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Show Give Child Tasks To Occupy Him While Outdoors By MYRTLE MEYER ELDRED How easily children manage to disupt all our wise theorising about them. We think we know Just how they should act but do they? They 'should, by every Criterion, want and need to eat, but they apurn food. They should be worn to a fraszle by night but often they are far wider awake than their exhausted parents. They should want to play out of doors because it's so good for them, but they defeat all our efforta to get them out For months during a hot summer my mornings were punctuated unpleasantly un-pleasantly with the screams of a less-than-2-year-old girl who was being taught to "like her play pen. At last bearing she waa atill dead set against it Refused to Go Outdoors "I have an unusual problem with my 8-year-old boy," writes Mrs. M. J. O. "For a month ha baa refused re-fused to go outdoors to play. For a while be refused to go anywhere with me, but I forced him to and though he cried all the way he has now recovered from that and goes willingly. "He has children to play with and plenty of toys. They say they have not frightened him, but he refuses to nlav on the porch, even though 1 am with him. Have you aver known : of a case like this?" Give Outside Tasks There are hosts of small children who spend their time outdoors with their noses pressed against the front door, begging or screaming to be let in. Giving them definite things to do for you, sweeping walks, dabbing at windows, any of the tanks which present themselves to be dons, may keep them happily and vigorously occupied for a short time. At this season, in your climate. It occurs to me that the boy may not be warmly enough dressed to be comfortable outdoors, I find mothers, moth-ers, though muffled to their own ears In furs, are apt to be unimaginative unimagi-native about the number of garments gar-ments that are needed to keep small children warm. Would you like "Dressing the Child in Winter" aa a check list to determine if you are perhaps overestimating his "warm-bloodedness?" "warm-bloodedness?" ' Send a 3-cent-stamped. self-addressed envelope to Myrtle Meyer Eldred of the "Your Baby and Mine" department of The Salt Lake Telegram. |