BOYS AND GIRLS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 202, 15 January 1913, Page 6

BOYS AND GIRLS.

MR. ADAMSON'S CRITICISM. A CHRISTCHURCH VIEW. The criticism of the Australian boys and girl* by Mr. Lawson, Adamson, of Wesley College. Melbourne, was referred by a Lyttelton Times reporter to various local authorities, including Mrs. Cunnington, who. in the light of her social work, is well qualified to express an opinion on the subject.

The problem of juvenile immorality, Mrs. Cunnington said, was one of the very gravest. What was needed, and needed urgently, was an alert public opinion, a close and continued study of the problem, and an earnest effort to solve it. There were two things which could be done at once with every prospect of effecting an improvement in the prevailing condition of affairs. There should be female officers to patrol the streets at night. They should be women ' of an earnest sympathetic spirit, able to deal with young girls. The male constables could not do it, for it was essentially woman's work. If two capable women were appointed in Clvristchurch she felt sure that they could do a great deal of valuable work, perhaps not so much in the direction of rescuing the fallen as in preventing girls from failing. Then there was an urgent need for a female probation officer, who would be under the Education Department or the Justice Department, as was deemed best. The suggestion had emanated from a prominent member of the local detective force. In the Juvenile Court such an officer would find plenty of work. She could keep in touch with the girls who came before the court but were not sent to any home, and in many ways she could do work which would :bc of untold value as the years went by. Many mothers, Mrs. Cunnington continued, had absolutely no idea of what their daughters did when they went out of an evening. On Sunday evenings, doubtless, the parents thought that their daughters went to church, but in very many cases Hagley Park and not the church was where they spent the evening. The churches, it had to be admitted, were not reaching the class .which it was desirable they should reach and influence. They only attracted the respectable people. Only the good mothers attended the mothers' meetings. There was a great class which no branch of church work toudied at all.

In the proper education of the rising generation Mrs. Cunnington found the chief grounds for hope. Parents had the power to mould the characters of their children, and no teaching of children in the mass could do the work so effectively. Tn this connection much could he said about the laxity of the fathers. As a rule, they threw the whole duty of bringing up the children on to the already 'burdened shoulders of the mothers. Fathers could do so much, but did so little. Why could they not associate more with their children, enter more into their lives, give them the benefit of their advice and experience? Nowadays they seemed to live lives apart altogether from those of their children, and yet, when disaster overtook ;fny of them, the fathers blamed the mothers. The duties of parentage did not devolve upon the mothers alone, and the point could not bo over-emphasised. Regarding the subject of modern fashions for women, Mrs. Cunnington added, there would have to be a marked change in the direction of more modest, more simple styles, before any great improvement in juvenile morality could be looked for. Jn these days women, not only in New Zealand but in Australia, were going to extremes. Women drew more and more money for dressing requirements, and the results as seen today were not in any way pleasing.