Further Needs of The Young Child

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 5, 28 July 1939, Page 10

Further Needs of The Young Child

Summary of a talk by

Mrs.

C. E.

BEEBY

(V.)

love and security. To-day I want to talk about some of the other things necessary for his happiness, and the first one is the need for a calm and peaceful background to his life. The little child’s world is full enough of strange and puzzling things without the addition of a couple of moody grown-ups, who are sometimes boisterous and cheerful and sometimes miserable bundles of nerves. The child doesn’t know where he is in such a home, and he will develop not one character, but half a dozen, to fit in with the varying moods of his parents. I know it isn’t always easy for the mother of a family to be calm and serene. .. .I think the best advice to give a mother who feels tired and over-worked and touchy with her children, is to tell her to neglect all but the absolute essentials in housework. If we could only remember that a child’s happiness is more important than highly polished floors and immaculately tidy rooms! week we discussed the child’s need for Some mothers say to me, "How on earth can I be calm and serene when I’m naturally a jumpy,

irritable sort of person?" I know it’s much harder for some people to be serene than others, but it’s astonishing how the habit can be cultivated. And it does help to give the little child the feeling of security he needs if he can have any sort of situation accepted with a serene matter-of-factness. ... The next thing the small child needs is a regular routine about his life. The same thing should happen at the same time every day: meals, bath, going to bed, and so on. A young child who doesn’t have a quiet and orderly routine has very little chance of developing good habits himself, and he will always be feeling confused because he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next... . Now I come to the last, and perhaps the greatest need of the child, and that is the need for freedom to grow, and every child should have this, no matter what his age. . . . Most of us, when we were young, had tucks made in our clothes to allow for growing. It’s rather a pity we can’t do something the same thing in regard to children’s minds. We make a set of rules for the control of the three-year-old, but we often forget to let out the tucks as the child grows, and the boy of thirteen may still be under the same discipline as fitted him ten years before. + « « We have to be always reminding ourselves to let out the tucks, as it were, and we must be prepared to allow our children more freedom and more responsibility as they grow up. (To be continued)