The more I study my children, the more I am convinced of my own helplessness and inability in directing them. My own childhood experiences belong to another and remote age—the last eighteen nineties.
The clock in the sitting-room, the slow revolving black-winged fly fan that sat in the center of the dining table, and the sewing machine were the only mechanical household devices to perplex my boyish genius.
I found my fun in dusty streets, mysterious woods, and in the swimming place in the bend of the river where the lilies grew. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving Day, the annual school commencement, the annual tour of the singing class of the Masonic Orphanage, John Sparks’s One-Ring Circus, the travel patent-medicine man, the imported evangelist who held a two-weeks-revival in the Baptist church every summer: these were the only annual excitements. We didn’t even have Fourth of July excitement, because the South hadn’t learned to celebrate an occasion that called for a display of the Union flag. We shot off our fireworks at Christmas—a custom that still prevails in the South.
Everything has changed. My children have come into a different world. They are suddenly thrust into an environment which even their parents have not begun to understand. Their little minds must at once take hold of the telephone, the phonograph, the radio, the automobile, the cinema, the flying machine, the camera, cooking by gas and electricity, home without a mother except at meal time—and without a day oftener than that.
When I was a kid, a boy who had mastered the mysteries of the interior of a dollar watch was a mechanical prodigy. To-day a boy is a boob if he doesn’t know the intricacies of a gas engine and every obscure part of a flivver, know how to build and operate a radio station, build a camp, cook a meal, give first aid to the injured, explain the law of electricity right off the bat, and spell transubstantiation without batting an eyelid.
It is even more complex for the girl, because the girl child of this generation has access to pretty much everything that a boy has access to, by reason of a new freedom that was not her mother’s.
Millions of old-fashioned mothers of stay-at-home days haven’t the remotest idea of the world their young daughters are living in. Their sheltered and secluded lives have given them no opportunity to know and understand the great changes that have come about. And their children know that their mothers do not know! This explains modern Miss America’s impatience with the old-fashioned notions of her maternal ancestors.
--From “Bringing Up Four Kids” by W.O. Saunders in The American Magazine for November.
From the editorial page of the Elizabeth City Independent, Friday, Nov. 2, 1923
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