Part 4

The deeper the theme of converse, and the profounder the thought involved in it, the greater the probability of a child’s freshness and life in its considering, if he indicates an appreciative interest in its discussion. It is not merely in the story of the child Samuel that there is a gleam of childhood’s possibilities in the direction of closer communion with God than is granted to ordinary manhood; but all the teachings of Scripture and of human experience tend to the disclosure and confirmation of this same truth. “Verily I say unto you,” says our Lord, “Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.” And again: “See that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” And there is an echo of these Divine words in the familiar teachings of the Christian poet of nature:

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,— He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the East Must travel, still is Nature’s priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.”

There is, indeed, a possibility of retaining the child-freshness of acquaintance with spiritual truths even into manhood and through all one’s life. That possibility every parent ought to strive to attain to. “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child,” said our Lord, as he pointed to a veritable human little one, “the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” And he who is greatest through being most child-like, will be readiest to recognize the individuality and the glorious possibilities of each and every child committed to his charge. Even while training a child, he will learn from the child; and so he and his child will grow together toward the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

IX.

_LETTING ALONE AS A MEANS OF CHILD-TRAINING._

Not doing is always as important, in its time and place, as doing; and this truth is as applicable in the realm of child-training as elsewhere. Child-training is a necessity, but there is a danger of over-doing in the line of child-training. The neglect of child-training is a great evil. Over-doing in the training of a child may be even a greater evil. Both evils ought to be avoided. In order to their avoidance, their existence and limits as evils must be recognized.

Peculiarly is it the case that young parents who are exceptionally conscientious, and exceptionally desirous of being wise and faithful in the discharge of their parental duties, are liable to err in the direction of over-doing in the training of their children. It is not that they are lacking in love and tenderness toward their little ones, or that they are naturally inclined to severity as disciplinarians; but it is that their mistaken view of the methods and limitations of wise child-training impels them to an injudicious course of watchful strictness with their children, even while that course runs counter to their affections and desires as parents. Their very love and fidelity cause them to harm their children by over-doing in their training, even more than the children of parents less wise and faithful are harmed by a lack of systematic training. It is, in fact, because they are so desirous of well-doing, that these parents over-do in the line of their best endeavors for their children.

A young father who was an earnest student of methods of child-training, and who sincerely desired to be faithful in the training of his first child at any cost to his feelings of loving tenderness toward that child, made a mistake in this direction, and received a lesson accordingly. His child was as full of affection as she was of life and spirit. She had not yet learned what she might do and what she might not do, but she was rapidly developing impulses and tastes in various directions; and her strength of personal character was showing itself in her positiveness of purpose in the line of her tastes and impulses for the hour. Her father had heard much about the importance of parental training and discipline, but had heard nothing about the danger of over-doing in this line; hence he deemed it his duty to be constantly directing or checking his child, so as to keep her within the limits of safety and duty as he saw it.

To his surprise and regret, the father found that, while his little daughter was not inclined to waywardness or disobedience, she was steadily coming into a state of chronic resistance to his attempts at her stricter governing. This resistance was passive rather than active, but it was none the less real for that. She would not refuse to obey, but she would not be ready or prompt to obey. She would not be aroused to anger or show any open sign of disrespect, but she would seem unable or unwilling to act as she was told to. Kind words and earnest entreaties were of no avail at this point, neither were they ever resented or explicitly rejected. If punishment was attempted, she submitted to it with a good grace, but it seemed to have no effect in the way of removing the cause of original trouble. The father never, indeed, lost his temper, or grew less loving toward his child; he prayed for guidance, and he gave his best thoughts to the problem before him; but all to no apparent purpose. The matter grew more and more serious, and he was more and more bewildered.

One day, after a serious struggle with his little daughter over a matter that would have been a trifling one except as it bore on the question of her character and welfare, the father left his house with a heavy heart, and almost in despair over this question of wise child-training. At the door he met a friend, much older than himself, with whom he had been a co-worker in several spheres of Christian activity. Seeing his troubled face, that friend asked him the cause of his evident anxiety, and the young father opened his heart, and told the story of his trouble. “Isn’t the trouble, that you are over-doing in the training of your child?” asked the listener; and then he went on to give his own experience in illustration of the meaning of this question.

“My first child was my best child,” he said; “and I harmed her for life by over-doing in her training, as I now see, in looking back over my course with her. I thought I must be training her all the time, and I forced issues with her, and took notice of little things, when I would have done better to let her alone. So she was checked unduly, and shut up within herself by my course with her; and she grew up in a rigid and unnatural constraint which ought not to have been hers. I saw my mistake afterwards, and I allowed my other children more freedom, by letting them alone except when they must be interfered with; and I’ve seen the benefit of this course. My rule with all my children, since my first, has been to avoid an issue with them on a question of discipline whenever I could do so safely. And the less show of training there is, in bringing up a child, the better, as I see it.”

This was a revelation to that young father. He determined at once to try to act on its suggestions, since the opposite course had been such a signal failure in his hands. When again in his home, an opportunity for an experiment was soon before him. His little daughter came into the room, through a door which she had been repeatedly told to push to, after she had passed it. Without any special thought on the subject, the father, who sat writing at his desk, said, as often before: “Push the door to, darling.” And, as often before, the child stood quiet and firm, as if in expectation of a new issue on that point. The counsel of the morning came into the father’s mind, and he said gently, “You needn’t shut the door to, darling, if you don’t want to. Papa will do it,” and at once he stepped and closed the door, returning afterwards to his desk, without a word of rebuke to his child.

This was a new experience to the poor overtaxed child. She stood in perplexed thought for a few minutes. Then she came lovingly to her father, and, asking to be taken up on his knee, she clasped her arms about his neck, and said: “Dear papa, I’m sorry I didn’t shut that door. I will next time. Please forgive me, dear papa.” And that was the beginning of a new state of things in that home. The father had learned that there was a danger of over-doing in the work of child-training, and his children were afterwards the gainers by his added knowledge of the needs and tastes of childhood.

In the case of this father, the trouble had been that he made too many direct issues with his child on questions of authority and obedience, and that thus he provoked conflicts which might have been wisely avoided. After this new experience he was very cautious at this point, and he soon found that his child could be trained to obey without so often considering the possibility of resisting or questioning parental authority. When, in any case, an issue had to be accepted, the circumstances were so well considered that the child as well as the parent saw that its right outcome was the only outcome. The error of this father had been the error of a thoughtful and deliberate disciplinarian, who was as yet but partially instructed; but there are also thoughtless and inconsiderate parents who harm, if they do not ruin, their children’s dispositions by over-doing in what they call child-training. And this error is even worse than the other.

There are many parents who seem to suppose that their chief work in the training of a child is to be incessantly commanding or prohibiting; telling the child to do this or to do that, and not to do this, that, or the other. But this nagging a child is not training a child; on the contrary, it is destructive of all training on the part of him who is addicted to it. It is not the driver who is training a horse, but one who neither is trained nor can train, who is all the time “yanking” at the reins, or “thrapping” them up and down. Neither parent nor driver, in such a case, can do as much in the direction of training by doing incessantly, as by letting alone judiciously. “Don’t be always don’t-ing,” is a bit of counsel to parents that can hardly be emphasized too strongly. Don’t be always directing, is a companion precept to this. Both injunctions are needful, with the tendency of human nature as it is.

Of course, there must be explicit commanding and explicit prohibiting in the process of child-training; but there must also be a large measure of wise letting alone. When to prohibit and when to command, in this process, are questions that demand wisdom, thought, and character; and more wisdom, more thought, and more character, are needful in deciding the question when to let the child alone. The training of a child must go on incessantly; but a large share of the time it will best go on by the operation of influences, inspirations, and inducements, in the direction of a right standard held persistently before the child, without anything being said on the subject to the child at every step in his course of progress. Doing nothing, as a child-trainer, is, in its order, the best kind of doing.

X.

_TRAINING A CHILD TO SELF-CONTROL._

An inevitable struggle between the individual and the several powers that go to make his individuality, begins in every child at his very birth, and continues so long as his life in the flesh continues. On the outcome of this struggle depends the ultimate character of him who struggles. It is, to him, bondage or mastery, defeat or triumph, failure or success, as a result of the battling that cannot be evaded. And, as a matter of fact, the issue of the life-long battle is ordinarily settled in childhood.

A child who is trained to self-control—as a child may be—is already a true man in his fitness for manly self-mastery. A man who was not trained, in childhood, to self-control, is hopelessly a child in his combat with himself; and he can never regain the vantage-ground which his childhood gave to him, in the battle which then opened before him, and in the thick of which he still finds himself. It is in a child’s earlier struggles with himself that help can easiest be given to him, and that it is of greatest value for his own developing of character. Yet at that time a child has no such sense of his need in this direction as is sure to be his in maturer years; hence it is that it rests with the parent to decide, while the child is still a child, whether the child shall be a slave to himself, or a master of himself; whether his life, so far, shall be worthy or unworthy of his high possibilities of manhood.

A child’s first struggle with himself ought to be in the direction of controlling his impulse to give full play to his lungs and his muscles at the prompting of his nerves. As soon as the nerves make themselves felt, they prompt a child to cry, to thrash his arms, to kick, and to twist his body on every side, at the slightest provocation,—or at none. Unless this prompting be checked, the child will exhaust himself in aimless exertion, and will increase his own discomfort by the very means of its exhibit. A control of himself at this point is possible to a child, at an age while he is yet unable to speak, or to understand what is spoken to him. If a parent realizes that the child _must_ be induced to control himself, and seeks in loving firmness to cause the child to realize that same truth, the child will _feel_ the parent’s conviction, and will yield to it, even though he cannot comprehend the meaning of his parent’s words as words. The way of helping the child will be found, by the parent who wills to help him. To leave a child to himself in these earliest struggles with himself, is to put him at a sad disadvantage in all the future combats of his life’s warfare; while to give him wise help in these earliest struggles, is to give him help for all the following struggles.

As soon as a child is able to understand what is said to him, he ought to be taught and trained to control his impulse to cry and writhe under the pressure of physical pain. When a child has fallen and hurt himself, or has cut his finger, or has burned his hand, or has been hit by an ill-directed missile, it is natural for him to shriek with pain and fright, and it is natural for his tender-hearted mother to shrink from blaming him just then for indulging in this display of grief. But even at such a time as this, a mother has an unmistakable duty of helping her child to gain a measure of control over himself, so as to repress his cries and to moderate his exhibit of disturbed feeling.

A child can come to exercise self-control under such circumstances as these. His mother can enable him to do this. It is better for both child and mother that he should have her help accordingly. Because of the lack of help just here, many a child is a sufferer through life in his inability to control himself under physical pain. And because of this inability many a person has actually lost his life, at a time when calmness of mind was essential to that endurance of physical suffering which was the only hope of prolonged existence. Because he was not trained to control his nerves, he is hopelessly controlled by his nerves.

Coaxing and rewarding a child into quiet at such a time is not what is needed; but it is the encouraging a child into an intelligent control of himself, that is to be aimed at by the wise parent. It is only a choice between evils that substitutes a candy-paid silence for a noisy indulgence of feeling on a child’s part. A good illustration of the unwise way of inducing children to seem to have control of themselves, is given in the familiar story of the little fellow throwing himself on the floor and kicking and yelling, and then crying out, “Grandma, grandma, I want to be pacified. Where are your sugar-plums?”

Dr. Bushnell, protesting against this method of coaxing a child out of a state of irritation, in a fit of ill-nature, by “dainties that please the taste,” says forcefully, “It must be a very dull child that will not cry and fret a great deal, when it is so pleasantly rewarded. Trained, in this manner, to play ill-nature for sensation’s sake, it will go on rapidly, in the course of double attainment, and will be very soon perfected in the double character of an ill-natured, morbid sensualist, and a feigning cheat besides. By what methods, or means, can the great themes of God and religion get hold of a soul that has learned to be governed only by rewards of sensation, paid to affectations of grief and deliberate actings of ill-nature?”

That control of himself which is secured by a child in his intelligent repression of an impulse to cry and writhe in physical pain, is of advantage to the child in all his life-long struggle with himself; and he should be trained in the habit of making his self-control available to him in this struggle. “I buffet my body [or give it a black eye] and bring it into bondage; lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected,” says the Apostle Paul; as if in recognition of the fact that a man’s battle with his body is a vital conflict, all his life through. Every child needs the help of his parents in gaining control over his body, instead of allowing his body to gain the control of him. The appetites and passions and impellings of the outer man are continually striving for the mastery over the inner man; and unless one is trained to master these instead of being mastered by them, he is sure to fail in his life-struggle.

A parent ought to help his child to refrain from laughing when he ought not to laugh; from crying when he ought not to cry; from speaking when he ought not to speak; from eating that which he ought not to eat, even though the food be immediately before him; from running about when it is better for him to remain quiet; and to be ready to say and to do just that which it is best for him to say and do, at the time when it needs to be said and done. Self-control in all these things is possible to a child. Wise training on the parent’s part can secure it. The principle which is operative here, is operative in every sphere of human existence. By means of self-control a child is made happier, and is fitted for his duties, while a child and ever after, as otherwise he could not be. Many a man’s life-course is saddened through his hopeless lack of that self-control to which he could easily have been helped in childhood, if only his parents had understood his needs and been faithful accordingly.

XI.

_TRAINING A CHILD NOT TO TEASE._

A child who never “teases” is a rarity; yet no child ought to tease. If a child does tease, the blame of his teasing properly rests on his parents, rather than on himself. The parent who realizes this fact, will have an added stimulus to the work of training his child not to tease; and no phase of the work of child-training is simpler, or surer of its result, than this one.

“To tease” is “to pull,” “to tug,” “to drag,” “to vex [or carry] with importunity.” A child teases when he wants something from his parents, and fails to get it at the first asking. He pulls and tugs at his parents, in the hope of dragging them to his way of thinking, or to a consent to his having what he wants in spite of their different thinking. He hopes to vex or carry them into the line of his desires by means of his importunities, whatever their view of the case may have been, to begin with. If a child could have what he wanted at his first asking, he would not tease; for there would be no room for his teasing. If a child never secured anything through teasing, he would not come into the habit of teasing; for there would be no inducement to him to tease. When, therefore, a child is accustomed to tease, it is evident that he has been trained by his parents to tease, instead of being trained by them not to tease; and they are to bear the responsibility and blame of his teasing.

Many a child does not expect to get what he wants, if it is out of the ordinary line of his daily needs, unless he teases for it; therefore he counts teasing a part of his regular duty in life, as truly as “beating down” the city shop-keeper on his prices is supposed to be the duty of a shopper from the country. If a child asks for a slice of bread-and-butter, or a bit of meat, at the family table, or for a glass of water between meals, he expects to get it at the first asking. Teasing for that is not in his mind as a necessity. But if he wants to stay at home from school without any reason for it, or to start off with some of his schoolmates on a long and hazardous tramp on a Saturday, or to sit up an hour later than usual at night, or to have a new sled or velocipede or bicycle, or to go to the circus or to hear the minstrels, “like all the other fellows,”—he is not so sure of gaining his request at the first asking. So, when the answer “No” comes back to him, in such a case, he meets it with the appeal, “Do let me. Oh, do!” and then he enters upon a nerve struggle for the mastery over his parents at this point, with the idea in his mind that it is a single question of who shall be most persistent in adhering to his side of the conflict.

There are few children who always succeed in carrying their point by teasing; but there are fewer who never succeed by this means. Most parents give way, sooner or later, in some of these conflicts with their children. It may be that they are less determined than their children, and that they are simply tired out by the teasing. It may be that they are moved by their children’s earnestness in the matter, and that they yield because of their tenderness toward the little pleaders. It may be that their first answer to the appeal is a thoughtless one, and that their fuller considering of the matter leads them to see it to be right to reverse their impulsive decision. Whatever be the parents’ reason for their course in such a case, if they give a negative answer to their children’s first request, and an affirmative one in response to more or less teasing on the children’s part, they train their children so far to believe that teasing is an important factor in a child’s progress in life; and of course they are responsible for their children’s continuance in the habit of teasing.

It is a misfortune to a child to suppose that teasing is essential to his gaining a point that he ought to gain. A result of such a view in his mind is, that he looks not to his parents’ wisdom and judgment, but to his own positiveness and persistency, as the guide of his action in any mooted case of personal conduct; not to principles which are disclosed to him by one who is in authority, but to impulses which are wholly in his own bosom. Such a view is inimical to all wise methods of thinking and doing on a child’s part. And it is even more of a misfortune to the parent than to the child, for a child to have the idea that the parent’s decision is a result of the child’s teasing, rather than of the parent’s understanding of what is right and best in a given case. No parent can have the truest respect of a child, while the child knows that he can tease that parent into compliance with the child’s request, contrary to the parent’s real or supposed conviction. For the child’s sake, therefore, and also for the parent’s, every child ought to be trained not to tease, and not to expect any possible advantage from teasing.