ON PARENTHOOD.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2614, 23 September 1909, Page 3

ON PARENTHOOD.

LACK OF PREPARATION. Mr S. Kettle, S.M., in giving his decision in the case against Robert John Neill and Olive Josephine Neill, at Auckland, on Monday week last quoted the following apt passage from the writings of Herbert Spencer on the subject of preparation for parenthood : ‘•We come now to the third great division of the human activities —a division for which no preparation whatever is made. If by some st-raiigo chance not a vestige of us descended to the remote future save a pile of our school-books or some college examination papers, we may imagine hod puzzled an antiquary of the period would be on finding in them no sign that the learners were ever likely to bo parents. ‘This must have boon the curriculum for their celibates,’ we may fancy him concluding. ‘I perceive here an elaborate preparation for many things; especially tor reading the hooks of extinct nations and of co-existing nations (for which indeed it seems cleai that these people had very little worth reading in their own tongue); hut I find no reference whatever to the bringing up of children. They could not have been so absurd as to omit all training for this gravest of responsibilities. Evidently, then, this was the school course of one of their monastic orders.’ Seriously, it is not an astonishing fact, that though on the treatment of offspring depend their lives or deaths, and their moral welfare or ruin; yet not one word of instruct tion on the treatment of offspring; is ever given to those who will by and by lie parents. Is it not monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to chance of reasoning, custom, impulse, fancy—joined with the suggestion of ignorant nurses and the prejudiced counsel of grandmothers. If a merchant commenced business without any knowledge of arithmetic and bookkeeping, wo shou'd exclaim at his folly, and look for disastrous consequences. Or if, before studying anatomy, a. man set up as a surgical operator, we should wonder at his audacity, and pity his patients. But that parents should begin the difficult task of rearing children, without ever having given a thought to the principles—physical, moral, or intellectual—which ought to guide them, excites neither surprifo at the actors nor pity for the victims. To tens of thousands that are killed, add hundreds of thousands that survive with feeble constitutions, and millions that grow up with constitutions not so strong as they should be; and you will have some idea of the curse inflicted on their offspring bv parents ignorant of the laws of life. Do but consider for a moment that the regimen to which children are subject, is hourly telling on their life-long injury or benefit; and that there are twenty ways of going right; and you will get some idea of the enormous mischief that is almost everywhere inflicted by the thoughtless haphazard system in common use.”