GIRLS’ COCKTAILS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4960, 9 April 1926, Page 1

GIRLS’ COCKTAILS.

WRINKLED FACES AT TWENTY.' LACK OF DISCIPLINE!. Dr J.. S. Risieu Russell, neurologist, lecturing on “The Prevention of Nervous Affections in Children,” at the Institute of Hygiene, London, said : —■ From the discipline, perhaps too strict, of the Victorian era the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, so that the. modern child has become quite out of hand. An undisciplined child is one whose nervous system cannot fail to suffer. , “Hygiene., of body and mind are much needed in these days when children are .allowed to rea.d .the mofet baneful literature at will and spend so many hours in kinemas where the mental food may be of the moist, pernicious type for .them, instead of being compelled to reap the benefits provided by nature' in the way of fresh air and sunshine.

The girl of the present day, even when stilli in her teens, has a freedom of action and liberty which is! fraught with more than one danger. The chaperone is, in the main, a thing of the past, and young girls are free to go out with young men not only to restaurants and dances, but to night clubs, with, no sort of restrictions put, on their actions, and with no limit of time when they must return to their homes.

The result is that the part of the night is, spent in frivolity with no time left for ? sleep to. refresh the nervous system, so that a day following this full of social and other engagements can. only he got through with the assistance of alcohol, or drugs. Girls not long’from'school are to be seen drinking cocktails, champagne, and liqueurs, while in time 1 whiskies and sodas are added to the list of stimulants, required to keep them gonig.

Scarcely has the age of 20 been reached before the lines that belong to the face of a woman of middle age have become evident in such girls,. Nature, deprived' of her normal hours of sleep, begins to 'forget the habit; the nervous system, overtaxed by the strain of abnormal a life, and poisoned by alcohol, toba.cco, and perhaps drugs, falls into a state of neuras-

thenia with insomnia; which demands the increase of drugs fo bring sleep. Is it to be supposed that when girfe of this, kind reach womanhood and become mothers they can produce men and women with anything but the most miserable physiques .and of the neurotic type ?