Fathers and the Attractiveness of Home
By Editor
IN our Home Circle department is a selection entitled, "How to Save the Boys." It is a bit of excellent advice to mothers. We endorse every word of it. And yet there seems to be something lacking. It seems to us that this thing of favoring the mother with all the good advice, is becoming rather stale. It is to very little purpose for the mother to try, in the attractiveness of the home, to compete with the attractiveness of the public places, so long as the father spends the time in public places that he ought to spend at home. It is to very little purpose for the mother to try to supply at home the animated and hilarious companionship which might be sought by the boys away from home, as long as the fathers seek such companionship at the club, and other questionable places for which the "club" is only the shield. The father's example in these things weighs vastly more in the minds of the boys, than all the mother's precepts can be made to weigh. We endorse the advice to the mothers, but in it we would join with them the fathers. Let the fathers help to create the attractiveness of home, rather than that of the public places. Let the fathers spend their evenings at home instead of at the "club." Then the mothers will not be so heavily handicapped in the competition with the public places for the possession of her precious boys. Then, too, it is probable, the mother will be able to dispense with much of the excellent advice with which she is now so freely favored.