The Waterbury Democrat., 1935-01-04
FAVOUR
 CHILDREN
RY Olme Roberts esrton
t@ RMz sl6zssz. E

 For the forty-first time in forty one days Mrs Brown had to stop her work to help Jimmie
 hunt his cap. And as many times Jimmie got lectured on his care-
 lessness. As long as Nom was around to supply the wits and the cap why should he worry?
 Mrs Brown never got terribly upset about the cap. It was al- most routine as far as she was concerned. And so were the boys l books and his glasses and his gloves. They usually turned up with a little scouting and no harm done.
 One day, however, the glasses don't turn up. They aren't under
 the sofa cushions, in the cookie jar, behind the bathtub. The neigh bors know nothing and a search of | the schoolhouse proves futile. Gradually the ire of his parents becomes a scathing recrimination.
 Jimmie is just about the most hopeless piece of good -for-nothing
 the earth ever produced. Not Allowed to Forget He Is promised plenty. No new
 suit. No movies for six months.
 No trip to Uncle Te9s Glasses
 cost money. Doesn't he know that
 Mother has had to do without
 shoes and Dad has had to walk to work half the time to pay for
 them in the first place? Then the glasses are found un-
 der Jimmie's neckties in his draw
 CT. Or let us change the story and
 not find them at all. Let us tell l ha 4hn er1 II n
 at each meal and remind the
 young fellow every time the fam
 fly feels pinch that it is all his
 fault. ,.t
 Which is a real tragedy indeed
 and no fun for anybody. But what concerns us here is just how guilty Jimmie really is.
 | Children seldom, feel differ ence between the various possess
 sions in their care. Their ideas of value are not commensurate l with ours.
 Sense of Values Is Sufficient
 They are quite as likely to take l better care of some loved toy than of a necessity. Caps, books, gloves, | rubbers and glasses are casual l items of existence to them and | not important. Responsibility toward them is at best a sort of
 vicarious business relayed from
 ourselves. They are told they must
 be careful, warned about the grav- ity of loss, and they sense this to a great extent. It really is re-
 markable, how little children acts | ually do lose considering their in- ability to gauge results and pie ture the trouble of replacement.
 But responsibility, as such, takes l time to acquire.
 Naturally it is sensible to im-
 press on 8 child the gravity of loss and to explain that he must
 be careful and that every posses
 sion means sacrifice of some sort, | just to give him an idea that
 waste and carelessness have a price. But there was not much | difference between Jimmie's losing his glasses and losing his cap,
 Really the trouble lay with the l cap in the first place, and its re-
 peated disappearances. No one needed to hunt 1t for him over
 and over He had to learn that
 what he lost meant difficulty for him and that the easy way is to keep ones mind on things.
 l Children live ten times harder than we do. They lose themselves in whatever they are doing at the moment. They have not developed that little corner of the mind for extraneous detail. Yet they can
 be made to remember duty toward possessions. We cannot expect perfection l but we should expect something. What we should not do Is to al- low repeated carelessness and then, when something really seri- ous happens, make 1t out a crimi- 1 na1 nffopsQ