Education (Volume 6) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ABOUT THE MINDS OF LITTLE CHILDREN BY REV. M. A. POWER, S. J. The subject of children is a dangerous one to touch. Various sorts and conditions of men and women have already settled on the territory and put up notices threatening the trespasser with prosecution. Free trade with the place they have made their own is penal. Over the departments into which the child is divided are vigilant and sometimes pugnacious officers, who have to be reckoned with before a foreigner can land himself or his goods. Nurses are in the forefront. To conciliate them by diplomacy, or beat them in open fight, is a task that none but the most daring attempt. They know all about the health of a child, and your nostrums are all rubbish. Did not they see scores of children brought up in the old nursery with no more air than that window let in ? And fine children they were, too; a long way handsomer than the red-haired young man, " Fresh from the surgery-schools of France," who talks of lungs and air and cubic feet, "as if the little dears had them, and Hyginnisli appliances. ' That ever such things should be.'" Then there are mothers, and they resent criticism more politely but more strongly. Somebody ventures in their presence to express an opinion that children, especially of the higher classes, do not seem, as far as outward appearances go, to love their parents as they used to do. To allay the indignation he has roused, the speaker proceeds to offer some excuse for the children, by dwelling on the alleged decrease of the interest of mothers in babies. He is only making matters worse, and for this second attack he is bound to apologize. He now lays the blame on the social arrangements which necessitate rearing by proxy. Servants and nurses must stand to a great extent in loco parentis, ...