The American Child | Page 5

clothes; and you hear what she thinks of them!"
"But, for ordinary wear, for play, wouldn't the things she wants be more comfortable?" I ventured. "You dress her so beautifully!" I added.
"Well," said my acquaintance in a gratified tone, "I am glad you think so. I had no very pretty clothes when I was a child; and I always longed for them. My mother didn't believe in finery for children; and she dressed us very plainly indeed. I want my little girl to look as I used to wish I might look!"
"But she doesn't care how she looks--" I began.
"I know," the child's mother sighed. "I can see how her little girls will be dressed!"
Can we not all see just that? And doubtless the little girls of this beruffled, befurbelowed tomboy--dressed in middy blouses, and bloomers, and aviation caps, and sweaters, and Peter Thompson coats, or their future equivalents--will wish they had garments of a totally different kind; and she will be exclaiming, "Children are never satisfied!"
If this principle on the part of mothers in America in providing for their children were confined to such superficialities as their clothing, no appreciable harm--or good--would come of it. But such is not the case; it extends to the uttermost parts of the child's home life.
Only the other day I happened to call upon a friend of mine during the hour set aside for her little girl's piano lesson. The child was tearfully and rebelliously playing a "piece." Her teacher, a musician of unusual ability, guided her stumbling fingers with conscientious patience and care. A child of the least musical talent would surely have responded in some measure to such excellent instruction. My friend's little girl did not. When the lesson was finished, she slipped from the piano stool with a sigh of intense relief.
She started to run out of doors; but her mother detained her. "You may go to your room for an hour," she said, gently but gravely, "and stay there all alone. That will help you to remember to try harder tomorrow to have a good music lesson." And the child, more tearful, more rebellious than before, crept away to her room.
"When I was her age I didn't like the work involved in taking music lessons any better than she does," my friend said. "So my mother didn't insist upon my taking them. I have regretted it all my life. I love music; I always loved it--I loved it even when I hated practising and music lessons. I wish my mother had made me keep at it, no matter how much I objected! Well, I shall do it with my daughter; she'll thank me for it some day."
I am not so sure that her daughter will. Her music-teacher agrees with me. "The child has no talent whatever," she told me. "It is a waste of time for her to take piano lessons. Her mother now--she has a real gift for it! I often wish she would take the lessons!"
American mothers are no more prone to give their children what they themselves did not have than are American fathers. The man who is most eager that his son should have a college education is not the man who has two or three academic degrees, but the man who never went to college at all. The father whose boys are allowed to be irregular in their church attendance is the father who, as a boy, was compelled to go to church, rain or shine, twice on every Sunday.
In the more intimate life of the family the same principle rules. The parents try to give to the children ideals that were not given to them; they attempt to inculcate in the children habits that were not inculcated in themselves.
I know a family in which are three small girls, between whom there is very little difference in age. These children all enjoy coming to take tea with me. For convenience, I should naturally invite them all on the same afternoon.
Both their father and mother, however, have requested me not to do this. "Do ask them one at a time on different days," they said.
"Of course I will," I assented. "But--why?" I could not forbear questioning.
"When I was a child," the mother of the three little girls explained, "I was never allowed to accept an invitation unless my younger sister was invited, too. I was fond of my sister; but I used to long to go somewhere sometime by myself! My husband had the same experience--his brother always had to be invited when he was, or he couldn't go. Our children shall not be so circumscribed!"
There is not much danger for them, certainly, in that direction. Yet I rather think they would enjoy doing more things together. One day, not a great while ago, I chanced