DAY BY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 88, Issue 13511, 18 June 1917, Page 4

DAY BY DAY.

A student of sociology recently said io

a public address that The Home the most essential thing •f in the training of a the Child, child was a normal home. This sort of home ought to be common. Yet investigations showed that a large number of homes must be considered abnormal. Such are poverty-stricken, over-crowd-ed homes, and such are the servantfilled homrih of the wealthy. It is the large well to-do "middle-class" who should and who do supply most of the so-called normal homes. It has been found that many homes which might be normal are not so, and that the parents usually are to blame. Parents are quarrelsome, a favoured child is allowed to bully the household, the mother i? indifferent to the home, the father is ugly, discipline is too lax, the children are ignored, parents reverse each other's decisions—these are some of the defects which are singled out because they betray no gross weakness in the parents, and could be eliminated by a little patience and thoughtful effort. The environment of a child in its early years undoubtedly has a good deal to do with forming its character. It seems as if parents ought to heed this fact, and to offer such self-denial and self-con-trol as may be necessary to make the home a place where the child can l>e sure of finding peace and just treatment. There are many homes that, for familiar reasons, are entirely without the scope of these considerations. But the observations noted apply with reasonable pertinence to the numerous American homes in which the parents ai'e well-behaved and I'elf-respectjng, but who are too selfish or too thoughtless to give due nttention to the very imnortant matter of providing a tranquil and helpful homes for the little ones.