SPOILT CHILDREN.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18890, 4 January 1927, Page 13

SPOILT CHILDREN.

• -, o LAX MATERNAL DUTIES. (prom our own correspondent.) IvONDON, November 16. Lady Rhondda has turned her attention from the so-called idle, pleas-ure-loving, bridge-playing women of the leisured classes to the modem mother, who is now made the subject of scathing censure by the superwoman of the business world. Under the pen-name of. Candida, she is taking the leisure members of her sex severely to task in a series of attacks on their shortcomings now appearing in "Time and Tide." Their children, Lady Rhondda asserts, are growing up too soft, and are receiving too much attention and spoiling—because the mothers have not developed a social conscience as apart from a maternal conscience. "No one ever teaches them that the maternal instinct unregulated and unsublimated can be just as dangerous, just as antisocial, and just as amoral as any other untaught and unregulated instinct. They are taught to mistrust—as _ well as to emphasise —their sex instinct; but they are taught that the maternal instinct' needs no mistrusting, .110 pruning, no directing, and that nothing should be allowed to stand against it. They grow up and they marry; they have children, and their natural instinct, that instinct which' every one about them has taught them to regard as sacred, immediately tells' them to sacrifice everything and every one to their children."

Lady Rhondda finds that tlie husband is, on the whole, inclined to agreo that the children should come first, "before his comfort, his career, before his duty to the community!" The mother, . complains the critic, "lets the children know that they come first, she saves them every jar, she sees that they have better food than any one else in the house, she gives them rather more treats than the family income can afford, and if it conies to a question between their interests and the husband's career, as it quite often does, it is his career that goes; the family comes first, the home comes before the community, and the children are brought up to expect that that should be so. The idea that' she, the mother, has any serious duty in life apart from her children never even occurs to the aver-i age married woman."