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The Art of Being a Parent. By Amabel Williams-Ellis. (Bodley Head. 8s. 6d.) "CAN a parent make a good parent?" Miss Naomi Lewis once pertinently asked, and Mrs. Williams-Ellis, with that inspired common-sense that marked The Art of Being a Woman, emphatically believes it to be possible. But—and this is where her good sense lies—she is far from pretending it inevitable or even, in our society, easy, and in The Art of Being a Parent it is this problem of parenthood here, now, in our society, at this moment, that she has chosen to appraise.
What is, of course, shocking, is that Mrs. Williams-Ellis's attempt to set English parenthood in its sociological, even anthropological, context, should be the first in this particular field—the first, that is to say, written for the normal simple almost unread parents .themselves. In fact this kind of knowledge should be a common- place. It is, as she writes, a duty to try to understand "what are the virtues of our Western way of life ... and which of its faults are proving most dangerous," to be able to "allow for the strength of social pressures," and to understand how very relative are all our concepts of correct behaviour. We should have acquired such knowledge as part of our ordinary education; it should not be new ground that Mrs. Williams-Ellis must break to show us how to apply this knowledge to the problems of parenthood. I should like to hear her disseminating it far and wide by „media more popular than in these illiterate times a book can possibly be, for with a new book like this there is the danger that those who most need to read it will find the revolutionary concept of accepting absolutes as relative is too disturbing to be received and practically applied.
But this is in no way to belittle the admirable work Mrs. Williams. Ellis has done nor the good and constructive approach to parenthood that she indicates, and if one doubts whether this book can be valuable to those who so badly need it, the fault lies with our educa- tional system in a wider sense than mere schooling. But it may be that The Art of Being a Parent will become a pioneer of reform. Certainly it is reasonably enough priced and attractively enough written to suggest that top forms in girls' schools would be a very
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