By ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN. Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press. 191 pp.
Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.35.
To gain the sympathetic and accurate knowledge of children shown in
his book, Mr. Coulter stood on the reviewing stand for ten years. His
was the eye to see and the heart to feel from the first, but as clerk
of the Children’s Court in Manhattan for ten years he had the unique
opportunity of looking into the faces of a procession of 100,000
dependent, neglected and delinquent children as they filed by the
judge and told their stories.
These stories he often verified in alley, street, tenement, station
house, reformatory and prison. He shows how crowded streets, lack
of play space, poverty, sickness, insanitary houses, criminal
companions and parental neglect provide a fruitful soil in which to
breed neglected and delinquent boys and girls. These conditions he
charges to the greed of individuals and to the careless, neglectful
indifference of society.
As a means of helping individual boys who need the personal touch of
a friend right now, Mr. Coulter started the Big Brother Movement,
which is spreading all over the country. His permanent remedy for
the woes of children, however, requires not only the love of Big
Brothers, parents and friends, but also sanitary houses, good food,
playgrounds, fresh air and sky. Mr. Coulter’s pen pictures of
Children in the Shadow challenge us all not to rest until all such
children are brought out into the sunlight.
* * * * *
Miss McCracken’s book is a reprint of articles which originally
appeared in the _Outlook_, and deals with actual children and parents
of rather exceptional intelligence in both city and country. What
these exceptional American parents do for their children in home,
play, school, library and church is told in such a way as to appeal
to and educate parents who are not exceptional.
What children do for their parents is also set forth. The real
message of the book is that the reciprocal relation of children and
parents can be and should be one of the most beautiful and helpful
that this old world knows. The title might have been True Stories of
Parents Who Knew How to Live with Their Children.