OUR CHILDREN
Patri, Angelo
Our Children By Angelo Patri= TO THE troubled 12-year old girl who wrote to me about the trouble she was having with her companions, her great loneliness and unhappiness at home and in school, and...
...One victory through usefulness will lift your spirit, boost your pride, sustain your self-respect...
...Hold on to it...
...The first law of self-preservation is self-respect...
...Our Children By Angelo Patri= TO THE troubled 12-year old girl who wrote to me about the trouble she was having with her companions, her great loneliness and unhappiness at home and in school, and to all those in her group, I have this to say...
...Be yourself and be useful...
...You have to grow inside your own and make that fit...
...Nobody is ever going to do that for you any more...
...Hold On To Self-Respect When you allow yourself to be teased, when you retreat from a struggle with the ready-tongued, fast-thinking leaders, you fall another step backwards and it is going to be harder for you next time to speak for yourself...
...You are intelligent girls, proved by the fact that you are 12-years-old and soon to enter high school...
...You can't live in the other fellow's skin...
...You must spend yourself in winning friends, in gaining interests in your school life and in your community...
...You have passed that stage...
...It won't fit you...
...Stand Up For Yourself Study your home, your school, your community and pick out one job, be it ever so humble, that you can do and do well, and make that job yours so thoroughly that nobody else can ever touch you in it...
...Be useful...
...You must learn now or never to stand up for yourself, for your own ideas, for your way of life...
...You can be talked to as understanding young people, not as babies, crying for somebody to cradle and comfort you...
...Time will do the rest...
...When you begin to feel yourself a bit inferior to this one and that one because of style, dress, manners,, proficiency, smartness, you are in danger...
...Attend to your own...
...Stop worrying about the other fellow's success...
...Make up your mind that you are not Helene, or Godfrey, but you are just as good a person in your own right as Mary Jane or John, and you might do even better...
...I'll tell you how to find a way to like yourself a lot...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 16
