It is as if they did
not know how to search for the children without the assistance of
the children themselves. Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of
such cases is their revelation of the premature dependence of the
older and wiser upon the young and foolish, which is in itself
often responsible for the situation because it has given the
children an undue sense of their own importance and a false
security that they can take care of themselves.
On the other hand, an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking
at the public school will help her mother to connect the entire
family with American food and household habits. That the mother
has never baked bread in Italy--only mixed it in her own house
and then taken it out to the village oven--makes all the more
valuable her daughter's understanding of the complicated cooking
stove. The same thing is true of the girl who learns to sew in
the public school, and more than anything else, perhaps, of the
girl who receives the first simple instruction in the care of
little children--that skillful care which every tenement-house
baby requires if he is to be pulled through his second summer. As
a result of this teaching I recall a young girl who carefully
explained to her Italian mother that the reason the babies in
Italy were so healthy and the babies in Chicago were so sickly,
was not, as her mother had firmly insisted, because her babies in
Italy had goat's milk and her babies in America had cow's milk,
but because the milk in Italy was clean and the milk in Chicago
was dirty.
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