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Show WILL YOUR CHILD FAIL BECAUSE OF YOU? One of the bitterest tragedies ol life is the responsibility for' failure that is often attached to a parent by a child t whom every attention has apparently been given. Without attempting at-tempting to be Shavian, it must be confessed that parents are too often really misguided and in Good Housekeeping House-keeping for December, Miriam Finn Scott, the famous children's diagnostician, diagnos-tician, offers a few suggestions for eliminating this unhappy truth. Says she: "The great reason for the failure of our dreams, as our diagnosis will show, is that we so frequently base our dreams upon misconceptions, and upon this foundation of misconception miscon-ception we further try to build our dreams into realities by using unsound un-sound methods. Many a fond dream for our children chil-dren has been wrecked because of a false valuation of the things of life; because we have based our dreams upon conventional standards rather than upon reality. And in the very process of wrecking dream's we have 'wrecked them at the cost of the greatest imaginable self-sacrifice on our part. And these false standards rule, and these sacrifices are made, in all economic classes. In my many years with what we not very happily call the working classes, I have found parents making almost indescribable inde-scribable sacrifices, living on next to nothing, working day and night, in order to help their children into what are considered superior positions in life and doing all this without any preliminary thought as to the qualifications quali-fications of their children to occupy the positions of their dreams. 'I will not have John a tailor, a mechanic, a working-man; he shall be a doctor, a lawyer'; 'I Will not have Mary go into a shop; she- shall become a teacher.' Such are the cherished determinations de-terminations of tens of thousands of parents;unimaginable deprivation on the part of the parents, at length complete a college education. And then, after years of struggle on the part of both parents and child, it is found that John would make a far better mechanic than doctor (and as such would earn far more money), and Mary would make a very much better dressmaker than teacher." In concluding, . Mrs. Scott points out a solution that is at once wholesome whole-some and practical. |