Parent and Child - Child Study and Training Part 5

5. What is the relation of habit to training and education?

6. What is the relation of habit to the skilled workman?

7. In what way can the expert increase efficiency in every vocation and profession?

8. How might much time be saved in the home and on the farm by the acquirement of effective habits in work?

_Reference_: For further study of habit see "Phillip's Elementary Psychology."

HABIT CONTINUED

_Right Habits Must Be Acquired Early; Wrong Habits Are Broken Only Through Tremendous Effort_

Whatsoever the parent desires in his child in the nature of attainment or skill, of character or ideal, if not foreign to the nature of the child, may be realized through attention to habit. But the training in right habits should be accomplished during the golden age of childhood when body and soul are plastic and impressions are easily made. Too early the character hardens like cement and thereafter becomes well nigh impossible to change. Think how difficult it is for the adult, but how easy for the child, to acquire skill in music, or facility in speaking a foreign language. With respect to moral virtue and spiritual sentiment, whatsoever good fruit you look for in the man usually appears as seed and flower in the child.

Among the habits that should be impressed early, habits that are absolutely essential to success in life, are the following:

1. Promptness and regularity.

2. Obedience to right and justice.

3. Truthfulness and honesty.

4. Thoroughness.

5. Industry or the habit of work.

6. Persistence.

7. Temperance.

8. Courtesy and respect for the rights of others.

Crowning these and transcending them in importance are the supreme sentiments and ideals of life, which cannot properly be regarded as habits; they are sympathy, love, faith, reverence for religious convictions, and the ideal of freedom or liberty.

Society itself could not endure but for the stability which habits afford.

It is easy to denounce custom and tradition as obstacles to progress and reform, but it should be remembered that they are the social habits which society has acquired through registering the experience of the past, and that while some of them, such as intemperance and s.e.xual vice, are destructive of society, others, like co-operation, and the ideal of freedom, are absolutely essential to human progress.

An example by Oppenheim, in his "Mental Growth and Control," well ill.u.s.trates the power of habit. A wealthy woman in New York City became interested in the crowded tenements of the east side; she believed that constant sickness, unclean habits, and the vicious characters of the people were due largely to overcrowding. She secured, therefore, some well furnished cottages in the suburbs and offered them rent free until such time as the occupants should become well established. Her surprise was great when they refused to move into these comparatively luxurious quarters; they seemed to prefer the dirt and disease, the sickness and vice to which they were accustomed. "She did not know the force of habit; she was totally ignorant of the hard and fast condition into which people grow.

She had never stopped to consider how necessary it is for the world at large to have such repression. Without this control there could be no peace, no safety, no steady growth in civilized society. The poor would attack the rich, the lawless and violent would a.s.sail the peaceful, the indolent would refuse to labor, the regularity and studied discipline of well-ordered life would absolutely cease. In their place anarchy would reign and each day would make confusion worse confounded. Imagine, if you can, what animals would be if they lacked restraint of habit. Man's power over them would cease instantly and their strength would be a terrible engine of destruction. Men would be as much worse as human intelligence exceeds brute intelligence. One is quite safe in declaring that habit is the great flywheel that regulates society."

Desirable habits, therefore, together with all necessary reforms, must come about slowly; they should be the result of conscious training and education in all the factors that make for a higher civilization.

LESSON IX

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What are some habits essential to success?

2. When should training to fix these habits begin? Why?

3. Why do many parents fail to fix right habits in their children?

4. How may wrong habits be overcome and right habits established?

5. What does Solomon say in regard to training the child?

6. Give reasons why community habits are so hard to change? What is the good side of this strength of habit?

7. What is the quickest and surest way to bring about desirable social reforms?

MAXIMS ON HABIT

_Professor James Gives Four Maxims to Follow in Breaking from an Old Habit or in Acquiring a New One_

"1. _Take care 'o launch yourself with as strong and decided initiative as possible_. Reinforce the right motive with every favorable circ.u.mstance; put yourself in a condition that will make the right act easy and the wrong one difficult. Take a public pledge if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid possible.

"2. _Never suffer an exception to occur until the new habit is securely rooted_. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of yarn that is being wound; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. It is necessary above all things never to lose a battle; every gain on the wrong side undoes the effects of many conquests on the right.

"3. _Seize every opportunity to act in the direction of the desired habit, and permit no emotional prompting in its behalf to escape you_. 'h.e.l.l is paved with good intentions,' hence to have good desires, thoughts, intentions without actually working them out weakens and destroys the moral fibre. 'Character is a completely fashioned will,' says J.S. Mill, and a will in this sense is an aggregate of tendencies which act in a firm, prompt, and definite way in every emergency of life. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing fruit in action, it is worse than a chance lost, it is a positive hindrance to the carrying out of future resolutions. Nothing is more contemptible than a sentimental dreamer who is carried away with lofty thoughts and feeling but who never does a manly, concrete deed. Positive harm is done through cultivating the emotions and sentiments if no outlet is found for some appropriate action.

"4. _Keep the faculty of effort alive by a little gratuitous exercise every day_. That is, be heroic, do every day something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need comes, it may find you nerved and trimmed to stand the test. The man who practices self-denial in unnecessary things will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in a blast.

"The h.e.l.l which theology once taught is no worse than the h.e.l.l we make for ourselves by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

Every small stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.

The drunken Rip Van Winkle excuses each drink he takes by saying, 'I won't count this time.' He may not count it, and a kind heaven may not count it, but down among his nerve cells and in the muscle fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we do in a strict, scientific sense is ever wiped out; each thought and every deed is registered in the soul and helps to compose that book out of which we will be judged on that great final day when we are called upon to render an account of our stewardship."

Notwithstanding the difficulty, however, habits may be strengthened, or abolished. The older they are the more difficult they will be to modify; the chief factor involved is the amount of labor required to make the change, the possibility of making it need never be questioned. Breaking the habit of excessive use of drugs, tobacco, tea and coffee, or alcohol, will occasion much discomfort, hardship, and even functional disturbance, but these ills are only temporary, and the organism soon returns to its original normal condition.

To break a well-established habit requires common sense, decision and strength of purpose. "If you want to abolish a habit, you must grapple with the matter as earnestly as you would with a physical enemy. You must go into the encounter with all tenacity of determination, with all fierceness of resolve, with a pa.s.sion for success that may be called vindictive. No human enemy can be as insidious, as persevering, as unrelenting as an unfavorable habit. It never sleeps, it needs no rest, it has no tendency toward vacillation and lack of purpose. It is like the parasite that grows with the growth of the supporting body and like a parasite, it can best be killed by violent separation and crushing.

"Every time we make an unsuccessful attempt, the final crushing is indefinitely postponed, every time we put off the attempt, the desired result fades farther and farther away. The habit persists and from time to time the path becomes deeper and broader. In addition, during such a period of weakness and indecision, you may be fostering another habit, that of expecting defeat. From this lack of confidence and little faith in yourself and destiny, you must by all means escape at any cost. There is nothing more pathetic than the man who does not believe in himself. No one else will believe in him. But he who has the enthusiasm of belief in himself and never loses sight of his high purpose is the one who can perform wonders."

LESSON X