Part 2

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."