Minute Debate-Why have Children

Title

Language

English

Year

1939

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

modation is free up to what we would consider a middle-class level of income. Special attention has been given to children's sanatoria, and to schools for backward and abnormal children. Anyone who recalls the old conditions in these services will realize that there is now a new temper in Spain, a new command: this is a new spain.Pa.ul McGuire, condensed from (Jolumbia. WHICH couple enjoys the more complete life--the childless pair who can sit down to a quiet, uninterrupted meal, who can count on the luxury of privacy, the balm of solitude, who can :find time to keep upto-date on the things that feed the souls-books, music, painting, sculpture, the theatre, sports, the dynamic fabric of our changing times--or the harried parents whose fevered round of dishes, diapers, and disorders allows them leisure for neither culture, hobbies, nor company? Perhaps your .children will support you when you become too old to worlc. Perhaps, on the other hand, they won't. Perhaps they will still be relying on you to support them-along with such incidental dependents of their own as they may have acquired by marriage.-]. H. S. Moynahan, in Forum. SOME people ought to have children and some ought not. Some people are made to be parents and some are not. I still contend and will contend that nobody needs to have naughty children or nasty children. That is just bad management! The reward of having children is not in what they will do for you. The reward is solely in the joy of watching personality unfold and grow, in seeing at last a rich, full nature matured and ready to live. If everything you have done for the child, from washing diapers to reading poetry, has not been joy, if the knowledge that youi" child is a :fine human being is not reward enough in itself, then you know that you should not have been a parent.-Pearl Buck, in Forum. MABCH, 1939 13

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