The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

Notes and Queries.

Having taken in your valuable and helpful magazine for some time past, and done my best to bring up my dear little ones upon its principles, I must ask your advice upon points which have long been troubling me in their characters. My little girl P. (aged seven) is terribly greedy, and though I have done my best to correct this I continually find the cakes and jams tampered with. My little E., though not faulty in this respect, is (I am sorry to find, after reading the excellent article in the last number) extremely cruel to dumb animals, and delights in giving them pain. For instance, only yesterday I found him trying to cut off the tail of a little calf with a pair of garden shears, and when I explained the cruelty of such an act he merely laughed. Hoping you will advise me how to correct these faults and what punishments to inflict, I am, &c., F. P.

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A question in this month's number asks for advice for a stammering child. Herr Emil Behnke, 18, Earl's Court Square, S.W., treats this subject scientifically. I enclose his little work on the subject. M.C.

[We shall be happy to forward this invaluable little book to our correspondent if she will kindly send her address, which we have failed to keep. We should advise all our readers to possess themselves of this scientific and truly educational tractate, which, though it is headed "Stammering: its Nature and Treatment" (T. Fisher Unwin, London), throws a great light on the general culture of the human voice.--Ed.]

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At the end of your last article on "Parents and Children," I felt so sorry that you could not go on with the answer to "How" at once, as it is just what I want to know, or at least to have fresh light upon--How to train my children in all the nobility of character possible to them. It is my great, my chief desire, and yet I do not seem to succeed as I want to.

I need to say nothing of Edwin now. Harry is nearly seven years old, and I am so anxious to see him lose certain unlovely traits of character. He has a way of wanting to order the others about, and to be first himself, and have the best things, though I am constantly trying to show him in what true greatness consists, and that he who would be the first must be servant of all. He does try sometimes, I am sure he does, to battle with this "giant," yet it seems very slow work. And then little Fanny is inclined to be "touchy," and cry and sulk for little vexations. I fear she gets this from me. How often I feel, now I see certain things coming out in my children, that if I could live my life over again with this in view, what renewed effort I would make to overcome sins of character, rather then thus burden other lives with them! But at least I must do all I can now to help them, and I have been encouraged to write thus freely to you, as your articles from time to time have seemed to me so wise and forceful. E. F. G.

Typed July 2013 by Ella Jacobs; Proofread by LNL, June 2024