• Have you prepared your child to face adversity?! What would you do if death cruelly snatched away a member of the family?? Or if a financial calamity struck? Have the children the right to know of the matter?!
• Would it interest you, Madam, to hear a glimpse of contemporary Japanese poetry?? Here, then, is what I have read for you!!
It is another evening among your evenings; a breath blows in from the sea, wiping away the sweat that has streamed down your brow and easing the day's weariness; you recline on a soft seat, the sun's heat having gone out in the deep, and you take up a book between your hands!..
And I fear the rustling of the pages may add to the strain of your nerves, in this heat that electrifies the air; so I hasten to you, carrying in my hands an impossible summary of the latest the magazines have set before us.
You know, Madam, that the chief concern of this age is fixed upon upbringing; never in any period of time has the human race awakened to the importance of rearing these little livers of ours that crawl upon the earth as it has in this age; and so your eyes can hardly fall upon a magazine or a book without your sensing this care in shaping the writing to suit the educational approach — including the magazines and the recent books built upon psychological studies at once deep and exact.
In Parents magazine I came upon a subject fit to be a letter to every mother — indeed, to everyone
concerned with upbringing — and the letter's title is: Have you prepared your child to face adversity?
You may ask: what has he to do with the world of grown-ups? Naturally my love and tenderness will not allow me to burden him with care while he is small!..
But the writer says: the building of your child's personality depends upon your tact in handling these matters and analyzing them in the light of understanding and love.
And the writer insists on dotting the i's, and so begins her letter to you with a fact. She says she recently met a friend who had lost her mother, and when she asked her about the reaction of her daughter Salwa, eight years old, she answered: I was afraid of breaking Salwa's little heart,
so I told her nothing; instead I sent her to the mountain until the condolence ceremonies were over.
And when the writer asked how she had explained the grandmother's absence, she said: I let her believe she had gone away on a journey that would take years!
This is one of dozens of mothers who have gone to the farthest lengths to keep a daughter from life's misery, without noticing the abnormal situation created by her own will. And then, how is she to explain to this child why the grandmother's letters are delayed, and why no special card arrives for the beloved little one?
With time, the child begins to gather up fragments of the distorted truth, and she must in the end arrive at the painful reality of the situation; she will