by Elsie Lincoln Benedict
Available in 98 free installments
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"I do that just to see them use their heads," he explained. "People are just like that. They rush for the little chances where all the competition is, instead of staying out where they can see a big chance when it comes."
Life is full of opportunities for every person who will consult his own capacities and aim for the big chance.
¶ Various influences are responsible for the misfit, chief amongst which are his loving parents. Many fathers and mothers, with the best intentions in the world, urge their children to enter vocations for which they have no natural fitness whatever. These same parents often discourage in their children the very talents which, if permitted to develop, would make them successful.
Such a child has small chance in the world if it happens that his parents are sufficiently well-to-do to hold the purse strings on his training. Not until he has failed at the work they choose for him will such parents desist. When they finally allow him to take to the work he prefers they are usually surprised to see how clever he is.
But if he does not succeed at it they should bear in mind that it is doubtless due to their having cheated him out of his priceless youth?the years when the mind is moldable, impressionable and full of inspiration.
¶ In this situation alone does the child of poverty-ridden parents have greater opportunities than the child of the well-to-do. He at least chooses his own work, and this is one more little reason why the world's most successful men so often come from the ranks of the poor.
"Ruined by too much mothering and fathering" is a verdict we would frequently render if we knew the facts.
¶ One instance in which Fate took a hand was very interesting. A New York widow, whose husband had left his large fortune entirely to her, nursed definite ambitions for her son and daughter. Richard, she had decided, should become a stock-raiser and farmer on the several-thousand-acre ranch they owned in Texas. Dorothy should study art in Paris.
But it so happened that Richard and Dorothy disliked the respective vocations laid out for them, while each wanted to do the very thing the other was being driven to do. Richard was small, dark, sensitive, esthetic?and bent on being an artist. Dorothy, who was six feet in her stockings, laughed at art and wanted to be a farmer.
But mother was obdurate and mother held the family purse. So, in the spring of 1914, Dorothy was sent to Paris to study the art Richard loved, and Richard was sent to the Texas ranch that Dorothy wanted.
Then the War broke and Dorothy hurried from Paris to avoid German shells, while Richard enlisted to escape the Texas ranch. Dorothy, in her element at last, took over the ranch (of which Richard had made a failure), turned it into one vast war garden, became a farmerette and is there now?a shining success.
Richard got to Paris during the War and when it closed refused to come home. He wrote his mother that the war had taught him he could earn his own living?an accomplishment he is achieving today with his art. The mother herself is happier than she ever was before, and proud of her children's success.
¶ Parents can be divided into three classes?those who over-estimate their children, those who under-estimate their children, and those who do not estimate them at all.
The great majority are in the first group. This accounts for the fact that most fathers and mothers are disillusioned, as their children, one by one, fall short of their cherished hopes.
Those who under-estimate their children are in that small group?of parents who live to be happily surprised at their achievements.
The best parents of all are those who allow their children to follow their natural talents.
¶ Don't push your child into any vocation he dislikes.
Don't be like the parents we dined with recently. As we sat around the table they pointed out their four children as follows: "There's Georgie?we're going to make a doctor of him. Our best friend is a doctor. We'll make a lawyer out of Johnnie. There's been a lawyer in the family for generations. Jimmie is to be a minister. We thought it was about time we had one of them in the family."
"What about Helen?" we asked.
"Oh, Helen?why, she's going to marry and have a nice home of her own."
