Parental Delinquents
Most parents have a fairly clear mental picture of the ideal school ; all teachers have a very definite picture of the ideal parent —an efficient, kindly agency, which despatches children'at the right time in the right clothes and with the right equipment to the right place each morning, and welcomes them back at night with wholesome food and no less wholesome counsel. The National Association of Head Teachers, which ought to know, believes that the best breed of parent is disappearing, largely because mothers are deserting their homes for work outside. It is children from these homes, said one of the speakers at the Association's conference this week, " who arrive late for school, who are untidy, forget their dinner-money and are generally the most unsatisfactory." But in fact the " working mother "•is an imprecise concept. A mother who spends all her days in the home and has six children to look after may be a less effective guardian than a mother of, two children/who deposits one at a nursery school and the other at a Council school on her way out to work and divides the evening between their care and the other household duties. Overwork in the home is unfortunately still The rule rather than the exception, but even without washing machines it is presumably less common than it used to be. A- mother who goes out to work because she enjoys the company which it -brings may, perhaps, fall into the category of " bad parent," but presumably she would be_ in this category • anyway. And in fact most working mothers do a job because they have been encouraged to see in this a contribution of national value.
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