The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

Notes and Queries.

Why burden children with numberless undergarments, which are a source of perpetual expense, trouble, and annoyance? My little girls, from babyhood, wear, firstly, a combination, thick handknit in winter, woven in summer, a bodice and drawers of Ruskin homespun (white); over these a combined petticoat knitted from beehive wool, stockings suspended from the bodice, then a smock, the yoke in winter being lined with homespun, so that only the best pinafores, print frocks, and washing bonnets need be any trouble to wash, and their clothes keep clean longer and are far healthier than calico garments. As for my boy, a combination, flannel blouse, Irish tweed knickers, and stockings, with an extra vest in winter, suffice for him.

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I hope you will allow me, as one who reads and values the Parents' Review, to protest against the severe and, as I think, unjust remarks upon nurses as a class, which appeared in the Extracts from a Mother's Note Book in the October number of the Review. For, whatever may have been in the mind of the writer of the Note Book, or the compiler of the extracts, the words appear capable of bearing no other meaning that this, viz., that the qualities of feature and character which children are likely to derive from the nurses in whose charge they are left, are all of a very bad type. It cannot ever be right or true to speak so ill of any whole class of persons, and further I am sure that many a mother can speak with gratitude of the help she has received in bringing up her children from nurses who have been good and true women.

If "Vera's" extracts were intended to impress upon parents the importance of great care in choosing nurses, and of devoted watchfulness over both children and nurseries, the intention was one with which all good mothers will sympathise, but it was not necessary to speak so hardly of a whole class of persons who are often most worthy of respect and gratitude. A.

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I should like to bear testimony to the value of the pussy box. I have given away some to little girls of three and four, and their delight has been great. It is strong and durable, and the printing very clear. Will not everyone think at Christmas of all the little trots they know? who might thereby be helped to love "lessons," and possibly their mothers might be helped to love the Parents' Review. I only wish some more boxes might be brought out. For my own children I want some in French. M.L.H.D.

[The "Little Pussy Box" is a box of letters and words making up the poem "I like little pussy" as an aid for teaching children to read. Charlotte Mason described its use in Volume 1, Home Education, on page 217.]

Typed August 2013; Proofread by LNL, June 2024