INTRODUCTION

IN the poem "Father and Son" by Edgar Guest the first stanza reads:

"Be more than his dad,
Be a chum to the lad;
Be a part of his life
Every hour of the day;
Find time to talk with him,
Take time to walk with him,
Share in his studies

And share in his play;

Take him to places,

To ball games and races;

Teach him the things

That you want him to know;

Don't live apart from him,

Don't keep your heart from him,
Be his best comrade,

He's needing you so."

Children need more than anything else the kind of companionship with their parents that Edgar Guest pleads for here. Such a relation of father and son, of mother and daughter, accentuates the blood tie and makes the home something more than a place where the children eat and sleep and have clothing and shelter provided. It requires, however, for fullest realization more than parental instinct on the part of the father and mother. Parents need to know what to talk to their children about, where to take them for walks, how to help them so as not to hinder them in their studies, what plays and games are suitable to the various ages, and how much truth may be comprehended at a given age. The ideal companionship is based upon an intelligent understanding

of child nature, its possibilities and needs, and the means for its complete development.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EARLY TRAINING

Harold Copping has painted a very beautiful picture entitled "The Hope of the World." The central figure is the Master of Galilee and around him looking up into his face are children representing every race, white, brown, red, yellow and black. The message of the picture is clear; the hope of the world lies in training the children of the world according to the principles of Christianity. There is no other cure for the profiteering, the strife between capital and labor, the extravagant expenditure of money, the narrow and selfish nationalism, the disregard of human life which in some form have darkened our own and every other period of history. Those who would base their hope upon reforming the men and women of the present generation are doomed to disappointment. The habits of thinking, feeling and acting have been so firmly established that they bind as chains the majority of our citizens. Any one who has attempted to reform his own habits of eating including a choice of diet knows that only with extreme difficulty has he made headway. There are scores of people who, convinced that a certain article of food was injurious, have found it well-nigh impossible to break the habit of eating it. Statistics compiled for recent extensive revivals show that the great majority of conversions occur in adolescence and early manhood and that the numbers dwindle surprisingly as middle life and old age appear. The science of neurology gives us the reason for these facts; there is a physiological basis for every habit. In the connections in the nervous system of the human body invisible except under the strongest microscope, are laid what we have termed habits. As the nerve current passes year after year over the same path it traverses that path more readily each

time and there is more and more difficulty in switching it to any other path, as each time that a sled takes the same path down the icy hill it is less likely to make a different path. Moreover, the younger the child the more plastic the nervous system, the more impressionable the life, we say using common terminology, and the older the child the less plastic the nervous system, the less easily impressed the individual. Little children are openminded, curious, investigative, lacking in prejudice and superstition except as their elders engender it. They afford the opportunity par excellence of making a new world where brotherly love and the golden rule may function.

THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE HOME

Such a new world cannot come, however, without the active coöperation of parents and teachers in forming child nature. The original nature of the child is not all good. There are some tendencies in our children which need to be eliminated like greed, insane rage and cruelty, inheritances from those days "when the human animal contended with the brute forces of land, water, wind, rain, plants, animals and other wild men." There are others that need to be modified such as the fighting instinct, and there is not one tendency, however good, which does not need some care for its perpetuation. Parents as well as teachers should know something about the original equipment of the child and what to do with it. If they did know, we should not have the tragedies of crime, suicide and wretchedness which strew the human highway with wreckage. The opportunities of the home and the parents are peculiarly significant for many reasons. Teachers come and teachers go in the school career of the child, and so do playmates, but the home exercises a continuous influence from the cradle to manhood. There is, moreover, a closeness in the home relationships which is impossible to approximate outside.

The family forms a social unit where each member has his specific function to perform for the whole and his own rights in the group; and the size of the unit makes it possible for the little child to find his place, while a larger social group bewilders him. Long before the child knows other homes and other friends his own home and parents are indelibly engraved upon his consciousness. Because the love of a child goes out most warmly to those who confer the most keenly appreciated benefits upon him, parents have an opportunity to win a very deep and abiding affection. The impressions gained in the home are enduring and cannot be divorced from the personality of the man or woman. It has been well said, "The child is wax to receive and granite to hold the impressions of the fireside.”

THE NEEDS OF CHILDHOOD

The needs of childhood are many. First of all there is the right of every child to be well-born, physically perfect and mentally sound. Not until our prospective parents have learned the fundamental facts of the science of eugenics, the science of being well-born, will every child enter into his birthright, for the germplasm of the parent should be free from taint of insanity, feeble-mindedness and crime as well as from transmissible disease. Such a standard of morality must be built up through knowledge that legal measures can meet with the intelligent support which insures success. After the child is born the physical needs of the little organism are so pressing that many parents forget that there are any other needs until they wake up some day to find that they possess a whining, peevish, quarrelsome, domineering autocrat who holds in his baby hand the scepter of the home. As soon as life begins so soon are the beginnings of the mental and moral-social development apparent. The habits of proper sleep and feeding are formed within the first few

weeks and are fundamental to later self-control. The restful repose of a mother whose life holds a center of peace and of faith is felt within the first hours of the baby's life and in such humble fashion his religious experience begins. If the first birthright of the child is to be well-born his second birthright is certainly to be understood, understood physically, understood morally, understood mentally. How many a child has said, "You tell mother. You know she doesn't understand." Such sympathetic understanding not only child life but all life craves; but child life needs it particularly because children are different from grown-ups, different in bodily structure and proportion and consequently different in their ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. To understand our children means to win their confidence, their gratitude, their friendship, and to make them in large measure the men and the women that we dream they may become.