Emma's Reviews > The Home-Maker

This was a pretty progressive story as it was written in 1924. It examines gender roles and societal norms; whether home-making can or should be enough; how to raise children. It raises issues of emotional neglect in children. It’s funny: I’m a teacher and in the staff room, we often bemoan parents who stick their children in front of the tv or a computer as a common form of childcare- where children are not engaged with or conversations are not had- and say ‘it never used to be like this’. But of course, it’s not only absorption in the latest technology that leaves children emotionally neglected from ‘absent’ parents, as this book reminds us. The story would have left an emotional glow from how this family resolve their difficulties, the rightness of the solution, were it not for the adults’ attitudes to Lester’s health and well-being.