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Show Are Children Happy? The story about the 13-year-old Indiana boy who killcci Aimself because he couldn't make a neighborhood football team is one of the most pathetic bifa of news I hat the papers have printed in a long time. It emphasizes something that we too often overlook : that n child can, on occasion, be the unhappiest mortal alive. Little disappointments have a way of seeming blacker, in childhood, than adults generally rculize. -Most of us. as we go bumping along from one disappointment and disillusionment disillu-sionment to another, acquire a sort of casc-hanbned philoso piiy, and learn to discount the value of the prizes we fail to gct. H'lt a child hasn't any philosophy of that kind to sustain sus-tain hint. Instead, he has to grin and bear i! ; and some times the grin doesn't come easily. Kwn an adult gets the notion, now and then, that he faces a world which is in conspiracy to cheat him. How much more terribly does not such an idea jrar down on a child's mind? ! for children, in general, are rather lonely. We can do ; o"i- b"st to understand them, to bo pals to them, to comfort lb:T-, ; b;i( Uvre is always something of a barrier between ' 11.".. berause they look out at the world with unspoiled eyes ; we do not. and they know it. 'I here are moments in which a child Feels thai it is hopeless for him to go to an o'der person for sympathy, no' matter how kind and well-meaning well-meaning that older person may be. '; So, when things go v,T'n-'. he has to fall back on his ' ' :i resources whii-h means that every so often he has a ' 'Sl t ty t hin time of it. Of course, it very seldom ends as tragically as this cast' in Indiana did. IV.it if we are wise we shall let this pitiful . story teach us something: teach us that a youngster's 1111-.. 1111-.. happiness can be infinitely more real and deep than we (beam, and that oar greatest wisdom and our deepest sym-' pithy and understanding are imperatively demanded, over and over again, if there has been given to us the tremendous Hid priceless responsibility of bringing up a boy. |