Selfish Mothers

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18551, 10 November 1934, Page 10

Selfish Mothers

TN a lecture on motherhood the seliishA ness of the too affectionate mother was condemned by Dr. Jane HawI thorne, an educational expert, at the New Healt h Society Summer School in ! England. I “The woman who is praised as a loving and affectionate mother,” said Dr. Hawthorne, “is sometimes being merely self-indulgent. She likes to feel that the child is dependent on her. She enjoys a feeling of power. “You know tho mother who is constantly interfering with her child’s activities. If her child finds but a new game of his own she must show him a better way of playing it. If he falls down she must pick him up (with expressions of alarm and sympathy and tell him that the floor is a bad, wicked floor to hurt him so. “She tells the child not to go near the /ire. If he does and burns his finger, the mother kisses and hugs him, pretending to hit the lire with a poker, and calling it, a nasty wicked lire to injure her precious child. “That; mother is giving her child an entirely wrong idea of life. I knew a woman who behaved just like that to her fatherless only son. She nearly ruined him. Her insane attentions culminated iii her foolish behavior when the time came for the unfortunate boy to go to school.