The boy at the bat is one of 6,000 children's paintings that Junior Red Cross has selected in the last year for exhibition here and overseas through its International School Art Program. Wayne, age 11, of Pittsburgh, Pa. painted it. Danny, age 4, of New York City painted the picture below. uent behavior. This not only pushes the child outside the pale at an age where acceptance by the group is particularly vital, but often embroils him in the all too undiscriminating processes of the police, the courts and corrective institutions. We know today that delinquent behavior is only a reflexion of what the child has re¬ceived from parents and society. It is only after truly finding himself in the earlier phases of adolescence that the youth is able to reach a more mature level in which he is capable of intimate friendship and love for others. Often it is the friend¬ships formed in late adolescence that last most intensely through the rest of life; this is the time when most mar¬riages are made. Finally, after the other stages have been lived through, comes true maturity. The adult emerges from his ab¬sorption in those he loves most closely, and includes wider and wider circles in his concern. The father and mother produce children and love them truly. They will make every necessary sacrifice for them—not the loudly protesting sacrifice or the forced one—but the spontaneous, uncounted one. Though each parent's de¬votion is given freely to the children, the other parent does not feel this as subtracted from his share. The good parents' love does not try to possess the child, or keep him a babyish plaything, or force him to act out their ambitions. It is a love that, without having to be re-minded, naturally respects the child as a person and enjoys seeing his potentialities unfold. True parental love goes further and considers the child as not just its own but as held in trust for the community. This is because mature people have a deep sense of them¬selves as participants in a wider society and as owing allegiance to the spiritual aspirations of that society. We know some of the more obvious obstacles that interfere with the development of the final stages of maturity. The inability of the world to achieve peace keeps us all anxious and suspicious. In America we have not yet succeeded in stabilizing and integrating our spiritual ideals. Our lack of set traditions has been one of the keys of our progress but it also robs many of us of the secure enjoyment of life which stable tra¬ditions give to other societies. Some of the ideals that are constantly held up to us by advertisements, by motion pictures, by radios, such as youthfulness, wealth and sophistication, may not be vicious but they are certainly not the prime parental virtues either. What are some of the more specific difficulties of parents that we see clinically? There is the anxiety which so many feel, especially when facing the care of their first child. One root of this is inexperience. In simpler societies girls and boys are taking care of their younger brothers and sisters from early childhood right through adolescence. There is never a chance to forget how to hold a baby's head, what to feed him, how to make him behave. Our respect for scientific authority has also created anxiety in that it has robbed young parents of a natural confidence in their ability to take care of their children and made them vulnerable to every shift of scientific discovery and opinion. In simpler days parents never doubted that they knew what was right. Now they must ask, "What's the latest theory?" Why are married mothers of even young children going to work in ever increasing numbers? Is it, as they say, because the payments on the new house are stiff? Is it that work in an office is more companionable or exciting than staying home? Is it that caring for children makes them tense and irritable? These ques¬tions are important ones and we'd better find some solutions. Anyone who works with parents—as physician, nurse, social worker, teacher—finds mothers who are resentful, either frankly or covertly, about their role as house¬keeper and child rearer. One root may go back to rivalry with brother or antagonism to mother in early child¬hood. Another factor may be that most of our schools from kindergarten through college focus so largely on the world outside the home: commerce, science, tech¬nology, the arts, communication, politics, that it is dif¬ficult for a girl not to get the idea that the only con¬tribution the world respects is in these fields. For boys, too, our education neglects, out of all proportion, the importance and the satisfaction of human relations, of family living, of rearing fine children. Incidentally, this failure of schools to sensitize men to human feel¬ings impairs the effectiveness and happiness of men in their roles as lawyers, doctors, factory workers, and hus¬bands, as well as in their roles as fathers. Have we, with all our proud inventiveness in taking some of the drudgery out of housework and child care, ignored the emotional aspects of the problem and left even the most loving of mothers feeling somewhat an¬chored, isolated and bored when there is a young child to keep her at home? In pictures in the National Geo¬graphic Magazine and Margaret Mead's motion pic¬tures the mothers are sitting around in a clearing be¬tween their huts enjoying each other's company while they weave, cook, and watch the children. Can't we try the same idea with a glamorized community center, right in the midst of a shopping district, where children are welcome and there are nursery school teachers to help, where mothers can spend a couple of hours gos¬siping, sewing, modeling clay, watching a style show or an educational motion picture? Though our knowledge is incomplete in most aspects of personality development, there is plenty of knowl¬edge to do an infinitely better job than is being done today. The most obvious and immediate needs, to my mind, are to provide more and earlier help for emo¬tionally neglected children, and to improve our schools. I think the most fundamental question is: Why are so many parents unable to enjoy their children? We know what some of the causes are in individuals and that individual psychotherapy can be effective in certain cases. But we have not studied the problem from a broad public health point of view and we have not begun to think of broad solutions. We must see what educational methods, from nursery school through col¬lege, can do to keep alive the delight in children which is usually present in childhood, and to bring the boy and girl to adulthood with the feeling that there is no more important, honorable, and soul-satisfying job than having and caring for children. * Dr. Spock, one of America's most widely read authors, wrote "Baby and Child Care," a family text- book. Director of the Rochester, Minn., Child Health Institute and a noted psychiatrist, he gave the keynote address at the Midcentury White House Conference for Children and Youth from which this article is taken. 11