Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1909 PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4375, 18 February 1909, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1909 PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

I’he question of responsibility to ward the young of our population is one which is receiving more and more attention from teachers and moralists, legislators and socialists, as the great fact of the relation of the child to our national destiny comes more completely home to the present day thinker. But unfortunately the fact remains, as we have been painfully reminded, that not all parents are fully alive to the stupendous importance of the part they have to play in preparing their children for their place in the nation’s life. The child is entrusted with an amount of liberty of action which too often imperils its moral well being. It is allowed to be out on the streets at night, and to form companionships which are morally ruinous. And the huge pity of it all is that the child, if led into sin, is directly the victim of parental unwatchfulness. The child suffers moral undoing, but the parent incurs the blame. The fact ever remains that the child enters upon life at the tremendous disadvantage of not having “ passed this w-ay heretofore,” and in its ignorance it is liable under the influence of older and more corrupt companions to commit blunders, or even very serious misdeeds, without means being fully alive to |the gravity of those misdeeds. And for this reason it is necessary that those who have travelled the road of life long enough [to be aware that the road is beset with snares and pitfalls, should exercise a faithful vigilance, and a kindly but firm control, over the young with whose destiny providence has entrusted them. The young should be safeguarded as far as is possible from all risk of contamination by evil influences. There can be no question but that the most effectual safeguarding is to be accomplished by promoting a thoroughly healthy mental and moral tone in our children, furnish-* ing them with enthusiasms, in the form of manly and womanly outdoor sports, and also in the direction of furnishing their mental picture gallery with sweet and ennobling pictures from history, or from the records of present-day achievement.

We speak of youth so glibly, as though it were a period touched exclusively with all the hope and all the finer sentiment alone, and unbeset with darker tendencies. But this is not so. Apollyon has set dreadful ambushments about the dawn-lit world of life’s young days. And it is by keeping the youDg life around us immersed in wholesome and breezy interests and pursuits that these ambushments ipay be passed in safety. Let us give the children wholesome games to keep them indoors of an evening. That will work far better than any prohibition to keep them off the streets. Let us acquaint ourselves with their doings and whereabouts, and keep in touch with them at all points. And there is yet another aspect of the safeguarding of the young which has to be considered and it is this : seeing the painful facts which continually come to light, regarding the evils to which our children are exposed, would it not be better to fore-warn them ? Much as one may shrink from the idea of im parting, prematurely, knowledge which one feels ought not to be given to the child, yet seeing that the child every day runs the risk of having that knowledge imparted to it in a gross and perverted form, by evil companions, does it not appear almost necessary to forestall these evil communications by teaching the child at least the sacredness of the facts of life, and allaying curiosity with the promise of fuller light. This is the last course to suggest itself to a parent or guardian of keen sensitiveness, butextreme danger demands extreme precaution. Were it not better to acquaint the child with what we would for the time with-hold, rather than run the risk of allowing him to obtain a tainted knowledge of it The late Ellice Hopkins, that saintly and highly gifted churchwoman, whose life was laid down in her strenuous fight for the preservation of the purity of the young, has written a number of young people’s books treating these most difficult matters in a delicate, yet intensely scientific spirit, and anyone who wishes to gain some idea of how best to approach the difficult task of dealing with these questions cannot perhaps do better than consult her . writings. Again we repeat : The child enters upon life at the tremendous disadvantage of not having “ passed this way heretofore,” and it devolves upon the parent to safeguard him against the peril to which his very ignorance exposes him.