CHILDREN AND BEAUTY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 370, 2 June 1928, Page 18

CHILDREN AND BEAUTY

Not all children, of course, have musical ability, but practically all of them have an ear for music. Why do we sing a baby to sleep? Because the experience of generations proves that the child’s senses are soothed and gratified by musical sound. Why do children delight in nursery rhymes long before they have any understanding of the words? Simply because they have an instinctive sense of time, of the regular beat of the metre, an appreciation of rhythm, which is perhaps stronged then than in later life.

The trouble is that many of the gifts which are natural to the cljjld not only do not develop with his growth, but are sometimes completely lost before he reaches his teens. The schools are sometimes blamed for this, but often the mischief is done long before the child has reached school agi>. More and more it is being realised that the early years are the decisive years; that up to the age of seven, while he is still in the plastic stage, is the time when we can do most for the child. And surely, of all the things that could be done, there is none better worth doing than to develop the sense of beauty latent in the child mind. If you can sing, sing to him. If you can play, play to him. But don’t degrade his taste by singing some tuneless comic song or strumming a fragment of jas;z. If you can neither sing nor play, let him hear good records on the gramophone and listen when there, is something worth while on the wire-* less. It needn’t be “highbrow” or beyond his range. But you will very soon see that his range is by no means so limited as you perhaps imagined. While some children perceive beauty of sound, others receive pleasurable impressions more readily by the eye. Such children early reveal delight in colour or in shape. They will find joy in the colour of the flowers they are gathering, or perhaps in the fine lines of the vase in they place them. Such children only need opportunity and a little guidance to develop their artistic taste. They may never become great painters or sculptors, but at least they may learn to appreciate a good picture, or a fine building, or weldesigned furniture. How many gre .vnups can do as much? Yet we probably all “had it in us” if only there had been someone to bring it out at the right time.