SOPHISTICATED CHILDREN

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 9, 2 March 1925, Page 60

SOPHISTICATED CHILDREN

r T I HE world is so full of concern about the girl of to-day, her morals and her manners, that it has more or less overlooked the modern child who is to be the modern girl of to-morrow. And I think that Miss To-morrow will prove even more disturbing than Miss To-day. Children, particularly little girls, are alarmingly sophisticated in these days. Artificial children ape artificial elders, and, to a large extent, reproduce in the nursery the grownup atmosphere of boredom and ennui. The game of "Let's Pretend" is out of date, superseded by wonderful, though imagination-destroy-ing, toys. Yet a child's imagination is a more precious possession, and can give it greater pleasure than all the expensive toys that were ever made. There is more real joy in makebelieve than in the elaborate model toys; there is more real motherliness learned by the little girl who patiently, and with needle-pricked fingers, fashions her dolls clothes from scraps, than the pampered child who, with boredom, lifts beautiful and true-to-life dolly's clothes from a miniature baby's basket. I was in

Monte Carlo, and it was almost pitiable to see the wee girls who, beautifully dressed, were quite content to mince up and down the promenade with their mothers or their nurses, when the sunshine, and the warmth and the blue sky should have set them agitating for a bucket and a spade and the beach that isn't there. It was even more sad to see them look complacently on while so-called sportsmen shot pigeons released from a collapsible trap. The heart of the real child, the child that we should love, would cry aloud at such cruel and wanton destruction of a pretty bird. And what is true of Fortune's favourite on the Riviera manifests itself just as surely in her lessfavoured sister at home. Many mid-dle-class parents deny themselves that they may give their children a better time than perhaps they themselves had. But they need more wisdom and restraint in the giving. These sophisticated children of to-day are the adults of to-morrow, and what will they not demand of life then, if they have been able to get so much out of it, and so easily, now ? —A.M.