In Loco Parentis If I told my children not to
lie on the floor resting their chins on their hands while watching television, because if they did it would be liable to make their faces misshapen, I would not expect them to desist from this practice for long, if indeed at all. I see that the BBC issued an admonition on these lines during the children's television programme the other day, and if, as I suspect, the nation's nurseries prove more subservient to the nice gentleman on the screen ,than they ever would have to their parents, we may be on the threshold of a new era in child-management. The juvenile viewer, regularly bombarded with cogent hints on deportment, will be easily recognised from his unregenerate contemporary; sitting bolt upright with his hands folded in his lap, never picking his nose or pulling his sister's hair, he will have been more or less hypnotised into model behaviour. When this new era dawns the vague qualms I feel when, for the sake of peace, I try to induce my children to go to look at television will, I expect, cease to trouble me. But will they go ?
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