THE AMERICAN CHILD
By Elizabeth McCracken. Houghton Mifflin, Riverside
Press. 191 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of The Survey $1.35.
To gain the sympathetic and accurate knowledge of children shown in his book, Mr. Coulter stood on the reviewing stand for ten years. His was the eye to see and the heart to feel from the first, but as clerk of the Children’s Court in Manhattan for ten years he had the unique opportunity of looking into the faces of a procession of 100,000 dependent, neglected and delinquent children as they filed by the judge and told their stories.
These stories he often verified in alley, street, tenement, station house, reformatory and prison. He shows how crowded streets, lack of play space, poverty, sickness, insanitary houses, criminal companions and parental neglect provide a fruitful soil in which to breed neglected and delinquent boys and girls. These conditions he charges to the greed of individuals and to the careless, neglectful indifference of society.
As a means of helping individual boys who need the personal touch of a friend right now, Mr. Coulter started the Big Brother Movement, which is spreading all over the country. His permanent remedy for the woes of children, however, requires not only the love of Big Brothers, parents and friends, but also sanitary houses, good food, playgrounds, fresh air and sky. Mr. Coulter’s pen pictures of Children in the Shadow challenge us all not to rest until all such children are brought out into the sunlight.
Miss McCracken’s book is a reprint of articles which originally appeared in the Outlook, and deals with actual children and parents of rather exceptional intelligence in both city and country. What these exceptional American parents do for their children in home, play, school, library and church is told in such a way as to appeal to and educate parents who are not exceptional.
What children do for their parents is also set forth. The real message of the book is that the reciprocal relation of children and parents can be and should be one of the most beautiful and helpful that this old world knows. The title might have been True Stories of Parents Who Knew How to Live with Their Children.
Henry W. Thurston.