THE HOME

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 16212, 29 September 1924, Page 7

THE HOME

HOW LARGE FAMILIES SCORE.

Of course a bachelor or a bachelor maid can have a home, and a childless couple can have a home. But it is a home only in an accommodated and •borrowed sense of the word. It is not a home in the full meaning of the term. To make a complete home you need a complete set of human relations, as per the following list prepared by Nature and endorsed by the best traditions:—Husband and father, wife and mother, children (including babies and adolescents), sisters and brothers, grandfather, grandmother, guests, and a dash of neighbours and friends.

If you lack any of these items you 1 miss something—the home is not perfect. There be hot loves and wayward loves, and they have their place; but blessed is the man, and thrice blessecj jthe woman, that loves the people that ought to be loved. There are grandmother and grandfather, for instance. The child that has them not has missed one of the sweetest elements that make memory happy. They understand children better than parents, for they havje learned that so many things that worry parents are not much matter.

As fbr babies, it’s only a sort of imitation where there are none. The very best ingredients of our character come from dealing with babies. ATost cranks and dried up folks and pessimists and disagreeable people are victims of small families. They have been deprived of that wholesome flow of the humanities that comes from a full set of relations.