Study of Child Life Part 5

For, of course, you do not require him to perform these duties for your sake, whatever you allow him to suppose about it, but chiefly for the sake of their influence on his character. Therefore, if the influence of any work is bad, you will change it, although the new work may not be nearly so much what you prefer to have him do.

Whatever the work is, if it is only emptying waste-baskets, don't nag him, merely expect him to do it, and expect it steadily.

[Sidenote: Helping]

In their earlier years all children love to help mother. They like any piece of real work even better than play. If this love of activity was properly encouraged, if the mother permitted the child to help, even when he succeeded only in hindering, he might well become one those fortunate persons who love to work. This is the real time for preventing laziness. But if this early period has been missed, the next best thing is to take advantage of every spontaneous interest as it arises; to hitch the impulse, as it were, to some task that must be steadily performed. For example, if the child wants to play with tools, help him to make a small water-wheel, or any other interesting contrivance, and keep him at it by various devices until he has brought it to a fair degree of completion Your aim is to stretch his will each time he attempts to do something a little further than it tends to go of itself; to let him work a little past his first impulse, so that he may learn by degrees to work when work is needed, and not only when he feels like it.

UNTIDINESS

[Sidenote: Neatness Not Natural]

Essentially a fault of immaturity as this is, we must beware how we measure it by a too severe adult standard. It is not natural for any young creature to take an interest in cleanliness. Even the young animals are cared for in this respect by their parents; the cow licks her calf; the cat, her kittens; and neither calf nor kittens seem to take much interest in the process. The conscious love of cleanliness and order grows with years, and seems to be largely a matter of custom. The child who has always lived in decent surroundings by-and-by finds them necessary to his comfort, and is willing to make a degree of effort to secure them. On the contrary, the street boy who sleeps in his clothes, does not know what it is to desire a well-made bed, and an orderly room.

[Sidenote: Remedies]

[Sidenote: Example]

[Sidenote: Habit]

The obvious method of overcoming this difficulty, then, is not to chide the child for the fault, but to make him so accustomed to pleasant surroundings that he not help but desire them. The whole process of making the child love order is slow but sure. It consists in (1) _Patient waiting on nature_: first, keep the baby himself sweet and clean, washing the young child yourself, two or three times a day, and showing your delight in his sweetness; dressing him so simply that he keeps in respectable order without the necessity of a painful amount of attention. (2) _Example_: He is to be accustomed to orderly surroundings, and though you ordinarily require him to put away some of his things himself, you do also a.s.sist this process by putting away a good deal to which you do not call attention. You make your home not only orderly but pretty, and yourself, also, that his love for you may lead him into a love for daintiness. (3) _Habits_: A few set observances may be safely and steadfastly demanded, but these should be _very_ few: Such as that he should not come to breakfast without brushing his teeth and combing his hair, or sit down to any meal with unwashed hands. Make them so few that you can be practically certain that they are attended to, for the whole value of the discipline is not in the superior condition of his teeth, but in the habit of mind that is being formed.

IMPUDENCE.

Impudence is largely due to, (1) lack of perception: (2) to bad example and to suggestion; and (3) to a double standard of morality.

[Sidenote: Lack of Perception]

(1.) In the first place, too much must not be expected of the young savages in the nursery. Remember that the children there are in a state very much more nearly resembling that of savage or half-civilized nation than resembling your own, and that, therefore, while they will undoubtedly take kindly to showy ceremonial, they are not ripe yet for most of the delicate observances. At best, you can only hope to get the crude material of good manners from them. You can hope that they will be in the main kind in intention, and as courteous under provocation as is consistent with their stage of development. If you secure this, you need not trouble yourself unduly over occasional lapses into perfectly innocent and wholesome barbarism.

Good manners are in the main dependent upon quick sympathies, because sympathies develop the perceptions. A child is much less likely to hurt the feelings or shock the sensibilities of a person whom he loves tenderly than of one for whom he cares very little. This is the chief reason why all children are much more likely to be offensive in speech and action before strangers than when alone in the bosom of their families. They are so far from caring what a stranger thinks or feels that they cannot even forecast his displeasure, nor imagine its reaction upon mother or father. The more, then, that the child's sympathies are broadened, the more he is encouraged to take an interest in all people, even strangers, the better mannered will he become.

[Sidenote: Bad Example]

(2.) Bad example is more common than is usually supposed. Very few parents are consistently courteous toward their children. They permit themselves a sharp tone of voice, and rough and abrupt habits of speech, that would scarcely be tolerated by any adult. Even an otherwise gentle and amiable woman is often disagreeable in her manner toward her children, commanding them to do things in a way well calculated to excite opposition, and rebuking wrong-doing in unmeasured terms. She usually reserves her soft and gentle speeches for her own friends and for her husband's, yet discourtesy cannot begin to harm them as it harms her children.

It is true that the children are often under foot when she is busiest, when, indeed, she is so distracted as to not be able to think about manners, but if she would acknowledge to herself that she ought to be polite, and that when she fails to be, it is because she has yielded to temptation; and if, moreover, she would make this acknowledgment openly to her children and beg their pardon for her sharp words, as she expects them to beg hers, the spirit of courtesy, at any rate, would prevail in her house, and would influence her children. Children are lovingly ready to forgive an acknowledged fault, but keen-eyed beyond belief in detecting a hidden one.

[Sidenote: Double Standard]

(3.) The most fertile cause of impudence is a.s.sumption of a double standard of morality, one for the child and another for the adult.

Impudence is, at bottom, the child's perception of this injustice, and his rebellion against it. When to this double standard,--a standard that measures up gossip, for instance, right for the adult and listening to gossip as wrong for the child--when to this is added the a.s.sumption of infallibility, it is no wonder that the child fairly rages.

For, if we come to a.n.a.lyze them, what are the speeches which find so objectionable? "Do it yourself, if you are so smart." "Maybe, I am rude, but I'm not any ruder than you are." "I think you are just as mean as mean can be; I wouldn't be so mean!" Is this last speech any worse in reality than "You are a very naughty little girl, and I am ashamed of you," and all sorts of other expressions of candid adverse opinion? Besides these forms of impudence, there is the peculiarly irritating: "Well, you do it yourself; I guess I can if you can."

In all these cases the child is partly it the right. He is stating the feet as he sees it, and violently a.s.serting that you are not privileged to demand more of him than of yourself. The evil comes in through the fact that he is doing it in an ugly spirit. He is not only desirous of stating the truth, but of putting you in the wrong and himself in the right, and if this hurts you, so much the better. All this is because he is angry, and therefor, in impudence, the true evil to be overcome is the evil of anger.

[Sidenote: Example]

Show him, then, that you are open to correction. Admit the justice of the rebuke as far as you can, and set him an example of careful courtesy and forbearance at the very moment when these traits are most conspicuously lacking in him. If some special point is involved, some question of privilege, quietly, but very firmly, defer the consideration of it until he is master of himself and can discuss the situation with an open mind and in a courteous manner.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.

In all these examples, which are merely suggestive, it is impossible to lay down an absolute moral recipe, because circ.u.mstances so truly alter cases--in all these no mention is made of corporal punishment.

This is because corporal punishment is never necessary, never right, but is always harmful.

[Sidenote: Moral Confusion]

There are three princ.i.p.al reasons why it should not be resorted to: _First_, because it is indiscriminate. To inflict bodily pain as a consequence of widely various faults, leads to moral confusion. The child who is spanked for lying, spanked for disobedience, and spanked again for tearing his clothes, is likely enough to consider these three things as much the same, as, at any rate, of equal importance, because they all lead to the same result. This is to lay the foundation for a permanent moral confusion, and a man who cannot see the nature of a wrong deed, and its relative importance, is incapable of guiding himself or others. Corporal punishment teaches a child nothing of the reason why what he does is wrong. Wrong must seem to him to be dependent upon the will of another, and its disagreeable consequences to be escapable if only he can evade the will of that other.

[Sidenote: Fear versus Love]

_Second_: Corporal punishment is wrong because it inculcates fear of pain as the motive for conduct, instead of love of righteousness. It tends directly to cultivate cowardice, deceitfulness, and anger--three faults worse than almost any fault against which it can be employed.

True, some persons grow up both gentle and straightforward in spite of the fact that they have been whipped in their youth, but it is in spite of, and not because of it. In their homes other good qualities must have counteracted the pernicious effect of this mistaken procedure.

[Sidenote: Sensibilities Blunted]

_Third_: Corporal punishment may, indeed, achieve immediate results such as seem at the moment to be eminently desirable. The child, if he be young enough, weak enough, and helpless enough, may be made to do almost anything by fear of the rod; and some of the things he may thus be made to do may be exactly the things that he ought to do; and this certainty of result is exactly what prompts many otherwise just and thoughtful persons to the use of corporal punishment. But these good results are obtained at the expense of the future. The effect of each spanking is a little less than the effect of the preceding one. The child's sensibilities blunt. As in the case of a man with the drug habit, it requires a larger and larger dose to produce the required effect. That is, if he is a strong child capable of enduring and resisting much. If, on the contrary, he is a weak child, whose slow budding will come only timidly into existence, one or two whippings followed by threats, may suffice to keep him in a permanently cowed condition, incapable of initiative, incapable of spontaneity.

The method of discipline here indicated, while it is more searching than any corporal punishment, does not have any of its disadvantages.

It is more searching, because it never blunts the child's sensibilities, but rather tends to refine them, and to make them more responsive.

[Sidenote: Educative Discipline]

[Sidenote: Permanent Results]

The child thus trained should become more susceptible, day by day, to gentle and elevating influences. This discipline is educative, explaining to the child why what he does is wrong, showing him the painful effects as inherent in the deed itself. He cannot, therefore, conceive of himself as being ever set free from the obligation to do right; for that obligation within his experience does not rest upon his mother's will or ability to inflict punishment, but upon the very nature of the universe of which he is a part. The effects of such discipline are therefore permanent. That which happens to the child in the nursery, also happens to him in the great world when he reaches manhood. His nursery training interprets and orders the world for him.

He comes, therefore, into the world not desiring to experiment with evil, but clear-eyed to detect it, and strong-armed to overcome it.

We are now ready to consider our subject in some of its larger aspects.

TEST QUESTIONS

The following questions const.i.tute the "written recitation" which the regular members of the A.S.H.E. answer in writing and send in for the correction and comment of the instructor. They are intended to emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the lesson.