Arthur Capper, Governor of Kansas and thirty- year United State Senator from Kansas, wrote the following in 1922: “As a friend of all boys and girls, I am sometimes troubled about them and their future and the country’s future, in which at no far-distant day they will have an important part to play.
“My concern chiefly is for the town-reared boy or girl, and it is not due, I’m sure, to mature years, not to any lack of sympathy on my part. The things that worry me are matter of rather common observation, and as this is again the school season, perhaps it will do no harm to set down some of them here.
“There is almost daily evidence in any community which shows how helpless is the present-day town or city-reared boy of the average well-to-do family to cope with any difficulty. If you know such a boy or girl you are aware that any situation which disarranges their plans, or that calls for a little self-denial on their part, or that brings any real disappointment no matter how trifling, floor them completely. They seem unable to deny themselves any pleasure or any whim to which they take a fancy. They have little or nothing apparently in their mental or moral makeup with which to combat any adversity. The fact is they are characterless, a misfortune for which their parents and not themselves are to blame. They are the butterflies. We see them everywhere, even in Kansas, but they abound in eastern cities and Washington, D.C. has its share. The parents of these boys and girls were brought up in no such namby-pamby fashion. The boys and girls of 40 to 50 years ago, in every family had certain daily duties they were expected to perform and did perform. Not only were they expected to go to school, but they were expected to get their lessons every day. They didn’t run around much, nor loaf around soda fountains. They didn’t spend as much money in a year as the average boy or girl in a day or a week, and then asks for more. They didn’t go dressed like fashion plates, more concerned over having to wear an out-of-style coat or a too long or a too loose shirt, than anything else in the world unless it was the date of the next dance. Nor did they feel they were inferior human beings and go about in shame and humility because the family did not own a motor car.
“In the homes of the well-to-do, the present generation of boys and girls are grown into men and women with characters as unformed as little children because their parents have spoiled them by overindulgence. They have given them too much money, gratified their every whim, given them no character-forming discipline. They keep this up until the boys get to an age where boys and girls are usually more or less beyond discipline and can scarcely be reasoned with. Then for the first time these parents begin to think they have made a mistake somewhere. They find their children have no intellectual resources. That they cannot have a good time unless they are spending money. That they are bored to extinction if there isn’t “some place to go,” some show or entertainment to be enjoyed. To sit down and read a good book is to them a punishment instead of a pleasure. “It is when this stage is reached that these over-indulgent parents begin to realize that when the time comes for their boys and girls to face the common difficulties of life, they are going to be terribly up against it. All that because they had easy-going, too indulgent fathers and mothers who let them drift along because “everybody else’s” boys and girls were trailing along the same line of least resistance. They wanted their children “to enjoy life while they were young” and have everything that the most petted, most spoiled boy or girl in town had, and then did not realize this was mistaken kindness, that they were robbing their children of the very qualities of upbringing which had made their parents resourceful and successful men and women.
“Now that I have this out of my system, it reads a little like a scolding to parents, but I am far from meaning it that way. I have been a little more earnest than I intended to be because I feel some plain speaking is timely, and because I wish every boy and girl to have a fair chance to get on in the world.
