The American Child Part 1

The American Child.

by Elizabeth McCracken.

PREFACE

The purpose of this preface is that of every preface--to say "thank you" to the persons who have helped in the making of the book.

I would render thanks first of all to the Editors of the "Outlook" for permission to reprint the chapters of the book which appeared as articles in the monthly magazine numbers of their publication.

I return thanks also to Miss Rosamond F. Rothery, Miss Sara Cone Bryant, Miss Agnes F. Perkins, and Mr. Ferris Greenslet. Without the help and encouragement of all of these, the book never would have been written.

Finally, I wish to say an additional word of thanks to my physician, Dr.

John E. Stillwell. Had it not been for his consummate skill and untiring care after an accident, which, four years ago, made me a year-long hospital patient, I should never have lived to write anything.

E. McC.

CAMBRIDGE, January, 1913

INTRODUCTION

One day several years ago, when Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson's statement that he had found no conversation and--worse still--no conversationalists in America was fresh in our outraged minds, I happened to meet an English woman who had spent approximately the same amount of time in our country as had Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson. "What has been your experience?" I anxiously asked her. "Is it true that we only 'talk'? Can it really be that we never 'converse'?"

"Dear me, no!" she exclaimed with gratifying fervor. "You are the most delightful conversationalists in the world, on your own subject--"

"Our own subject?" I echoed.

"Certainly," she returned; "your own subject, the national subject,--the child, the American child. It is possible to 'converse' with any American on that subject; every one of you has something to say on it; and every one of you will listen eagerly to what any other person says on it. You modify the opinions of your hearers by what you say; and you actually allow your own opinions to be modified by what you hear said.

If that is conversation, without a doubt you have it in America, and have it in as perfect a state as conversation ever was had anywhere. But you have it only on that subject. I wonder why," she went on, half- musingly, before I could make an attempt to persuade her to qualify her rather sweeping a.s.sertion. "It may be because you do so much for children, in America. They are always on your mind; they are hardly ever out of your sight. You are forever either doing something for them, or planning to do something for them. No wonder the child is your one subject of conversation. You do so _very_ much for children in America,"

she repeated.

Few of us will agree with the English woman that the child, the American child, is the only subject upon which we converse. Certainly, though, it is a favorite subject; it may even not inaptly be called our national subject. Whatever our various views concerning this may chance to be, however, it is likely that we are all in entire agreement with regard to the other matter touched upon by the English woman,--the pervasiveness of American children. Is it not true that we keep them continually in mind; that we seldom let them go quite out of sight; that we are always doing, or planning to do, something for them? What is it that we would do? And why is it that we try so unceasingly to do it?

It seems to me that we desire with a great desire to make the boys and girls do; that all of the "_very_ much" that we do for them is done in order to teach them just that--to do. It is a large and many-sided and varicolored desire, and to follow its leadings is an arduous labor; but is there one of us who knows a child well who has not this desire, and who does not cheerfully perform that labor? Having decided in so far as we are able what were good to do, we try, not only to do it ourselves, in our grown-up way, but so to train the children that they, too, may do it, in their childish way. The various means that we find most helpful to the end of our own doing we secure for the children,--adapting them, simplifying them, and even re-shaping them, that the boys and girls may use them to the full.

There is, of course, a certain impersonal quality in a great deal of what we, in America, do for children. It is not based so much on friendship for an individual child as on a sense of responsibility for the well-being of all childhood, especially all childhood in our own country. But most of what we do, after all, we do for the boys and girls whom we know and love; and we do it because they are our friends, and we wish them to share in the good things of our lives,--our work and our play. To what amazing lengths we sometimes go in this "doing for" the children of our circles!

One Sat.u.r.day afternoon, only a few weeks ago, I saw at the annual exhibit of the State Board of Health, a man, one of my neighbors, with his little eight-year old boy. The exhibit consisted of the customary display of charts and photographs, showing the nature of the year's work in relation to the milk supply, the water supply, the housing of the poor, and the prevention of contagious diseases. My neighbor is not a specialist in any one of these matters; his knowledge is merely that of an average good citizen. He went from one subject to the other, studying them. His boy followed close beside him, looking where his father looked,--if with a lesser interest at the charts, with as great an intentness at the photographs. As they made their way about the room given over to the exhibit, they talked, the boy asking questions, the father endeavoring to answer them.

The small boy caught sight of me as I stood before one of the charts relating to the prevention of contagious diseases, and ran across the room to me. "What are _you_ looking at?" he said. "That! It shows how many people were vaccinated, doesn't it? Come over here and see the pictures of the calves the doctors get the stuff to vaccinate with from!"

"Isn't this an odd place for a little boy on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon?" I remarked to my neighbor, a little later, when the boy had roamed to the other side of the room, out of hearing.

"Not at all!" a.s.serted the child's father. "He was inquiring the other day why he had been vaccinated, why all the children at school had been vaccinated. Just before that, he had asked where the water in the tap came from. This is just the place for him right now! It isn't odd at all for him to be here on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It is much odder for _me_"

he continued with a smile. "I'd naturally be playing golf! But when children begin to ask questions, one has to do something about answering them; and coming here seemed to be the best way of answering these newest questions of my boy's. I want him to learn about the connection of the state with these things; so he will be ready to do his part in them, when he gets to the 'voting age.'"

"But can he understand, yet?" I ventured.

"More than if he hadn't seen all this, and heard about what it means,"

my neighbor replied.

It is not unnatural, when a child asks questions so great and so far- reaching as those my neighbor's small boy had put to him, that we should "do something about answering them,"--something as vivid as may be within our power. But, even when the queries are of a minor character, we still bestir ourselves until they are adequately answered.

"Mamma," I heard a little girl inquire recently, as she fingered a sc.r.a.p of pink gingham of which her mother was making "rompers" for the baby of the family, "why are the threads of this cloth pink when you unravel it one way, and white when you unravel it the other?"

The mother was busy; but she laid aside her sewing and explained to the child about the warp and the woof in weaving.

"I don't _quite_ see why _that_ makes the threads pink one way and white the other," the little girl said, perplexedly, when the explanation was finished.

"When you go to kindergarten, you will," I suggested.

"But I want to know now," the child demurred.

The next day I got for the little girl at a "kindergarten supply"

establishment a box of the paper woofs and warps, so well-known to kindergarten pupils. Not more than three or four days elapsed before I took them to the child; but I found that her busy mother had already provided her with some; pink and white, moreover, among other colors; and had taught the little girl how to weave with them.

"She understands, _now_, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one way and white the other!" the mother observed.

"Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some curiosity.

"Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time.

She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do the spending the better for knowing just what she is buying,--what it is made of, and how it is made!"

It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents of all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me, however, that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of any other era or nation, think, in training their children, of what one might designate as a most minutely detailed future. The mother of whom I have been telling wished to teach her little girl not only how to buy, but how to buy gingham; and the father desired his small boy to learn not alone that his state had a board of health, but that he might hope to become a member of a particular department of it.

We occasionally hear elderly persons exclaim that children of the present day are taught a great many things that did not enter into the education of their grandparents, or even of their parents. But, on investigation, we scarcely find that this is the case. What we discover is that the children of to-day are taught, not new lessons, but the old lessons by a new method. Sewing, for example: little girls no longer make samplers, working on them the letters of the alphabet in "cross- st.i.tch"; they learn to do cross-st.i.tch letters, only they learn not by working the entire alphabet on a square of linen merely available to "learn on," but by working the initials of a mother or an aunt on a "guest towel," which later serves as a Christmas or a birthday gift of the most satisfactory kind! Perhaps one of the best things we do for the little girls of our families is to teach them to take their first st.i.tches to some definite end. Certainly we do it with as conscientious a care as ever watched over the st.i.tches of the little girls of old as they made the faded samplers we cherish so affectionately.

The brothers of these little girls learned carpentry, when they were old enough to handle tools with safety. The boys of to-day also learn it; some of them begin long before they can handle any tools with safety, and when they can handle no tool at all except a hammer. As soon as they wish to drive nails, they are allowed to drive them, and taught to drive them to some purpose. I happened not a great while ago to pa.s.s the day at the summer camp of a friend of mine who is the mother of a small boy, aged five. My friend's husband was constructing a rustic bench.

The little boy watched for a time; then, "Daddy, _I_ want to put in nails," he said.

"All right," replied his father; "you may. Just wait a minute and I'll let you have the hammer and the nails. Your mother wants some nails in the kitchen to hang the tin things on. If she will show you where she wants them, I'll show you how to put them in."

This was done, with much gayety on the part of us all. When the small boy, tutored by his father, had driven in all the required nails, he lifted a triumphant face to his mother. "There they are!" he exclaimed.

"Now let's hang the tin things on them, and see how they look!"

The boy's father did not finish the rustic bench that day. When a neighboring camper, who stopped in to call toward the end of the afternoon, expressed surprise at his apparent dilatoriness, and asked for an explanation, the father simply said, "I did mean to finish it to- day, but I had to do something for my boy instead."

One of the things we grown-ups do for children that has been rather severely criticized is the lavishing upon them of toys,--intricate and costly toys. "What, as a child, I used to _pretend_ the toys I had, were, the toys my children have now, _are_!" an acquaintance of mine was saying to me recently. "For instance," she went on, "I had a box with a hole in one end of it; I used to pretend that it was a camera, and pretend to take pictures with it! I cannot imagine my children doing that! They have real cameras and take real pictures."

The camera would seem to be typical of the toys we give to the children of to-day; they can do something with it,--something real.

The dearest treasure of my childhood was a tiny gold locket, shaped, and even engraved, like a watch. Not long ago I was showing it to a little girl who lives in New York. "I used to pretend it _was_ a watch," I said; "I used to pretend telling the time by it."

She gazed at it with interested eyes. "It is very nice," she observed politely; "but wouldn't you have liked to have a _real_ watch? _I_ have one; and I _really_ tell the time by it."