The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1917-08-16
Dorothy Dar Says
Your Daughters Confidence.
BY DOROTHY DIX
: worlds Highest Paid Woman Writer

tell me how L can gain and hold the
confidence of my 15-year-old daugh-
ter l feel very much hurt because
she tells things to a neighbor that she
never mentions to me, and talks very
much more freely with this compare
tive stranger than she does with her
own mother
years too late in starting out to win
your child's confidence. Someone has
said that to make a gentleman you
must begin with mans grandfather
Certainly if you ever expect to be
chums with your children you must
begin when they are in the cradle.
Whenever grownup children are
not confidential with their parents it is
the parents fault Every baby runs
instinctively with its little joys and
SORROWS, its little plans and hopes to
it's mother and father, and it de-
ponds upon the way in which the par
ents receive and respect these infan-
tile condolences whether or not the
big boy and girl tell everything 70
mother or father.
Whenever this habit is broken up
and the children cease coming to
mother and father with their little
tales of what has happened to them,
and their little thoughts, it is because
mother and father have failed them
in some way or have proven untrust-
worthy.
Parents take a high and mighty
attitude towards their childrens con-
fidences. They think they have a
right to them, and to be told all that
the child thinks and does. This is not
SO. Even a child's soul is his own
and nobody has a right to look into
that holy of holes except upon in
vitation, and if parents have forfeit
| ed this privilege thru their blunder-
ing carelessness, the blame is
theirs not the child's.
| Parents forget in dealing with their
children that confidence is only posi-
Die between people of sympathy and
understanding Even a grown person
cannot tell anything to another unless
he is sure that that other is going to
| get his point of view in the matter
and feel about it as he does.
You never tell your plans more than
once to a person who puts a veto on
| everything that you were intending
to do. You bring forth your lit
tie tender. budding aspirations but
once before a person who throws over
you wet blanket that leaves you
chilled to- the bone. You tell
| some intimate, sacred secret but once
| to person who desecrates your reve-
! lation with ribald laughter. You
never talk about your real self at all
to the person who chatters and tells
everything.
If that is true of the grownup. it
is ten thousand times more true of
the child, because a childs soul is ten
thousand tunes more sensitive than a
grown persons. Life makes callouses
| on our soul even as it does upon orr
feet. but a chifd's soul is still so ten
der and delicate it bleeds at a rough
ttouch.
+ AND parents are too stupid to real
lze TINS or to see that the reason their
tchlldren do not confide in them is be-
s9cause they have acted in such way
Fas to, feffectually shut off all conf
dence.0
I Why should little johnnie tell YOU
that he is planning to build a play
house in the back yard when expert
ence has taught him that you will be
sure to say, don't" and that Won
won't have the backyard cIuttered up
with trash, whereas if he goes on and
builds it without taking you into his
confidence in the matter, you will
probably never notice it, or else think
it rather clever of him to have done
such bit of carpentry work.
1t would have added fmmeasurably
to Johnnie's pleasure in the matter if
he could have confided his plans to
you and you had been interested
enough in it to talk it over with him
and make suggestions anG perhaps
help a little. The superstition that
1t is the proper thing for parents to
always object on principle to any
thing children want to do is RESPONSE
BILE for half of the lack of confidence
between boys and girls, and their
fathers and mothers.
You may be very sure that the man
who enters whole hearted.y into his
boys plans. who lets them feel that
he is thrillingly interested in their
games and their lessons and their
school chums. and their fights and
who never objects to anything they
want to do that isn't actually wrong
or unwise, never has to- complain that
he isn't in his boys confidence. Why
| dads their best friend, and their first
impulse is to tell him everything.
And why should Mamie tell he1
mother anything when She knows be-
forehand that mother is going to be
| shocked and say that girls never die
: that way in her day? Or worse still
mother laughs and blabs.
Mamie told mother about a little
boy that she met at the dancing class
and he said he thought she had the
wrote his name on her fan, and he
walked part of his way home with
her, and he was perfectly lovely lit.
tie boy and his name was Percy.
1t was Mamie's first romance. the
first flutter of the embryo wings OF
her womanhood, and when Mamie
told it to mother she opened the very
, doors of her shy little soul and lei
mother look in at myste ries thai
Mamie herself was too young to know
were there
And the next night at dinner, before
a whole table full of people. mother
told the story of Mamie's first beau
and the grown-ups guffawed with
laughter, a Mamie cried and wa:
sent away from the table in disgrace
And mother didn't have enough intel
ligence to know that with her owr
brutal hand she had closed forever
the door of her little daughters con-
fidences-
Mamie will never tell mother agar
anything that matters. Perhaps there
will be times when it might be hel
| salvation if she could talk freely tC
| her mother and ask her mother:
guidance in some vital affair of hel
| life. but she can't do ii. There is {