CRUELTY TO CHILDREN

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 662, 16 January 1933, Page 9

CRUELTY TO CHILDREN

Unreasonable Clothes Cause Hardship. LACK OF THOUGHT EVIDENT. We hear a good deal abqut cruelty to animals, and not without need, but why does not someone start a society to prevent loving mothers being cruel to small children? On winter days, when fur coats were much in evidence, it was often the case that through the Square went the. loving mother, snuggled up to the ears in her luxurious garment, while by the hand she dragged a small girl with light little skirts up to the thigh and tiny blue legs, bare to the winds of the world. And no one ever said cruelty, perhaps because the old Roman idea persists in our family life, that a parent has the right of life or death over his or her offspring. Now the heat of summer is with us, and it is the little boys that are being made the object of their mothers’ vanity. One such was being tugged along the other day encased in long white trousers down to his shoe tops. It made the onlooker wonder by what method of reasoning a presumably loving mother could have arrived at the conclusion that it was better for her infant to swefter in bags than to run with free little limbs in shorts and sandals. If it is good for -the grown-up male to run about in shorts and shoes when out for health walks, why should a small boy be made an object of pity on the public streets by being put into long trousers? Besides, the child’s feelings should be respected. Childhood Influence. Once a member of the Society of Friends, who was one of those who adorn the earth both in mind, body and spirit, was asked why she did not wear the full dress of their faith. She explained that she came from a long line of Quakers, to whom their beliefs were more than life, and in her own case all her money was devoted to the cause; but in her own childhood she had worn the full dress of Quaker grey as became a child of that congregation, and she had suffered so much from being an outstanding figure of fun to her small contemporaries that ever alter she had modified the dress into a compromise between what Quakers wore in the early days and what we wear to-day. This once led her into a strange position amidst her own people, for she went as a delegate from the gathering in London to the great Pennsylvania Aleeting House in America, and was nonplussed to find that in all that great gathering she alone was not in pure Quaker dress. Feeling disconcerted, she sat at the back till the wife of the leader of the contention came to her and asked why she remained so far back. She explained that. she felt embarrassed by her failure to follow custom, whereupon the wife of the leader said, ** Then will I sit 'with thee.” It was told as an example of good breeding, but it also showed the mark that had been left on a childish mind, which had become a distinguished mind, by oddity in dressing m childhood.