Page:1954 Juvenile Delinquency Testimony.pdf/167

Rh Most children don’t haye such problems. Mothers can do the best they can to try to reassure such children.

The oldest boy cannot tolerate anything in the way of a story, even Peter Rabbit, who, if you reeal} your Peter Rabbit, went into a garden where his father got into an accident at the hands of a hoe of a farmer and had been put ina rabbit pie.

Lt had to take him screaming out of the prppet show on that picture.

He would leave the room if Jack and the Beanstalk was being read io the other children. Ie wonld iuen off the radio and he would reject any book or any comic that had any of these problems.

My second son, who was a little older and a different type of child,

instead of rejecting it has tried to solve the problem, and he is not <o much addicted to crime eomies, he is not addicted to crime comics at all, as far as that is concerned, but he loves to watch for hours on end television, radio, and movies which dea] with these same sitbjects.

T think for him it is an effort to find a solution of the mystery of life and death and how it can happen that a child's father can leave him even before the child knows the father.

For my daughter, who was a baby, last year m school she spent the time writing for her teacher crime stories, murder stories, in which the bloody head of the person who had been attacked would lie on the lap of the beloved person, whoever it was, and an effort would be made to soothe it.

This worried her teacher very much and she came to me with this problem. She said, "Is she reading too many crime comics?"

I said, "As far as I know she doesn't read them at all."

Not that I refuse them to her. She doesn't listen to television like the second child does, and she doesn't go to the movies very often.

But I said, "It is her way of solving her problem."

Now, she has votten that. problem. solved apparently. She has gone through this, and for her it is her solution.

Now, T can well imagine children, and I know plenty of disturbed children from homes where they have less support than my children do, because, after all, my children have not only had the support otf myself, but of our very many friends, who on occasions of these various things, and, after all, there are lots of children in the world whose fathers have been killed by gangsters or who don't know who their fathers are, and who live in a gangster's world and whose faihers are gangsters killing other peopleI don't know that crime is quite as had in the world as we iry to make il ont to be, and these children Tam sure will be disturbed by such things,

It they have to be exposed to them, or are exposed to them, they should have a wise adwt who can discuss the matiers with them and talk it over with them.

Mr. . Many of them do not.

Dr. . Many of them do not.

Mr. . You are on the editorial advisory board of the Superman Comics?

Dr. . That is right.

Mr. . I gather you were in the courtroom today and heard the discussion?

Dr. . I was.