Milford chronicle., 1930-02-14
KINDNESS PROVES
THE BEST POLICY In
RULING CHILDREN
(By Kathleen NOrris)

pareS TO IL III eHOrC, IeSpOnSlDAAA'J,
encouragement, bewilderment-and
reward.
When Billy is 5 and Betty 8, and
when both have heavy chest colds
and the baby is croupy at night
mother enters into a zone of anxiety.
She wonders what any woman IN
the world has to do if she hasn't
small, unmanageable, restless, alllng
children.
ANYTHING else can wait. Anything
else permits one at least to read or
to think or to take brisk walk
and htrow off a mood, or to drop IN
at a hospital or a shop for a IeW
minutes with a less fOrtunte friend.
Lunch can wait, dinner can wait,
tbe bridge game can wait. But chill
dren can't wait.
There they are, irresistibly de-
manding. Their day begins in the
gray dust before dawn, when Betty
climbs into bed with mother and is
full of eager conversation. Billy
thumps and crawls and bangs things
on the floor, and adorable Jimmy,
pleased that it is morning, sits up
in his crib and watches his family
interestedly through the bars. The
clock says $3.50.
At 1850 exactly fourteen hours
later, after lifetime of adventures,
tears, laughter, quarrels, bumps,
shrieks, reluctant maps, alert awak-
enings, they are reluctantly tricked
back into a nights rest.
There's no discharge in the
war;" says Kipling's ballad. There's
no discharge in the nursery, either.
No matter how tired, how blue, how
burdened and bewildered their moth
er is, babies never see it. They go
right on needing instant, vital care,
needing changes of raiment, needing
airings, consolation, milk, spinach,
beef Juice, fresh beds, fresh socks,
rubbers, woolies, advice, judgment,
guadance-and, alas! sometimes
punishment-ande even more dread
full, sometimes doctors.
Women get through these years,
they don't die of it. But it isn't
much fun for some of them. Just
few are smart, they manage well,
they enjoy nursery days. The rest
live-as we all do through wars and
crises and strains-simply because
they don't die.
And presently Billy and Betty are
in school, racing away from home
early morning, and Jimmy is D,
walking to market with mother and
amusing and delicious to such a de-
gree that she presently hears her
self saying regretfully, "This is my
baby. And don't know what We'll
DO when Jimmy gets to be real
boy!"
From middle-age one looks back
at those old agOnies with a heart
ache of sympathy-and envy. If we
could live them over again, more
simply, more quietly, more sensibly!
If we could only bring to baby trou-
bles one-half the common intelli-
gence that we bring to office work,
trained nursing, trained anything!
1t seems impossible. Not actual
ly, for the thing is supremely prac-
tical-as practical as all the other
great innovations that have been
sweeping our country in the last fifty
years. AS practically necessary as
five-and-ten shops, cafeteries, self
service groceries, Y. M. G. AS and |
Y. W. c. A.'s-as practical as medi-
cal attention in schools and a pure |
food law, and a thousand other |
things that are proving to the world |
Americas approach to something |
like the community ideal.
There is no reason why each
neighborhood should not have its
baby club, with thirty mothers and
ninety youngsters having a good
time inside, fifteen mothers on the
job each week, and the other fifteen
free to follow their professions,
clean their houses, play bridge, go
to the movies, or in any other way
spend the freedom that every one of
us must have if she is to live at all.
You can do it now, you modern
mothers, where your grandmOthers
couldn't. Your grandmOthers had
neither money nor independence;
but you have. And doing it-com-
munizing your children, making
babyhood a time of happy compan- >
ionship, without an instant of dull {
ness, would turn this hard time of
young motherhood into a most eX- /
citing adventure. G
1 say ''hard time" Perhaps that i
ought to be changed into partly {
hard time," or occasionally hard d
time" No one knows better than 1
what the joys of motherhood are, t
what it's compensations are, how ii
richly worth while are those wet, il
lragging afternoons when the house II
smells vaguely of cauliflower and n
aundry soap, and the clock seems "
fixed at ten past 8. W
In one baby club I know, in v
Southern State-only they call this II
he Grandmothers Club, because a Il
-oung grandmother started it-ffty- h.
i've happy babies gather every day, pi
nd the care of them is divided be- et
ween half their mothers-thirteen fl
nothers and a few grandmothers. ef
me mother, a widow, teachers
'rench, right in the school, and til
makes a handsome living. &C
Two mothers, also widows, live in m
he club, to order the milk and spin fr
ch and send out the laundry. The hs
abies' days fly by, in the big nur- fr
cry, on the slides and hobby-hOrses th
r on the lawn. They dig, build an
rick houses, climb trees-there is gr
OF a cross word nor punishment w
week. nT
This sounds too good, ideal, fan az
it is true. nj
Might you be the woman to start er
in your town? In another gener- no
lion these Baby Clubs are going to W,
Q as usual as all the other big su
ubs, the "Y" and the Scouts and in
le Campfire Girls. in
But if you can't do that, and if
lily and Betty and the baby are
aking even the reading of these
nes difficult for you, and if the II