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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Are Your Children "Common? NATURALLY, we can all make life miserable for each other. The power to be cruel is as close as the power to be kind, and sometimes some-times much easier to use. Any woman is free to say slighting or cutting things to her husband. Any man may neglect the mother who loves him and break her heart. Any parents may make life hell for their children; short of actual violence no one will stop them. Some homes are full of small instances of meanness mean-ness and coldness, little daily humiliations hu-miliations and hurts. . It is actually frightening to think how easily we may all fail each other in this way, and how far-reaching far-reaching the results of this only half-Intended rudeness and thoughtlessness thought-lessness can be. The members of one family of brothers and sisters, neighbors of ours many years ago, never said a kind word to each other. Too Much Unkindness Their dinner-table talk was quiet sneers, criticisms, and complaints. If one of the daughters, rather shy and not too pretty, observed that a young man had walked home with her, or sent her candy, all the others oth-ers metaphorically tore the young man from limb to limb. Only a bold girl would go on into courtship after that, and, as a matter of fact, none of the girls married. If the flushed, tired, overworked mother observed that her mother or her sister was coming in for an overnight stay, there were groans. Dishwashing was done, for all the have it applied to them. And bad manners are "common." Squabbling Squab-bling and bickering and hurting peoples' peo-ples' feelings, laughing at their troubles or embarrassments all indicate in-dicate a background without culture cul-ture or spiritual guidance; in other oth-er words, "a common family." If I can sit through just one dinner din-ner hour with any family of boys and girls, I can tell you just where the parents failed them or helped them in wise guidance, and predict pretty closely their successful or unsuccessful destinies. All this comes to my mind because be-cause of the predicament of a young wife who writes me from Wichita. "Matt and I will have to live with his folks for another year at least," says her tear-stained letter. "They don't hate each other, I know they don't. But if anyone stays long at the telephone, or is just a few minutes min-utes late for a meal, or buys a hat, the way they all scream at her, or laugh at her clothes, or push their pudding away and say they never have liked it is simply terrible I If ;ou say 'Will you do me a favor?' the usual thing is to say, 'I like that! When did you ever do one for me? What is it?" "Matt says this doesn't mean anything, any-thing, it's just their way. But my own home was different. We weren't allowed, as kids, to keep up this kind of silly, mean picking and grumbling at each other. The result is that we four brothers and sisters love one another; we like to be together, and our children, as they grow out of babyhood, will have happy times together as cousins. My mother-in-law has two sisters to whom she has not spoken spok-en for 15 years; Violet, the oldest girl, has married a very nice man, but they sneer at him." "... cheap family quarrels . . . six years I knew them, under protest, pro-test, recrimination and dislike. It was Dorothy's turn, it was Mabel's Ma-bel's turn to wash. As for the brothers those boys were so lazy and so stuck on themselves and so spoiled that, according to the girls, they were simply no good. Not many families are quite as disagreeable as were the Optics. But unkindness of this sort does exist in too many homes, and it destroys one of the most valuable assets any child can have: a background back-ground of love and help and security. se-curity. Cheap family quarrels destroy many a sensitive and hungry heart. Goodness just simple goodness and thoughtfulness, and a humble desire to promote family harmony completely make any life heaven. Goodness isn't easy to achieve. But there is a consideration that, to many women who are socially ambitious, who want everything about their houses and their children chil-dren to be "nice," might make fine manners and sweetness and tenderness tender-ness worth their cultivating. Bad Manners Are Common Such women average wives and mothers avoid the word "common." "com-mon." They would far rather die than |