to profit by the ideas which this malicious bard and his school put into their heads. They are no longer impressed with the favour which their parents were supposed to have done in bringing them into the world. It was not unnatural that they should 1 so impressed when the simplest notions of heaven prevailed. Getting born into this world was then regarded by everyone as a precondition of attaining bliss in the next, and was therefore thought a good thing on balance, however disagreeable at the moment. Such arguments are wasted on the agnostic in the modern cot, who, seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, often decides that its discomforts exceed its blessings, and is little inclined to be beholden to the authors of his being. One consequence of this is that parents, unable to cut any figure in their old role of wise and grave persons, have frankly resigned this task to their children, and given themselves over an exaggerated juvenility. A sense of their own worthlessness, has driven them forth from their own firesides: some few of them into colleges for adult education, the mere existence of which would have been thought an outrage by their ancestors; others (more numerous those last) into sexagenarian dancing classes, in which they soon loata to outdo the nerveless and sophisticated caperings of their offsprings. A sort of second adolescence, an Indian spring, descends on this typo of parent. As he walks (I ,;so the masculine for brevity only) he rises on the ball of the foot. Knowing ho is a mere butterfly and can never be anything better, he jazzes «lon~ the primrose slope before the indulgent eyes of his brood to the skirl of ukeleles and the popp:ng of champagne corks, secure in the knowledge that if the temple of learning is closed to him, the Palais do Dance is, and remains, open.