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Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter cover

Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

Chapter 73: FOOTNOTES
By James Sully
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Parenthood & Family RelationsPsychiatry/Psychology

About This Book

Selections present observational essays on early mental life, tracing how imagination and play animate perception, transform objects, and scaffold language and thought. Chapters examine playful fiction, pretend roles, and the serious side of make-believe; the emergence of naming, sentence-building, and inquisitive, reflective thought; first ideas about nature, self, birth, dreams, and the supernatural; the onset of fears, nighttime terrors, and recovery; moral tendencies including lying, truthfulness, obedience and rebellion; and first aesthetic responses and drawing. Emphasis is on careful case examples and temperamental differences to show gradual development of perception, emotion, social understanding, and creative expression in childhood.

Fig. 23.

Yet while children's drawings are thus so far away from those reproductions of the look of a thing which we call pictures, they are after all a kind of rude art. Even the amusing errors which they contain, though a shock to our notions of pictorial semblance, have at least this point of analogy to art, that they aim at selecting and presenting what is characteristic and valuable. In many of the rude drawings with which we have here been occupied we may detect faint traces of individual originality, especially in the endeavour to give life and expression to the form. To this it is right to add that some drawings of young children from two to six which I have seen are striking proofs of the early development now and again of the artist's feeling for what is characteristic in line, and for the economic suggestiveness of a bare stroke (see Fig. 25 (a) and (b)). When once a child's eye is focussed for the prettiness of things the dawn of æsthetic perception is pretty sure to bring with it a more serious effort to reproduce their look. Among children, as among adults, it is love which makes the artist.

Fig. 24 (a).

 

Fig. 24 (b).

 

Fig. 25 (a) (drawn by a boy aged two years one month).
Fig. 25 (b) (drawn by a girl of five and a half years).

 

FOOTNOTES

[1] From a paper by Mrs. Robert Jardine.

[2] The Invisible Playmate, p. 33 ff.

[3] I owe this and other observations on the treatment of dolls to Dr. Stanley Hall's curious researches.

[4] From an article on "The Philosophy of Dolls," Chambers' Journal, 1881.

[5] See my account of George Sand's childhood, in Studies of Childhood, chap. xii.

[6] The Development of the Intellect (Appleton & Co.), p. 155.

[7] I am indebted for these illustrations to an article by Dr. Stanley Hall on "The Contents of Children's Minds".

[8] Mrs. Meynell gives an example of this in her volume The Children ("The Man with Two Heads").

[9] See his poem, Anecdote for Fathers, showing how the practice of lying may be taught. ("Poems referring to the period of childhood.")

[10] From a published article by Mrs. Robert Jardine (compare above, pp. 16, 17).

[11] Fig. 1 (a) is a drawing of a man by a child of twenty months, reproduced from Prof. M. Baldwin's Mental Development, p. 84; Fig. 1 (b) is a drawing of a man by a child of two years three months, reproduced from an article on children's drawings by Mr. H. T. Lukens in The Pedagogical Seminary, vol. iv. (1896).

[12] Reproduced from the article already referred to, by Mr. Lukens.

[13] Fig. 9 (a) is a reproduction of a drawing of a girl of four and a half years, from Mr. Lukens' article.