Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 182, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1911 — The Boy Puzzle [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Boy Puzzle

By DR.J.S.KIRTLEY

He and His Teacher

If he has a brother and sister. If not, he is a most unfortunate creature, almost as unfortunate as If he had no parents. If the home is full of children, all the better; and best of all, if they are as near to his age as they conveniently can be. They will do more to train him than the average parents and almost as much as the best of parents. The trouble of bringing up an extra boy or two will be more than justified by the extra boyhood they will produce In each one of them.

An only child is at a very serious disadvantage, especially If he is a boy, for a girl can stay in and become a companion of her mother, but a boy has a fermentation going on inside him that he must have some help with, or the house will become too small for him, unless he happens to be not a boy, but only a sissy of the male variety. The "only boy" Is apt to be spoiled. His parents will concentrate all their attention on him. Instead of distributing it out to a half dozen. He grows up without that friction between himself and other children, which is so necessary to enable a child to find himself. He hds no one to quarrel with, and that is an Irremediable loss. He will have a hard time to learn his rights or the rights of others, all by himself, and will need some very excellent parents, to repair the deficit.. It must not be said that the “only child" Is foredoomed to failure. To be sure, from larger families most of our great men and women have come, and families with an "only child"* have furnished more than their ratio of the useless v and criminal classes, and yet some “only" children have been great .and good. We are only taking averages and Indicating probabilities. An older brother Is simply indispensable to the little boy’s happiness, and the little brother is an important part of the older boy’s llfd, especially if their ages are close together. If some years are between them, they are both to be pitied. The little one will be pathetically tagging after the older one whose tastes and companions are in advance, his heart aching to follow and breaking because he cannot follow. The older will get out of patience and be rough, but, even so, it is better for either one than to be an only child. With his sister be cannot well be a perfect comrade for the simple reason that she is a girl and he is a boy, yet there are great enjoyments and training for them both, as they play to-

gather and do other things in com-j mon. One peculiar thing is that he gets! the benefit of the other children’s presence in the house, without being fully"; aware of it; he may even sometimes think they are undesirable members' of the family. From the way they:; often talk we might imagine they regard each other with deadly and incurable hatred. The showers of verbal missiles they rain down on each other’s heads surely portend lifelong disaster to their friendship. Bad the next moment it is “dear shining; after rain.” They are, again, confidential allies against foeß within andi without, whether the older, who foolishly interfere, or another child that! dares to taunt them. Disagreements and quarrels they do not regard as incompatible with friendship or good! manners. It is not the quarreling that'is always wrong. The'noise may, be unendurable and require suppression. If a snarling nature is foundi in a child, it is tragical, a horrible inheritance, likely to become permanent, if daily tested and trained by thei example of older members of the family. God have mercy on them and! send in some good friend from the outside to steer their lives into peaceful waters. s

Discord seems unavoidable, and there come two very valuable compensations. One Is that they know; how to end their troubles without injury, except to the ears and fears of thp Innocent bystander. Nature attends to it Interference with their logomachy is usually a failure, and brings only artificial results.

The other compensation Is that the children are training each other, even when discordant, provided the discords are only ocacslonal. They are getting experience in applying the principles they have been taught; and they usually succeed, to the satisfaction of both affirmative and negative, plaintiff and defendant, especially, if the principles taught have been illuminated in the practices of their parents. These are contests in skill, and wit and strength that augment those qualities, for through such things, each child learns, by experience, where his rights end and the rights of others begin ;| he learns self-control and learns how to take defeat without whining or tale bearing; learns how to meet outside children and take care of himself, while respecting their rights. In a family of several, no child can be boss or get all he wants or have his own way, as in the “one child” family..