Studies of childhood

As implied in the account of his much questioning, the feeling which was most strongly marked and dominant during this year was wonder. His father would surprise him sometimes s...

Very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past self. The idea of personal identity, so dear to philosophers, does not appear to be fully reached at first. O...

The story about what he would do if his family were ship-wrecked suggests that self-sacrifice was as yet not a strong element in the boy’s moral constitution. Egoism, it might w...

A curious chapter in the psychology of the child which still has to be written is the account of the various devices by which the astute little novice called upon to wear the yo...

These first tentatives in verbal assertion, we are told, sounded very odd owing to the slowness of the delivery and the stress impartially laid on each word. C. had as yet no in...

About the same date he proffered a definition of one of the most difficult of subjects. His mother had been trying to explain the difference between poetry and prose by saying t...

This anger, it is to be noted, is due to check, and would show itself to some extent even if there were no intervention of authority. Thus a child will become angry, resentful,...

The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist the child’s hungry demand for a story? Edgar Quinet in his _Histoire de mes Idées_ tells how when...

I studied this phenomenon with an extreme pleasure. What struck me as most strange was to hear my own name repeated by my own voice. Then there occurred to me an odd explanation...

Do any of us really understand this doll-superstition? Writers of a clear long-reaching memory have tried to take us back to childhood, and restore to us for a moment the whole...

Before considering the manifold outgoings of fear produced by impressions of the eye, we may glance at another form of early disturbance which has some analogy to the shock-like...

All this is dreadful enough, yet it is probable that many children go through a longer or shorter stage of rebellion, who afterwards turn out to be well-behaved, respectable per...

I may begin my sketch of the early history of this boy by remarking that he appears to have been a normal and satisfactory specimen of his class,—healthy, good-natured, and give...

It must be confessed that our diary does not give us much that is startling in the way of original generalisation. So far as we can judge, C. was a steady-going baby, not given...

I have quoted at length this careful bit of maternal observation because it seems to indicate so clearly a spontaneous extension of a custom. The practice of the mother and fath...

How far can children be said to have the germ of a feeling for nature, or, to use the more comprehensive modern term, cosmic emotion? It is a matter of common observation that t...

This suggestion often combines with other forces. Here is a good example. A little American girl, sent into the oak shrubbery to get a leaf, saw a snake, which so frightened her...

Beginning with their ideas of natural objects we find, as has been hinted, the influence of certain predominant tendencies. Of these the most important is the impulse to think o...

Yet this way of viewing childhood is not merely of antiquarian interest. While a monument of his race, and in a manner a key to its history, the child is also its product. In sp...

So far as my own observations have gone there seems to be but little uniformity among children’s fears of the animal world. What frightens one child may delight another at about...

We may notice something more in this early mode of interrogation. Children are apt to think not only that things behave in general after our manner, that their activity is deter...

We may now notice some new manifestations of thinking power. All thought, we are told, proceeds by the finding out of similarities and dissimilarities. C. continued to note the...

While, however, these are the dominant characteristics of children’s fears they are not the only ones. Experience begins to direct the instinctive fear-impulse from the very beg...

This early consideration frequently takes the practical form of helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist you in little household occupations; and though love of...

We can most of us perhaps, recall similar experiences, where colours and sounds, in themselves indifferent, took on either through analogy or association a decidedly repulsive c...

Practice tends, of course, to reduce the conscious element in the process. In the case of a person accustomed to draw the outline of a human head, a cat or what not, the operati...

I would define art-activity as including all childish doings which are consciously directed to an external result recognised as beautiful, as directly pleasing to sense and imag...

In carrying out my inquiries into this region of childish ideas, I lighted quite unexpectedly on the queer notion that towards the end of life there is a reverse process of shri...

Enough has been said to show how very delicate a problem we have here to deal with. And if scientific men are still busy settling the point how the problem can be best dealt wit...

A somewhat similar inversion of what seems to us the proper order appears in the child’s first attempts at negation. The child C. early in his third year expressed the idea that...

At the same time the front features themselves undergo modification. The big grinning mouth is dropped and one of the eyes omitted. The exact way in which this occurs appears to...

To judge from a story for the truth of which I will not vouch children will turn the devil to the same useful account. A little girl was observed to write a letter and to bury i...

As with words, so with whole expressions and sayings. It was a natural movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the question of the Inspector, ‘What is an...

The first crude attempts about the age of three or four to draw animal forms exhibit great incompleteness of conception and want of a sense of position and proportion. In one ca...

This clinging to the familiar and alarm at a sudden intrusion of the new into his little world showed themselves in a curious way in his attitude towards strangers. When ten wee...

These samples may serve to show that in the stories of by no means highly-gifted children we come face to face with interesting traits of the young mind, and can study some of t...

It has recently been pointed out that in this moral control of the child through suggestion of right actions we have something closely analogous to the action of suggestion upon...

The only other pre-condition of this primitive thoughtfulness is that imaginative activity which we have already considered on its playful and pleasurable side. We are learning...

Coming to words which we call names we find that the child will often extend a recognition-sign from one object to a second, and to our thinking widely dissimilar object through...

As I have remarked, to the child bent on representing ‘man’ the head or face is at first the principal thing, some early drawings contenting themselves with this. But in general...

But even in this submissive acceptance there lies the germ of a subsequent transformation. If the child is to believe, he must believe in his own fashion; he must give body and...

Along with such lame omissions we have the more vigorous procedure of substitutions. In certain cases there seems little if any kinship between the sounds or the articulatory ac...

True language-sounds significant of things grow out of this spontaneous expressive articulation. Thus the demonstrative sign _da_ which accompanies the pointing, and which seems...

Baby, new-born, helpless condition of, 5, 400. Baby-worship, 17. Bagehot, Walter, 280. Baldwin, J. Mark, 11 note, 20, 40 note, 335 note, 484 note. Barnes, Earl, 125 note, 224, 3...

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issue...