The Project Gutenberg eBook, On the Training of Parents, by Ernest Hamlin Abbott

ON THE TRAINING OF PARENTS

I SPASM AND HABIT

A voice like a knife cut the still, warm air. "Now you just go right down and get that canned salmon." I turned my head and saw a little girl, in a fluffy dress with a skirt like a parachute, standing in the midst of the long grass. She was evidently frightened and hesitating. There was a whimper and a whining protest. A young woman in a wrapper, with a menacing switch in her hand, was advancing. Her voice grew sharper: "You do what I say, quick, or I'll whip you good!" The child beat a retreat toward me; then timidly stood her ground. "It's so far!" she wailed. The enemy again approached; but the little feet of the child were nimble enough to keep her at a safe distance. "If you don't hurry, I'll whip you anyway." Fear of the switch was evidently mastering the dislike of the task. The little girl burst out crying, turned down the dusty road, and disappeared in the direction of the village.

That incident was the result of government by collision. If that mother had any principle at all, it might be expressed thus: Wait till the child does wrong, then collide with her. Of course none of us would deliberately collide in just this fashion. We should not be so vulgar. When we have an altercation with a child, we choose less publicity and have some regard for refinement of phrase. Perhaps, too, we ordinarily avoid altercation entirely except concerning some grave matter. We should prefer to do without canned salmon rather than exhibit our impotence and our temper before the neighbors. When, however, we have the child in seclusion at our mercy, are we deterred from trying the collision method by any considerations of principle? If not, we belong to the same school of parents as the young woman in a wrapper. The only difference is that we have not her courage of conviction—or of indolence.

Now, those who believe in government by collision need read no further; for I shall assume that such government is only just better than no government at all, and that, if we fall into its methods, we do so by accident or because of the frailty of our temper; that every altercation with a child is a confession of weakness; and that our principal task is to train ourselves so that we may be able to govern a child without colliding with him. Of course, in the training of children, as in managing a railway, it may sometimes be necessary to occasion a disaster in order to avoid a great catastrophe. If a freight car is running wild down a grade, it is better to throw it off the track than to allow it to smash a loaded passenger train. So it may sometimes be better to let a child collide with you, rather than have him collide with the community. But in both cases it is better to have the collision well planned, to recognize it as a disaster, though the lesser of two possible ones, and, best of all, to prevent any occasion of resorting to destructive measures.

The only alternative I know to government by collision is government by habit. To show what I mean, may I cite an instance in contrast to the episode of the switch and the canned salmon? That same summer a small boy, six years old, was playing with his blocks. His mother in the next room suddenly realized that she had not ordered the fruit that was needed for the household. "Max!" she called. Now Max is no prig, but he had learned that he was expected to come when called; so, with an injunction to his playmates not to disturb the bridge he was building, he appeared at the doorway. "What is it?" (He ought to have said, "Yes, mamma;" but, as I have remarked, Max is thoroughly human.) "I want you to do an errand for me—something you've never done before. I want you to go to the grocery and get six oranges." Max started off. "Wait a moment. You've never gone alone on such a long errand before. Do you believe you can do it quickly, and not dawdle?" Max thought he could, and in fact did the errand as promptly as could be expected. He had been accustomed to obedience; in addition, he had become accustomed to accepting some measure of responsibility. The mother controlled him, not by violence, but by habit. The occurrence was the result of a long process, and became in turn a cause of future occurrences of similar character. Reduced to its simplest terms, then, the process of training children is the process of forming habits.

The earliest habits are physical. The whole duty of man during the first few weeks of his existence consists in feeding and sleeping regularly; and most of the rights of man during that period consist in being let alone. Listen to the eminent French psychologist, Th. Ribot: "The new-born infant is a spinal being, with an unformed, diffluent brain, composed largely of water. Reflex life itself is not complete in him, and the cortico-motor system only hinted at; the sensory centres are undifferentiated, the associational systems remain isolated, for a long time after birth." Doesn't it make you shudder to think of dandling such a creature as that on a hard-gaited knee? Does not that "unformed, diffluent brain, composed largely of water," plead to be let alone? Yet the impulse of most parents when they encounter their new possession is to do something to it,—to take it up, to carry it about, and, as soon as its eyes are really open, to try and show it things, to evoke from it some kind of human expression. It seems as if we were all beset by a doubt that our offspring is really a creature of our own kind, and that we were bound to make it establish, by some proof, its right to a place at the top of creation. Now, the instincts of the infant are all in other directions. Yielding to these, the mite seems to be utterly indifferent to the honors of its station in animal life, and even to the attention it receives. It wants to cry occasionally, to feed periodically, and to sleep a great deal. And, in spite of our experience, we are wrong, and the diminutive thing, with a cortico-motor system only hinted at, with sensory centres undifferentiated, and with the extraordinary disadvantage of having completely isolated associational centres, is right. The first habits, therefore, which the parents have to form in the training of their child are their own; and the most important of these is the habit of non-interference, which is another name for the habit of self-restraint. Fortunately, we parents can at the outset devote our attention chiefly to this for several months. If we wish to avoid, in later years, the necessity for resorting to government by spasm, and to establish instead government by habit, we do not have to begin by experimenting on a helpless child; we can begin, fortunately, by experimenting on ourselves.

It is during this period that we have the best chance of learning the difference between governing children and interfering with them; for though that midget will not thrive under interference, he will thrive under government. He does not need to be told what to do, but he does depend on us to teach him when to do it. While, therefore, we are forming in ourselves the habit of non-interference, we are also forming in him the habit of regularity. If we begin that way, we save both him and ourselves a great deal of trouble.

One mother, for instance, when she hears her baby cry, runs to him, picks him up, dances him up and down, offers him food, dangles a bell in front of him, talks to him, takes him to the window, tries every imaginable device to quiet him. "It's wicked, I think," says she, "to try to stifle my maternal instincts. The poor little dear! how could I be so cruel as not to respond to his cry for me?" She is assuming several things. She assumes, first, that the baby is crying for her, whereas he is probably crying because he needs the exercise. That is the only way he can expand his lungs. When he cries because of pain, or anger, or nervous irritability, the cry will be unmistakable; and the response ought to be, not a wild series of spasms, but an intelligent treatment of the cause. She assumes, in the second place, that the impulse to rid herself of the annoyance of hearing the cry is a maternal instinct. If that were so, a lot of gruff old bachelors on railway trains are frequently moved by maternal instinct. The maternal instinct, in fact, is something quite different—it is the instinct of care, watchfulness, nurture, and it does not call for spasms. In the third place, she assumes that it would be cruel not to experiment with her child—at least so it appears; for what she does is to try in quick succession a series of experiments, no one of which is continued long enough to be of any value, and all of which, as she might easily learn, have been proved to be of no permanent value in producing placid, contented babies.

The other mother, when she hears the cry, listens. If it is a cry of pain, she knows it in an instant. It is amazing how quickly a mother learns that language. It is a mystery to most men, though even to them not unsearchable. Physicians, after experience in children's wards, understand it; and even a father, if he is patient, can acquire a moderate knowledge of it. But a mother, or even a nurse, if she is moved by a genuine maternal instinct and not by a selfish desire for her own comfort, is almost an adept at the start. At the cry of pain, that mother in a moment is looking for the misplaced pin, or rearranging the irritating bit of clothing, or remedying the uncomfortable position, or searching for a more hidden cause. If it is a cry of irritability, she blames herself for having rocked the child a few moments before, and steels herself against repeating the indulgence. If it is a cry of hunger, she looks at the clock to see if it is the hour for another feeding. If it is just "plain cry," she smiles, for she knows that he is doing that in lieu of playing baseball or riding horseback. When it is meal-time, she, exercising the discretion which he is not always able to exercise for himself, gently withdraws the food supply when he has had all that is good for him. And when it is time for him to go to sleep, she arranges him comfortably in his crib, darkens the room, and leaves him. If then he emits another "plain cry," she is not disturbed. He has as much a right to cry as he has to sleep. If she lets him go to sleep in her arms, for the love of feeling him there, she will not complain later, when it is more inconvenient, if he remonstrates against going to sleep in any other way. She will know that in that respect, as in respect to his regular feeding, she has governed him by habit. Either she will have to pay the penalty of having established in her kingdom an inconvenient law, or else she will have to inflict upon him, as well as herself, the penalty of establishing later, and at greater cost, another and more convenient custom which might just as well have been established in the first place. This penalty may involve a collision—though possibly a mild one. Even in that case, however, in the very difficulty of supplanting an old custom by a new one, she will have evidence of the strength of her government by habit.

There is no reason why regularity once established should not become for all future years a routine. We all know how hard it is to break up a bad habit. Happily, it is just as hard to break up a good one. The difference between the child who teases for every new variety of food on the table, pushes away the dishes that are set before him, whines when he is told it is bedtime, eats and goes to sleep only after much coaxing, and the child who accepts his food and his hours for sleep as a matter of course, as he accepts the house he lives in, is simply the difference between a bad habit and a good one. It is no easier to change the one habit than it is the other. After a child has learned to get his food and go to bed with whining and teasing, it is very difficult for him to learn to eat and sleep in any other fashion; it is equally difficult for a child who has learned to eat and enjoy food adapted to him, and to go to bed at a suitable hour, to understand why all sorts of strange decoctions should be offered to him, and why he should not get undressed when his bedtime comes. Of course the spirit of adventure, which is strong in most normal children, will lead them sometimes to sample some things that they see their elders—or, for that matter, the animals—eating; and to race about the halls, exploring the domain of the dark, after they are supposed to be asleep; but even this spirit of adventure, which sometimes brings discouragement to the mother, is a tribute to regular life; and it is denied to those children whose whole life consists in a series of parental experiments. The little lad who at a children's party declines the sweetmeats is no angel. Nor is his companion, who grabs the dainties an imp. They are both, like the rest of us, creatures of habit. The theory of total depravity, by which our forefathers explained the unpleasant doings of youngsters, is, I have concluded, a doctrine which parents devised in order to shift the burden of their own failures to the shoulders of their offspring.

This practice of regularity in the physical care of children[1] will lay the foundation, not only of health and contentment, but also of moral discipline. When we have eliminated the opportunities for collision with our children at meal-times and bedtime, we are well on our way toward eliminating government by collision altogether. The quiet exercise of authority involved in carrying out a simple regimen of diet and of rest will almost automatically extend to other matters. The most difficult part of this exercise of authority will be overcome when the parent learns self-restraint. Not to run to a child every time he cries is the beginning of learning not to yield to a child every time he wants something. In many cases authority is thus exercised by doing nothing. The mother, for example, has left the baby creeping about alone in his nursery. She has left him a ball and two or three blocks with which he can experiment, and another ball hanging from a cord within his reach which he can swing to and fro. He is learning that the ball is soft and can roll, that the blocks are hard and cannot roll, and that the pendulum swings regularly. He is as well occupied in his work as the mother is in hers. Suddenly she hears a cry of vexation. If it continues, she steps to the door to see what has happened. He has raised himself up by the window and is trying to reach the tassel at the end of the cord on the window-shade, and finds it above his outstretched hands. She might go to the window, draw down the shade, and, holding it firm, let him play with the cord till he tires; but she knows that it would be inconvenient to have him continually playing with the window-shade in the house, and she does not want him to begin. She might then take him up and distract his attention till he forgets. But she knows that if she does this once, she will be called upon to do it again. So she shakes her head and says "No," which she has taught him to understand, and, after making sure that he is in no danger of a fall, leaves him and returns to her work. By doing nothing she has done what for the time being is the hardest thing. As she closes the door she hears another wail of vexation, but she does not interfere. She has exercised her authority simply by exercising self-restraint.

It all depends on what we want our children to be whether we employ the method of spasm or the method of self-restraint. Of course those of us who think pertness in a child is a virtue, who regard a fit of teasing as "smart" or "cunning," who enjoy the exhilaration of encountering a child as an adversary and breaking down his opposition, can develop in children habitual pertness, teasing, and disobedience with the utmost ease. It requires, however, no especial genius to avoid these qualities. Other traits, it may be, require something like genius—something at least beyond persistence and self-restraint—to create; but to provide children with a contented acquiescence in a regular life and an habitual disposition to obedience requires of the parents no qualities of mind which are not common to all of us mortals.

II THE WILL AND THE WAY

Parents regard their children with all sorts of feelings, with love of course, with indulgence, with amusement, and even, so it is said, with self-complacency and admiration; but it sometimes seems as if very few regard them with respect. No one who respects another will lie to him, or visit him with empty threats, or make to him vain promises; yet fathers and mothers in all parts of the country are at this moment lying to their children, threatening them with punishments they do not mean to inflict, and making promises they do not intend to fulfill. The faith of a child ought to be proverbial. It is the only substance of things hoped for which many children ever get. I sometimes wonder if it is really just to lay the Fifth Commandment upon all American children. Somehow, there seems to be something reciprocal implied in it. If that commandment is of universal application, it can be considered so, I imagine, only on the ground that it states a duty owed ultimately not to the parents but to the Almighty. Certainly that parent who does not respect his children has no personal claim upon their honor.

What I mean by respect for a child I can perhaps explain best by an instance. Marshall, aged seven, had yielded to temptation in the form of a preserved pear. Instead of putting the temptation behind him, he had put it within him; and he had been caught. The maternal court decided that a fair equivalent for this pear was a week of desserts. For two days the culprit sat inactive at the close of dinner while his comrades ate with relish their portions of pudding. Then unexpectedly came an invitation to dinner from a friend. On the return homeward an aunt remarked, "I noticed that Marshall ate dessert with the others." "Yes," replied his mother, "I think he must have forgotten. I noticed it too, but I did not speak to him because there was no expectation of this treat when the punishment was determined upon. Besides, I do not think it would have been just to add to his punishment by humiliating him before the others."

In this case respect for the youthful Marshall meant, first, attributing the failure to observe the rule to something besides deliberate intent; second, recognizing that he was to be treated not merely with severity, but also with justice; and, third, appreciating the individuality of the child, which included special sensitiveness to the attention and opinion of others. The very fact that Marshall was accustomed to regularity of discipline, to invariableness in punishment, and even to ridicule of vanity or silliness, made it possible for his mother to do something that smacked of irregularity and of variableness, and to save him from unnecessary abasement. Just because she had a rule which she habitually followed, she could break it. She could not have broken it if she had not had it. The effectiveness of this act of omission lay in the very fact that it was an exception. It was a case in which fairness to the boy depended upon inconsistency. This only illustrates the truth that in dealing with a child you may violate any principle so long as you keep your respect for the child inviolate. And the secret of respect for a child lies in regarding him as a human being.

The limitation of the devotee of "child study," the scientific investigator of "child nature," the observer of "the child mind," is that he cannot regard a child as a human being. In other words, his limitation consists in being too broad. He observes individuals only for the sake of disregarding their individuality. He is busy establishing some general laws of childhood. He must choose to know nothing of children that he may know the Child. As soon as he begins to respect an individual child he becomes personal and biased; and as soon as he becomes personal and biased he ceases to be scientific. A good mother, on the other hand, is good just because of her prejudices. She knows so much about her child that her testimony is scientifically worthless. In everything the child does she sees something he, and not another child has done before; and she makes her judgments accordingly. And it is just because her observations would be vicious in a table of statistics that they are the best possible basis for conduct. In other words, she is dealing, not with a subject, a cadaver, so to speak, that can be classified, but with a live being that for her purposes belongs in a class by himself. That is what I mean by respecting a child.

It is here that the teacher and the parent are at odds. The teacher is dealing with childhood, the parent is dealing with Dick-hood or Mary-hood. The teacher is engaged chiefly in providing each child with the equipment that belongs by right to all civilized children; the parent, on the other hand, is bound to bring each child to his, and not another's, highest development. The teacher is responsible for the school or the class; the parent, for the boy or girl. The difference in point of view makes the difference in duty. It was from the parental point of view that the ancient sage wrote his proverb—"Train up a child in the way he should go." He was not thinking of the way of universal obligation, for what he really said was, "Train up a child in the way he [that particular individual] is to go;" in other words, prepare him for the kind of life for which he is fitted. In order to do this, one must have regard for that child's temperament, his distinctive traits.

The severest test of our respect for a child comes when we find his will conflicting with ours. It is easy enough to overbear a child's will; it is difficult to educate it. The hardest task of a parent is to retain respect for a child while administering a spanking. It is easy to roll out the cant saying, "I spank you because I love you," but it is very difficult to bring one's self into that frame of mind in which it would be the mere truth to say, "I spank you because I respect you." Anybody, by simply being persistent, can thwart a child; and any one with the ordinary strength of an adult can beat him; but no one who is unwilling to do him the courtesy of regarding him as an individual can master and direct a child, or really punish him.

Not long ago I was traveling in a day coach. In front of me were a man, a woman, and a small boy of about five years. The woman was the dominant member of the group. Her face, with its thin, compressed lips and its hard gray eyes, had a look of indolent selfishness with a suggestion of latent high temper. The man seemed rather dull, weak, and unhappy. The boy had the rotund, insensitive countenance of his father; but he had not yet lost interest in life. He was no more restless than a boy of his age ought to be. When his mother found his movements disturbing, she darted a rebuke at him. For the moment he sat still or moved out of the way. Finally he edged out into the aisle. The woman made a pretense of ordering him back into the seat. The boy, evidently realizing that his mother, since she was now put to no inconvenience by him, had no intention of enforcing her command, remained passively where he was. When his mother's attention was distracted, he made use of his freedom to get a little mild gymnastic exercise. The train as it drew up to a station jerkily stopped. The lurch of the car threw the boy backward on the floor. Stunned for but an instant, the little lad sent forth a wail. Some of the passengers turned around; others started forward to the child. The woman was obviously annoyed by the disturbance. Before the father had fairly picked him up, she seized the child, roughly brushed off his clothes, and set him violently down on the seat. "You're a bad boy." She spat the words out at him and shook him. She turned to her husband: "I told him not to stand there." The man was silenced before his dull wits allowed him the chance to speak. "Now," to the boy, "stop your crying." The youngster could not repress his sobs; he was still somewhat dazed. The man gently rubbed the back of the lad's head. The woman glanced at the spectators. She must have noticed that her method of avoiding a scene was not altogether successful. She leaned toward the boy. "Did you hurt yourself?" she asked, and took him into her lap. He let his head fall indifferently on the woman's shoulder. Her tardy and rather formal caresses aroused no response. She put him back on the seat, less ungently than before. "Now will you be good?"

If any but the fool is ever tempted to doubt the existence of God, it is when he reflects that children are intrusted to the mercy of such women as this. None of us is of her breed. We do not like her coarseness. We should never allow ourselves to make the mistake she made—of being found out. She was too frank with her emotions. She had not the skill to conceal the springs of her conduct. What difference, at bottom, however, is there between her and us when we are governed, in disciplining a child, by the degree of our own displeasure? Every one of us has been, on occasions, at heart as incompetent as this vulgar female. We have all of us judged children, at one time and another, by their conformity to our will. A very good woman it was, of the straitest New England doctrines, who sent a boy supperless to bed because, while putting on his overcoat, he accidentally toppled over and smashed a prized vase. That boy is now a man gray with years and laden with honors; but to this day he has not forgotten the fact that he was made to suffer, not for his own fault, but for his aunt's disappointment.

The only thing that will free us from the futile way of the ogreish woman on the railway car and the austere Puritan lady is an abiding respect for our children. This will save us from attributing to our children our own willfulness! To be authoritative with children is something else besides being opinionated. The opinionated may compel obedience; but only the authoritative secure it. And even the opinionated find obedience not easy of compulsion. When caprice assumes command, I have a sly conviction that disobedience becomes a virtue. Preliminary to teaching children how to obey is the process of learning how to command. When a child is intransigent, it is worth while to consider whether it is not he that is administering a rebuke.

Sometimes resistance to even rightful authority is not as depraved as we, who do not fancy being resisted, delude ourselves into thinking. There comes the time when any child will exult at the discovery that he is a being apart. He naturally wants to measure his will, and his mother's or his father's will is the handiest standard of comparison. A test of that sort is sometimes disconcerting. A five-year-old, too much given to sliding down from his chair at meal-time, was warned by his father that whenever in the future he should leave his chair, he should not be allowed to return to the table. Soon afterwards the boy disappeared from his place. He had evidently renewed his slippery ways, and had made up his mind to lurk beneath the table and await results. Intent upon the enforcement of the decree, his father said sternly, "You may be excused." Forthwith a head of tousled hair was thrust above the level of the table. "But I didn't leave my chair." Sure enough, there he lay prone across the seat, like a bag of meal on an ass's back. His father had to find what scant refuge he could in the permissive form of his sentence of dismissal. The lad's wits had won a victory for his will. Those who enter such an engagement without reconnoitring must accept the risk, and, if they wish to preserve the advantage of a commanding position, must abide by the results of any such skirmish. To turn it into a battle of wills is to commit the blunder of underestimating their opponent's strength. A child's will is not a fragile thing. It is not "broken" when it is overcome by another will reinforced by physical strength. An old lady of Maine, now gone to her own place,—which I venture to say is not far from that of Luther and Knox and Jonathan Edwards,—once told me how, when a small girl, she had had her will broken; she recounted the passionate resistance, the screaming protestation, the convulsive and futile rage exhausted only by hours of kicking and pounding the floor, and her final capitulation, announced by her picking up the toy which, in defiance of her father's order, she had at first refused to touch. She gloried in this Spartan training, and deplored the lack of it in the present degenerate generation. It was this same old lady, with the "broken" will, who, rejecting all advances, stanchly maintained her side in a family feud to, I believe, her dying day. Her will, it is plain, had not even been cracked; it showed not so much as a suture; neither had it been trained. The only treatment it had received had been one of contumely. The old lady was not exactly to blame for the outcome.

If we respect a child's will, we shall give it a chance to operate. We do not thereby surrender a pea's weight of authority. A certain young mother, let us say, believes that there is a sort of unselfishness that has no part in love: she will not relieve her children of effort and responsibility. One of her brood, a lad of seven, with a touch of dreaminess in his mobile face, with impatience of the material restraints of time and space, with a will of his own that is the harder to direct because it is seldom aggressive, is engaged in propelling a vast tow of block barges along the river that winds across the nursery floor. Of his companions, one is umpiring a game of football between teams of leaden soldiers, and the other is constructing a fearsome dungeon ten blocks deep. At the door appears Authority. "It is now four o'clock," she announces. "At a quarter past four I want to have all the blocks and toys put away." The football umpire and the dungeon-builder, sniffing a prospective treat, bring their operations to an abrupt close. The lad of dreams listens abstractedly, and then turns with great puffing and snorting to his labors of navigation. Inattention? Partly; but partly, too, a deliberate choice of present pleasure and a willful rejection of the words of authority. Ten, eleven, twelve minutes pass. Again sounds the authoritative voice. "In three minutes it will be a quarter past four. I shall want you then to begin to wash and dress for a drive. Eric, I am afraid you won't be able to go with us; your blocks are not put away." She might, of course, justly tell him then and there that he will not be allowed to go; she chooses, however, the better way, and lets him wrestle with the situation. "You had better not stop to cry," she warns him; "there is no time to waste." In fractious misery he hurriedly begins his belated task. His will, so far from being broken or weakened, is actually stiffened; but it is now enlisted on the side of authority. The others—not a whit more virtuous, by the way, but only more sagacious—are half dressed before he has put his blocks in order. If he fails to overtake them, he will stand disconsolate, abject, perhaps tempestuous, and watch them depart. He has had his way, but he has won no victory; he has simply learned the cost of willfulness. If he succeeds in overtaking them, he will not have lost his lesson. His mother, it is true, will not exactly have had her way; but she reckons that no loss, as her way was not her end; she will have enlisted his will. The victory which the boy will have won is not over her. The only antagonist he has had is himself. Because of her respect for him, he will now have a new respect for himself and for her. He is on the road to acquiring the will to obey.

If it had been one of the other two who had disobeyed, her course might have been different. A sullen, recalcitrant will, open-eyed, calculating, defiant, might easily suggest a different treatment. "You have chosen your leaden soldiers; now leaden soldiers it shall be. Since you did not make your duty your choice, then I shall arrange matters so that your choice shall be your duty. Nothing but leaden soldiers till we return." Such a variation in the treatment of children smacks not in the least of partiality. It simply means that respect for the child has involved respect for his individuality. The maxim, Let the punishment fit the crime, may express a principle of action useful for the government of a State or of a school; but for the purposes of the home it should be altered so as to read, Let the punishment fit the child.

This ought to be the answer whenever that question arises that still serves the purpose of discussion in the correspondence columns of the newspapers, Is corporal punishment defensible? The conventional answer nowadays is, No. This is supposed to betoken the benignant mind. Any other answer nowadays classifies one as an autocratic brute. It seems to be assumed that corporal punishment must necessarily be administered in the jaunty spirit of the Chinese proverb which runs: "A cloudy day—leisure to beat the children." Real tenderness of heart, so runs the accepted modern doctrine, forbids the infliction of physical pain. In all these discussions, however, one consideration seems to be ignored—a decent respect for children. To one who is governed by this consideration, there is only one answer to the question, Do you believe in spanking a child? That answer is comprised in another question, What child? It is not necessary to go as far as Menander, who declared, "He who is not flogged is not educated," to be convinced that a good many children have been deprived of their rights because they have never been spanked.

There was once a little girl who could never forget the indignity she suffered in a spanking she had received. She grew up with her mind resolutely set against all corporal punishment. In the course of time she was married and had two children. With one of them she had no problems of discipline; but with the other, a daughter, she had problems that taxed her wits to the utmost. At times the little girl seemed verily possessed. At last, in desperation, this harassed mother, driven into recreancy to her own principle, resorted to the form of chastisement she had forsworn. The effect was instantaneous. The child was relieved, as it were, from herself. With some temperaments in some moods the rod is like the wand of a magician. The childish petulance, the outburst of temper, the streak of almost malicious perversity, is but the child's way of expressing his quarrel with himself; and when the sharp physical pain comes, it seems to announce the subjugation of an enemy. In a household there are three children. One, sensitive to physical pain, shrivels and warps at the very prospect of it; a second is deterred from no act by the fear of it, and is altered not a whit by the memory of it; the third seems to find in it the comforting sense of being mastered at those times when he is out of sorts with himself, and responds to it with renewed affection and restored sweetness of temper. For the mother of that trio academic discussions on corporal punishment are not only uninteresting—they are positively irritating. She has paid her children the decent respect of considering their temperaments.

III BY RULE OF WIT

At a dinner-table one evening, a man who was interested in his own children stated a rule by which he made sure that no child of his would disobey him. The rule is infallible. He remarked to his companion:—

"I never give a command to my children."

"What do you do?" he was asked.

"I tell them stories."

That expresses a perfectly intelligible policy: Abdicate, and you will never have a disobedient child. You will also never have an obedient one. The fact that the man who made this statement was an Anarchist explains his theory. He regarded obedience not as a virtue, but as a defect. He was altogether consistent. A disbeliever in government for society, he declined to establish any government for his family. In place of government, however, he at least took pains to establish something else. This was a systematic appeal to the child's imagination.

If one had to choose between government and influence over children through the imagination, there might be some reason for discarding government. As a matter of fact, however, the use of the imagination, so far from being antagonistic to effective government, is indispensable to it. The reason why we parents so often fail in securing obedience, and, what is more important still, in developing in our children the spirit of obedience, is that we are deficient in imagination—or at least that what imagination we have is untrained.

In this faculty in which we are weak, children are strong. A little four-year-old I know, in making letters for his own amusement, frequently attaches arms and legs to them; it is his way of pictorially representing the animation he ascribes to them. Indeed, he sometimes goes so far as to transfer in mind these limbs to the object which the letters spell. Thus, he laboriously prints the letters P-I-G, adds to each letter a lively pair of legs, and exclaims: "See, the pig is running!" Mental processes like that, complicated though it is, are common with children. A child left alone in the nursery with his blocks will find them transformed into trains, steamboats, people, trees, animals, whatever he wills. In this picturesque form imagination may be called fancy; but it has many other phases. Imagination is an element in memory. Ability to recall a sound requires imagination. When, for instance, a child repeats a word he has heard some one use, his imagination has enabled him to summon up the sound of that word. Imagination is an element in emulation. When a child is trying to outdo another, or outdo his own past performances, he has to picture to his mind what he or his competitor has done and what the desirable outcome of the struggle would be. Imagination is an element even in fear and hope. When a child dreads a punishment or eagerly awaits a reward, it is his imagination that gives him the power to anticipate.

Like every other instinct, imagination needs training. We all carry about with us a menagerie of instincts. Some of them have been ill-treated. In what a pitiable shape is the dyspeptic's food instinct! It has died of over-indulgence, and its corpse mocks him at every meal. The instinct of fighting has been given a bad name, and in many a well-conducted menagerie is kept chained; but it has been known to survive the most rigorous repression, and to spring out with most abounding vitality in the midst of a meeting on behalf of peace. We have learned to avoid those people whose instinct of curiosity is not bridle-wise; and we all have recourse at times to those who have nourished, groomed, and trained their play instinct. The fact is, that the process of education consists largely in transforming these instincts of ours, which in their original state are wild and unmanageable, into domesticated and useful habits.

Now, imagination is a vigorous beast. Its youthful antics are very picturesque and amusing; it is sometimes whimsical and troublesome; but it can be made of the greatest service. Indeed, for all kinds of work, I know of no species of instinct which I would more highly recommend. As a draught animal it is indefatigable; and nothing else can take its place for pleasure-driving. Yet I have heard of a private school for young women from which all fairy books are excluded, on the ground that a girl's imagination needs repression. Like some other instincts, imagination cannot be altogether repressed, though it can be tamed and guided. If it is left boxed up and wild, it is apt to break out and take a canter through dangerous regions. Since, then, we cannot take a child's imagination from him, and we run into peril if we neglect it, the profitable course is to show him how to break it to harness and make it serve him.

We cannot do this, however, unless we have paid some attention to the training of our own imagination. As a wild young colt will trot about beside its dam, so a child's imagination will readily follow that of an older person. But the two must be at least in the same lot. If we are going to appeal to a child's imagination in teaching him how to obey, we must exercise some imagination in giving commands. We thus come upon that recurrent principle that the chief task in the training of children is the training of ourselves.

That imagination may be used in maintaining strictness of discipline seems to some to be almost a contradiction in terms. It seems like invoking an imp of dreams to assist in adding up a column of figures. In many minds imagination suggests dreaminess, wool-gathering, waywardness, irresponsibility. That is one reason why we parents who like to be obeyed, who are inclined to believe that it is a virtue to be dictatorial, and who sometimes confuse our own will with the immutable principles of righteousness, so often fall into error. To a child there is nothing more serious, nothing more real and regular, than the products of his imagination, and nothing more vague, whimsical, irregular, than the unexplained orders which he receives from grown people. If we wish to impress a child with the seriousness and reality of our authority, we had better put our imagination into condition.

There were two small boys in a town of the Middle West. Active, spirited, mischievous, and in other respects healthy, these two tads—the younger about four years old, I believe—gave their father and mother much concern. One day an old drill-sergeant established in the neighborhood a class for boys, and in a short time received these two as pupils. The transformation was sudden. The boys were soldiers. Happily, their mother was imaginative. They were therefore soldiers not merely in the class, but also at home. The standards of conduct put before them, the punishments dealt out to them, and the rewards bestowed upon them were such as befitted defenders of the home. Obedience, promptness, chivalry, order, courage, regularity, honor, truthfulness, were not unreasonable qualities to expect from such as they. When one of these warriors was absent without leave for the greater part of a day—in other words, ran away—it was not inappropriate that he should be kept in solitary confinement on short rations. The discipline meted out to those youngsters was, from any point of view, severe. Even corporal punishment, which, as ordinarily applied, is crudely devoid of the imaginative element, became measurably glorified; it was a part of the hardship which they were called upon to endure as good soldiers. Of course this régime was accompanied with plenty of instruction in military traditions and practices. A constant visitor to that household has found in the manliness and good breeding of these children a source of amazed gratification. In another family, who had no access to a drill-sergeant with a streak of poetry, a somewhat different method has been in vogue. The boys in that family do not belong, as it were, to the regular army, but rather to the militia. They are not always under a military régime, but are liable to a summons at any time. When they hear the command, "Fall in," they know they are expected to stand in line and await orders. In the absence of their parents, they know that the older person left in charge is their commanding officer; and upon their parents' return they know that they will be called upon to fall into line, salute, and report to their father. Each is supposed to report any infraction of discipline which he himself—not his comrades—has committed. No punishment is administered as a result of such report, except for deliberate concealment. Each also reports some especial pleasure he has had. A good report is followed by formal and official congratulation. A reminder in the form of a sign, marked "Remember the Report," and placed in a conspicuous position in the nursery, has helped to train and direct their imagination. Since the report includes a record of enjoyments as well as of offenses, this reminder is not so threatening as to many people it would seem. Indeed, the proposal that such a sign be used met with instant approval from the young militiamen.

Those who object to tin soldiers as toys will have little patience with this metamorphosis of real children into creatures of militarism. Very well, let them be monks instead, or members of a labor union, or railway employees, or idealized legislators, or even honest policemen, anything that will not put too great a strain on the imagination—of the adults. The point is simply that the exercise of the strictest authority over children is compatible with the most lavish use of the imagination.

There is nothing necessarily soft or flabby about the imaginative life. There is no special reason why little children should be afflicted with continual talk about the dear little birdies or the sweet little flowers. Indeed, the natural taste of children seems to be attracted in the opposite direction. One small boy, when he inquired about a bloody Bible picture, and was put off with the explanation that it was not a pleasant story, expressed the views of many of his age when, looking up angelically, he exclaimed with ecstasy, "I like to hear about horrid things."

Even the rod can, as I have suggested, be used imaginatively. A small boy who is well acquainted with the story of the Israelites in Egypt has invoked its aid. He is not overburdened with a sense of moral responsibility. One day, when he was dawdling over his task of changing his shoes and stockings, it was suggested that his father be an Egyptian and he be an Israelitish slave. He joyfully acquiesced. His father took the tip of a bamboo fishing-rod as badge of authority and stood by. In a few moments the boy was dawdling. A slight rap over the shins recalled him to his duty. There was no complaint; for he knew it was the business of the overseer to keep the slave at his task. His shoes and stockings were changed in a very much shorter time than was customary; and he contemplated his finished work with satisfaction. A few days later, when he had a similar task to perform, he proposed of his own accord a repetition of the performance; and carried out his part with spirit. When we adults remember how much we rely upon some outside stimulus to keep us at our work—the need of money, the esteem of our neighbors, the fear of disease, the mandate of the law—we ought to be able to understand the reason why such an appeal to the imagination as this acted as a reinforcement of the boy's will, and therefore, by very reason of its disciplinary character, was actually welcomed.

Two other boys similarly acquainted with the experiences of Israel in Egypt contrived an application of one of those experiences to their own case. They had several times been thrilled by the account of the exciting race between the Israelites and the Egyptians to the Red Sea, and had repeatedly found relief in the safe arrival of the Israelites on the other side and the literally overwhelming defeat of the cruel army of Pharaoh. One evening their mother was engaged in washing the supper dishes, and they were engaged, as usual, in helping her by wiping the silver. On several occasions they had been so little intent on their work that their mother had finished all the washing and had wiped the china and glassware before they had wiped and put away the silver. This evening one of them suddenly became seized with a fancy. His mother was the Egyptian army and he and his comrade were the host of Israel. When the last fork had rattled into its place and the silver-drawer was shut, what a shout of joy arose! The Egyptians had been outdistanced; the Israelites were safe. After that, when there were signs of inattention, the warning cry, "The Egyptians are coming!" would rouse them into instant and happy action. Now those children usually do this work rapidly. They have formed in themselves a valuable habit.

That was not a device. It was the exemplification of a principle. A habit, I suppose, can be beaten into a child; but it is more lasting as well as more wholesome if it has been created, in part at least, by the child's own will; and it is the imagination, charged as it is with feeling, which can most surely summon the will into activity.

The difference between ignoring this principle and recognizing it may be illustrated by contrasting two concrete instances. In the one case the mother appears at the nursery door.

"Look at this room!" she exclaims; "it is very untidy." She thus puts the brand of disapproval upon disorder. "All the blocks and toys must be put away and you must be all washed for supper by six o'clock; and you have so much to do, you must begin at once."

"But I want to build this house."

"No; you must begin now." This is for the purpose, the mother explains to herself, of preparing the child to meet the harsh demands of an unfeeling world.

She notes that the child begins listlessly to pick up some of the scattered blocks, one by one, and drop them into the box where they are kept. After an absence of several minutes she returns. She sees but little change, although the child is hastily putting some toys away. She is aware, however, that this activity started only when her footfall sounded in the hall.

"If those things are not all in their places on time, I shall have to punish you."

The mother is vexed, the child is unhappy and rebellious. A daily experience of this sort may result finally in some kind of habit in the child; but only at great cost of effort to the mother, and at the sacrifice of much of the normal relationship between the two.

Another mother appears at the door of the nursery.

"In five minutes it will be time to begin to put away the blocks and toys," she announces, thus giving some time for the builder to complete operations. Then she asks, "What are you going to be this evening?"

"I think I'll be Michael bringing the wood to the wood-box for the fire."

In five minutes she calls: "Michael, I want all the wood put into the wood-box."

The builder is now transformed for the time being into Michael. He has seen the lusty Irishman carry great armfuls of wood, and his own frail arms assume new dignity. He gathers the blocks by the dozen, and as he lets them fall, kerplunk, into the box, he sees great logs falling into place. In a few moments his mother reappears.

"You have been working hard, Michael, haven't you? I think you will have the wood in its place in plenty of time. How much better the room looks without those logs of wood lying all about! You can carry a good many logs at once, can't you?"

Repeated every day, this process will inevitably develop into a habit of orderliness. The regularity of the process is not in the least impaired by the fact that one evening it assumes the form of stacking up firewood, another evening of bringing in bags of coal to the cellar, another evening of loading merchandise on to a vessel. It is the same will that directs Michael, and the coal man, and the stevedore, and it is the same brain that receives the repeated impression of promptness and good order. In each case, whether it is Michael, or the coal man, or the stevedore, the workman is doing his task under orders; he is subject to authority. And if Michael, or the coal man, or the stevedore fails to do his duty, it is not inappropriate that he should suffer a penalty. Of course it will be more effective if the penalty can be made suitable to the character. Whether it is made suitable or not will depend largely upon the imagination of the person in authority. As a rule, however, the spirit of such a process as that which I have illustrated is less that of discipline than of instruction, or perhaps more accurately, the spirit of discipline through instruction. It is, in fact, just because instruction plays so large a part in the government of children that those in authority need to have constant recourse to their imagination.

Deficiency in imagination is exhibited by parents not merely in their relation to their children, but quite as frequently in the relation between husband and wife. Criticism of the one by the other in the presence of the children can be accounted for, as a rule, only by a defective imagination. If the critic could be put for a moment in the place of the child who has heard the reproof, he would be amazed at discovering how he had weakened not only the mother's authority, but also his own. In a certain household, let us say, the mother is strongly of the opinion that it is injurious for the children to eat anything between meals; the father, however, scouts the idea, and actually keeps, in his pocket, sweetmeats for which he invites the children to search. If he had imagination enough to look into his own children's minds, he would be mortified at what he would see. Parents at cross-purposes are simply exhibiting their own stupidity. Without imagination, therefore, there can be only the most ineffective government in the family.

It is surprising, on the other hand, how the exercise of the imagination will clear away many perplexing difficulties in discipline; for in the light of the imagination many of these difficulties are seen to be problems in moral instruction. Let me illustrate.

The boys whom I have already described as militiamen were left by their parents, for a day, in charge of a competent nurse. When they were called upon to report in the customary military fashion concerning their behavior, they all confessed to certain offenses involving the marring of property.

"Would you have done that if mamma or I had been there?" their father asked.

"No," was the reply.

"Then you sneaked on us."

That word "sneaked" was apparently new to them; it upset their gravity. The entire company, including the commander, was soon convulsed. What could be done? The case could not be allowed to end thus. Finally, after some degree of order was restored, the commander proposed that they all take turns in sneaking on one another. The plan which was accepted with enthusiasm was this: Two of the boys were to leave the room; then the third, in their absence, was to find some precious possession of each of the two and destroy it. No sooner, however, were the victims in another room than they raised a vigorous protest. As this was to be not a punishment but an experiment, the protest was heeded. The tables were turned; one of the victims was appointed executioner, and the executioner took the place of victim. After several trials it was proved that nobody wished to have his property destroyed. They thus learned that, however much fun it was to sneak on some one else, they did not wish any one else to sneak on them. Although they agreed, too, that if each had a turn there would be nothing unfair, they were all unwilling to lose precious possessions even for the fun of playing an underhand trick. By this time one of the boys had decided that all sneaking "was bad." It was then proposed to the other two that their father go out, and that they should sneak on him. This seemed to be a solution. They would have the fun and suffer none of the loss. When they had committed themselves to this opinion, their father called their attention to the fact that he had already had his turn at being victim, and that now it was only fair that he should have his turn at being executioner. There was no escape. At the very moment when they were looking for all the gain and none of the loss, they were confronted with the prospect of suffering, perfectly justly, all of the loss and having none of the gain. By that time the word "sneak" conveyed an idea that was quite the opposite of humorous, and they were in position to appreciate their father's repudiation of any intention to act as a sneak. It was necessary for them to travel a long and roundabout way before they reached the point at which they could genuinely disapprove what they themselves had done. In the frame of mind in which at first they had been, punishment would have been meaningless; it would have signified nothing more than that an older person was vexed at something, and that they had to bear the ill effects of the vexation. What they needed primarily was not discipline but instruction. Incidentally, it may be added, they had a good deal of discipline in the process.

We are likely to forget that moral distinctions are not instinctive, but are the product of experience. The capacity to distinguish between the good and the evil is, we may all agree, inherent; but ability in deciding what acts belong in the category of the good and what in the category of the evil is acquired. There is no magic voice within a little child informing him what a lie is and warning him that it is evil. It is not enough, moreover, to tell a child over and over again that lying is wrong; it is equally necessary to instruct him so that he will recognize a lie when he encounters it. The knack of recognizing the difference between truth and falsehood is like the knack of recognizing the difference between edible and poisonous mushrooms. It comes only after careful instruction and long practice, and it is not as easy as it seems. Is "Alice in Wonderland" falsehood? Are the statements in Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verses" true? I believe I could set an examination in the subject, asking for reasons for the answers, which a good many parents could not satisfactorily pass. A child who habitually lies may be consciously doing wrong; but it is also possible that he has been simply ill-taught, or is not old enough to be taught at all in this subject. In order to reach a child's mind for the purpose of enabling him to see the difference between a lie and the truth, we must have imagination enough to put ourselves in the child's place sufficiently to find out what his conception of the truth is. It is easy to assume that a child is lying when he is merely experimenting with language, or is desiring to please, or is playing with his fancies. If we want children to understand us, we must exercise enough imagination to understand them. After we have established some basis of mutual understanding, we can feel free to proceed with rigorous discipline.

I hope I shall not be misunderstood. It is not necessary that a child should understand the reason for a command before he obeys. Obedience first and reasons afterwards is a good rule, and one that may even prevent disasters. It is necessary, however, that a child should understand what it is he is commanded to do or not to do. It requires some imagination to ascertain whether the child understands this or not.

Instruction in manners, like instruction in morals, requires the use of the imagination. The adult who is receiving his first lesson in golf ought to be able to understand why a child has difficulty in properly holding his spoon; the difference between a niblick and a stymie is not nearly so hard to learn as the difference between "Please" and "Thank you." Manners are more arbitrary than the technical terms of a game or a calling. Why it should be wrong but not naughty to eat with your knife or to sing at the table, children do not readily see.

As with regard to morals and manners, so with regard to all that a child has to learn, instruction is best coupled with imagination. A generation ago my grandfather wrote a book. Its tide seems to attach it to a long bygone age. It is called "Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young."[2] I know of no book which in spirit or in principles is more modern. I do not think its substance will ever be antiquated. It was through no fault or merit of mine that the author of this book was my grandfather; so I can see no reason why I should not be as free as any one else might be in expressing the wish that every parent who has some interest in the training of children might not only possess a copy, but also read it studiously. His words, with their touch of quaintness, concerning the use of imagination in the teaching of children were but the transcript of the principles which he had established by use and found practicable.

Are the children restive or boisterous? Do they talk incessantly and nonsensically? A little imagination will suggest what should be done with them. They are steam engines under full head of steam. If you do not wish to starve them into lassitude, set their activity to work in some direction that will not be troublesome. Has one of the children pinched his hand in the door or bumped his head? Summon up your imagination. He is a man who has met with an accident; call the ambulance, which comes in the form of a two-legged creature, to carry him to the hospital, which to grown-up eyes looks amazingly like the couch in the sewing-room; give him some medicine out of a bottle, which has the appearance of a shoe-horn. Is there an altercation in the nursery? Let there be a court established, and the issue heard and decided in due form. No retinue of servants can work such wonders as a moderately alert imagination.

If we parents have allowed our own imaginations to become atrophied through disuse, so that we are incapacitated from sharing in the most vivid part of our children's world, there is at least one thing we can do; we can restrain our natural impulse to interfere with our children's imagination. For a generous portion of every day we can leave our children alone. We are, of course, useful to them in emergencies, but ordinarily we prosy folk are in their way. What a nuisance we are when we impose upon an imaginative child that horror known as a mechanical toy! The nodding mandarin is so insistently a mandarin that no child with a healthy imagination can respect it. Off with its head! it then can conceivably be the pillar of a house, or a chimney for a steamboat. Large flat wooden dolls that come in a game-set have been known to serve admirably as roofs for block houses. Shall we allow the children to abuse their toys in this wise? exclaims the prosaic adult. The children might well reply, Must we be forced to lose our real world and to live in a commonplace, unreal world like yours? Elaborate dolls, complicated mechanisms, elegant playthings, may gratify the vanity of an adult, and even whet the curiosity of the growing boy and girl, but will not take the place of real toys like blocks of wood and spools and marbles. If we must nag him at other times, at least in his play let us leave the child alone with his imagination and the materials which his imagination can best use. If we are nonplussed by the enjoyment which a child finds in such simple things, it is because we have not the imagination to perceive that these very same simple things are the most capable of varied transformation.

Like those complicated toys which are made merely because the adults, who have the money, buy them, some kindergartens are engines of destruction. The play instinct, which psychologists kindly explain is simply the instinct for self-directed activity, is in mortal peril from people who are always for supervising children's games. Controlling the play of children is really attempting the impossible. As soon as it is controlled from the outside, play ceases to be play. If some one else directs the child, he ceases to be self-directed. Play is not mere recreation; it is sometimes very serious business. What makes it play is that it is not done under orders. And real play requires imagination. We parents can spoil our children by confining them to the artificial things we enjoy in lieu of our own minds. If we wish to amuse ourselves, we can do so for a time by spoiling our children. But if we wish them to enjoy life, as well as to grow strong in body and mind and character, we will not tempt them by the spices, the mechanisms, the artifices of our world, but will leave them as much as possible to wander and play and work unmolested in the world of simple things. Simple food, simple occupations, simple toys, simple surroundings—at least such we call them; in fact, there are no riches like them to the child—or the adult for that matter—who has not been robbed of his imagination. If we have lost ours, and must go about our task of instruction and discipline in the unreal way of the dry-as-dust, we can at least leave the child his. That is possible for the dullest of us.