The American Child | Page 5

what she
ought to have, and, moreover, they are not what she wants.
"I wish I had a middy blouse, and some bloomers, and an aviation cap,
and a sweater, and a Peter Thompson coat!" I heard her say recently to
her mother: "the other children have them."
"Children are never satisfied!" her mother exclaimed to me later, when
we were alone. "I spend so much time and money seeing that she has
nice 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,