The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1920-12-11
Dorothy Dix Tails
The Children's Earnings.
BIZ DOROTHY DIX
Wex13s Highest Paid Woman writes.

Parents are wrong from every point
Of view in making child turn over
all of his or her earnings to them.
For one thing, it works q great injus-
tice, in that nearly always it forces
the industrious and saving members
of a family to toll to support the loaf
ers. In almost every family there is
someone who has been born too tired
to work and who simply will not stick
to job as long as he or she is certain
Of three square meals a day and COM
Portable shelter. Nearly always there
is butterfly in the family who will
have good clothes, and go to places
OF amusement.
And strangely enough, this idler is
nearly always mama's pet, and she will
take the money of the Woodworking
children and give it to the spender. I
have known dozens OF cases in which
fra1i girls were - made, by their
mothers, to turn over their money to
her SO that she could give it to their
worthless brother, and I have known
other cases in which a brother was
literally worked to death to support
lazy and eXtravagant sisters.
This is most unfair, but justice has
no place in the repertoire of parents
and they are ever ready to sacrifice
their good children to the prodigal
sons and daughters.
For the parents to require their chill
dren to turn over their pay envelopes
to them, kills all ambition, and stran-
| giles the sense of thrift at its birth.
There are few of us who are so all
fired industrious that we work just
Tor the pleasure of working. The
habit of industry may have become
| SO ingrained in US that we love work,
| for works sake, when we are old: but
| when we are young, we work simply
| for the sake of the reward. We work
| Tor the money that will buy us the
| n a T1-1c<
we have a vision of the kind of a
house We want to live in, and the sort
| of a car we want to own, and the
position we want to hold, when we
are forty.
But if, at the end of the week, all
we nave worked for is taken from us,
if we are no better off than we were
at the beginning of it, then our incen-
| tive ~ gone, the hope and inspiration
are swept away, and the thing that
turned work into a means to an end is
lacking, and it all becomes a purpose
| less, endless drudgery.
| That's the reason that so many boys
and girls who are bright enough, and
capable enough, never take any inter-
| est IN their work and never get any,
where They never receive the re-
! ward for their labor, so they shrug
their shoulders and say, whats the
user" Their greedy and grasping IA
| theirs and mothers kill the goose that
lays the golden egg when they rob
| their children of their pay envelope
do not mean to imply that chill
dren should not support their parents
If their parents need to be supported
or that they should not help their pa
rents. 1t is their sacred duty to do so
but they should do so in their own
way. They should handle the money
they make themselves, and themselves
be the judge of what is a fair and rea-
sonable divide.
The boy and girl who work should
not be made to support idle brothers
and sisters. They should have the
/ chance to save up something to start
life on themselves, and they should
have the ineffable joy of owning theil
I own individual pocketbooks.