Chapter 5

Read Carefully. In answering these questions you are earnestly requested _not_ to answer according to the text-book where opinions are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. In all cases credit will be given for thought and original observation. Place your name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject.

1. How can you bring the influence of art to bear upon your child?

2. What is the influence of music? How can you employ it?

3. Do you believe in fairy tales for children? State your reasons.

4. How would you encourage the love of nature in your child?

5. What is it that the Kindergarten can do better than the home?

6. Suppose that your child had some undesirable acquaintances, how would you meet the situation?

7. What can you say of accomplishments for children?

8. If manual training, physical culture, domestic science, etc., are not taught in your schools and you wish your children to get some of the advantages of these studies, how will you set about it?

9. What do you understand to be the correlation of studies?

10. Should parents become acquainted with the teachers of their children and their methods? Why?

11. How may children be taught the use of money?

12. State the advantages and disadvantages of Sunday schools. What have they meant in _your own_ experience?

13. How will you train your child religiously? Can anyone take this task from you?

14. What rules must be borne in mind in teaching the Bible at home?

15. Give some experience of your own (or of a friend) in the training of a child wherein a success has been achieved.

16. Are there any questions you would like to ask or subjects which you wish to discuss in connection with the lessons on the Study of Child Life?

Note.--After completing the test sign it with your full name.

Supplementary Notes

on

STUDY OF CHILD LIFE

BY MARION FOSTER WASHBURNE

APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLES.

In this "Study of Child Life" we have considered some of the fundamental principles of education. When we think of the complex inheritance of the American people it is, perhaps, no wonder that many families contain individuals varying so widely from each other as to seem to require each a complete system of education all to himself. We are a people born late in the history of the race, and our blood is mingled of the Norseman's, the Celt's, and the Latin's. Advancing civilization alone would tend to make us more complex, our problems more subtle; but in addition to this we are mixed of all races, and born in times so strenuous that, sooner or later, every fibre of our weaving is strained and brought into prominence.

In the letters from my students this fact, with which I was already familiar in a general sort of way, has been brought more particularly to my attention. In all cases, the situation has been responsible for much confusion and difficulty. In a good many, it has led to family tragedies, varying in magnitude from the unhappiness of the misunderstood child to that of the lonely woman, suffering in adult life from the faults of her upbringing, and the failure of the family ties whose need she felt the more as the duties of motherhood pressed upon her. If it were possible for me to violate the confidence of my pupils I could prove very conclusively that the old-fashioned system of bringing up children on the three R's and a spanking did not work so well as some persons seem to think. I could prove that the problem has grown past the point where instinct and tradition may be held as sufficient to solve it. Everyone, seeing these letters, would be obliged to confess, "Yes, indeed, here is plain need of training for parents." Yet, at the same time, these same persons would be tempted to inquire, "But can any training meet such a difficult situation?"

Here is despair; and some cause for it. When one's own mother has not understood one; when one has lived lonely in the midst of brothers and sisters who are more strange than strangers; when one's childhood is full of the memory of obscure but intense sufferings, one flies for relief, perhaps, to any one who offers it hopefully enough; but one does not really expect to get it. _Can_ training, especially by correspondence, meet the need?

Not wholly, of course, let us be frank to admit. No amount of theory, however excellent, can take the place of the drill given only in the hard school of experience. But when the theory is not merely theory, but sound principle, based on scientific observation, confirmed by the wide experience of many persons, it is as valuable in practical life as any rule of mathematics to the practical engineer. We all know that the technical correspondence schools really do fit young mechanics to move on and up in the trade. By correspondence he is given what Froebel calls the interpreting word. The experience in application the student has to supply himself.

So in the matter of education. There are genuine principles which underlie the development of every child that lives--even the feeble-minded, deaf, and blind. Read Helen Keller's wonderful life, if you want to see the proof of it. Just as surely as a child has two legs and has to learn to walk on them by a series of prolonged experiments, just so surely he has (a) a sense of justice, (b) an instinct for freedom, (c) a love of play. Every kind of child has all these instincts, as much as he has love for food and drink; and to educate him consists in developing these instincts into (a) the habit of dealing justly by others, (b) the right use of freedom, (c) love of work. The particular methods may differ. The principles _do not and CANNOT DIFFER_.

She who would succeed in child training must hold to these truths with all her might and main--making them, in fact, her religion, for they are the doctrines of the Christian religion as applied to motherhood. To hold them lightly, or even experimentally, will not do. One most walk in faith. And that the faith may not be blind, but may be based on experience and understanding, let me suggest this means of proof: Instead of asking yourself how the laws laid down in these little books would fit this or that particular child, your own or another's, ask how they would have fitted you, if they had been applied to you by your own mother. Take the chapter on faults, pick out the one which was yours, in childhood--oh, of course, you've got over it now!--think of some bitter trouble into which that fault hurried you, and conceive that, instead of the punishment you did receive, you had been treated as the lesson suggests--what, do you think, would have been the result? And so with the other chapters--even with that much-mooted question of companionship. Test the truth of them all by their imaginary application to the child you know best. When you can, find the principles that your own mother did employ in your education, and examine the result of what she did. Some of the principles will suddenly become luminous to you, I am sure; and some things that happened in the past receive an explanation.

Such a self-examination, to be of any value, must be rigidly honest. There is too much at stake here for you to permit any remnants of bitter feeling to influence your judgment--and you will surely be surprised to find how many bitter resentments will show that they yet have life. The past is dead, as far as your power to change it is concerned; but it lives, as a thing that you can use. Here is your own child, to be helped or hindered by what you may have endured. It will all have been worth while, if by means of it you can save him from some bruises and falls. Every bitterness will be sweetened if you can look through it and find the truth which shall serve this dearer little self who looks to you for guidance.

Then, when you have found the principles true--and not one minute before!--put them rigidly into practice. I say, not one minute before you are convinced, because it is better to hold the truth lightly in the memory as a mere interesting theory you have never had time to test, than to swallow it, half assimilated. Truth is a real and living power, once it is applied to life; and to half-use it in doubt, and fear, is to invite indigestion and consequent disgust. Take of these teachings that which you are sure is sound and right, and use it faithfully, and unremittingly. Be careful that no plea of expediency, no hurry of the moment, makes you false. If you are thus faithful in small things, one after the other, in a series fitted to your own peculiar constitution, the others will prove themselves to you; for they are coherent truths, and not one lives to itself alone, but joins hands with all the rest. Being truths, they fit all human minds--yours and mine, and those of our children, no matter how diverse we may be.

OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN

Isn't it ridiculously true that, as soon as we get enlightened ourselves, we burn to enlighten the rest of the world? We do not seem to remember our own feelings during the years of darkness, and the contentment of those who remain as we were surpasses our power of comprehension. It is really comforting to my own sense of impatience and balked zeal to find how many of my pupils are dreadfully concerned about other people's children. This one's heart burns over the little boy next door who is shamefully mismanaged and who already begins to show the ill effects of his treatment. That one has a sister-in-law who refuses to listen to a word spoken in season.

Between my smiles--those comfortable smiles with which we recognize our own shortcomings--I, too, am really concerned about the sister-in-law's children. It is true that their mother ought to be taught better, and that, if she isn't, those innocent lambs are going to suffer for it. Off at this distance, without the ties of kindred to draw me too close for clear judgment, I see, though, that we have to walk very cautiously here, for fear of doing more harm than good. Better that those benighted women never heard the name of child-study, than to hear it only to greet it with rebellion and hatred. Yet to force any of our principles upon her attention when she is in a hostile mood--or to _force_ them, indeed, in any mood--is to invite just this attitude.

Most of us, by the time that we are sufficiently grown up to undertake the study of child life, have outgrown the habit of plainly telling our friends to their faces just what we think of their faults; yet this is a safe and pleasant pastime beside that other of trying to tell them how to bring up their children. You stand it from me, because you have invited it, and perhaps still more because you never see me, and the personal element enters only slightly and pleasantly into our relationship. I sometimes think that students pour out their hearts to me, much as we used to talk to our girl friends in the dark. I'm very sure I should never dare to say to their faces what I write so freely on the backs of their papers!

You see, the adult, too, has his love of freedom; and while he can stand an indirect, impersonal preachment, which he may reject if he likes without apology, he will not stand the insistence of a personal appeal. I've let "Little Women" shame me into better conduct, when I was a girl, at times when no direct speech from a living soul would have brought me to anything but defiance--haven't you? We have to apply our principles to the adult world about us, well as to the child-world, and teach, when we permit ourselves to teach at all, chiefly by example, by cheerful confession of fallibility, by open-mindedness. Above all things, we have to respect the freedom of these others, about whom we are so inconveniently anxious.

It is fair, though, that the spoken word should interpret what we do. It is fair enough to tell your sister-in-law what you think and ask her judgment upon it, if you can trust yourself not to rub your own judgment in too hard. If you are unmarried, and a teacher, you will have to concede to her preposterous marital conceit a humble and inquiring attitude, and console your flustered soul by setting it to the ingenious task of teaching by means of a graduated series of artful inquiries. Don't, oh don't! seek for an outspoken victory. Be content if some day you hear her proclaim your truth as her own discovery. It never was yours, anyway, any more than it is hers or than it is mine. Be glad that, while she claims it, she at least holds it close.

If you are a mother, you are in an easier case. You can do to your own children just what she ought to do to hers, and tell about it softly, as if sure of her sympathy. If you are very sincere in your desire for the welfare of her child, you may even ask her advice about yours, and so gain the right to offer a little in exchange--say one-tenth of what she gives.

All these warnings apply to unsought advice--a dangerous thing to offer under any circumstances. Except there is a real emergency, you had better avoid it. If your nephew or little neighbor is winning along through his troubles fairly well, best keep hands off. But if you absolutely _must_ interfere, guard yourself as I suggest, and remember that, even then, you will assuredly get burned, if you play long with that dangerous fire of maternal pride!

When your advice is sought, you are in a different position. Then you have a right to speak out, though if you are wise and loving you will temper that right with charity. No one can be too gentle in dealing with a soul that honestly asks for help; but one can easily be too timid. Think, under these circumstances, of yourself not at all; but put yourself as much as possible in her place; be led by her questions; and answer fearlessly from the depths of the best truth you hold. Then leave it. You can do no more. What becomes of that truth, once you have lovingly spoken it, is no more of your concern.

THE SEX QUESTION

Always convinced of the importance of this subject, convictions have deepened to the point of dismay since learning, through this school, of the many women who have suffered and who continue to suffer, both mentally and physically, because, in early girlhood, they were not taught those finer physiological facts upon which the very life of the race depends. Yet, strangely enough, these very victims find it almost impossible to give their children the knowledge necessary to save them from a similar fate. It is as if the lack of early training in themselves leaves them helpless before a situation from which they suffer but which they have never mastered.

Of course such feelings, in themselves morbid, are not to be trusted. Faced with a task like this we have only to ask ourselves not "Is it hard?" but "Is it in truth my task?" If it is, we may be sure that we shall be given strength to do it, provided only that we are sincere in our willingness to do it and do not count our feelings at all.

It is preposterous to have such feelings, in the first place. They are wholly the product of false teaching. For we have no right--as we recognize when we stop to think about it in calmness of spirit, and apart from our special difficult--to sit in scornful judgment upon any of the laws of nature. When we find ourselves in rebellion against them, what we have to do is to change the state of our minds, for change the laws we cannot. If we women could inaugurate a gigantic strike against the present method of bearing children--and I imagine that millions would join such a strike if it held out any promise of success!--we still could accomplish nothing. To fret ourselves into a frazzle over it, is to accomplish less than nothing;--it is to enter upon the pathway to destruction.

In teaching our children, then, we have first to conquer ourselves--that painful, reiterated, primal necessity, which must underlie all teaching. Having done so, we shall find our task easier than we supposed. The children's own questions will lead us; and if we simply make it a rule never to answer a question falsely no matter how far it may probe, we shall find ourselves not only enlightening but receiving enlightenment. For nothing is so sure an antidote to morbidness as the unspoiled mind of a child. He looks at the facts with such a calm, level gaze that proportions are restored to us as we follow his look.

Many of my letters show that adult women, wives and mothers, still grope for the truth that lies plain to the eyes of any simple child--the truth that there is no such thing as clean and unclean, only use and misuse. Others, through love, and the splendid revelations that it makes, have risen so far above their former misconceptions that they fear to tell a child the facts before he has experienced the love. I can imagine that in an ideal world some such reticence might be good and right--but this is far from an ideal world. We have to train our children relatively, not absolutely, in the knowledge that we do not control all their environment. I think the solution of the difficulty is to teach the facts of sex in a perfectly calm, unemotional, matter-of-fact manner, just as one teaches the laws of digestion. When knowledge of evil is thrust upon our child let us be sorry with him that those other children have never been taught, and that they are doing their bodies such sad mischief. But don't exaggerate it; don't be too shocked; don't condemn the poor little sinners, who are also victims, too severely. Charity toward wrong-doing is the best prophylactic against imitation. We never feel the lure of a sin which grieves us in another; but often the call of a sin which we too strongly condemn. Because the very strength of the condemnation rouses our imaginations, is in itself an emotion, and, since it is certainly not a loving one, must necessarily be linked with all other unloving and therefore evil emotions. As far as possible, let us keep feeling out of this subject, until such time as the true and beautiful feeling of love between husband and wife arises and uplifts it.

FATHERS

And now comes the editor of these lessons and accuses me of neglecting the fathers! Nothing in this world could be farther from my thoughts. Not only do I agree with him that "all ordinary children have fathers, and it might be well to put in a paragraph;" but I am cheerfully willing to write a whole book on the subject, provided that a mere modicum of readers can be assured me. I fairly ache to talk to fathers, having a really great ideal of them, and whenever a class of them can be induced to take up a correspondence course I shall be glad to conduct it.

Joking aside, however, I truly feel that the saddest lack many of our children have to suffer is the lack of fathers; and the saddest lack our men have to suffer is the lack of children. So little are most men awake to this subject that I am perfectly convinced that much of the prevalent "race suicide" is due to their objections to a large family, rather than to their wives'. Upon them comes the burden of support. They get few of the joys which belong to children, and nearly all of the woes. Seldom do they share the games of their offspring, or their happy times; and almost always the worst difficulties are thrust upon them for solution. Not that they often solve them! How can we expect it?

There is Edgar growing very untruthful and defiant. We have concealed all the first stages of the disease for fear of bothering poor tired papa. At last it reaches such a height that we can conceal it no longer. We fling the desperate boy at the very head of the bewildered father, and then have turns of bitter disappointment because the remedies that are applied may be so much cruder, even, than our own. Here is a boy who gets close to his father only to find the proximity very uncomfortable; and a father who becomes acquainted with his son only through the ugly revelations of his worst faults.

Not but that the fathers are somewhat to blame, too. Without urging by us, they ought, of course to take a spontaneous interest in the lives for which they are responsible. They ought to, and they often do; but the interest is sometimes ill-advised, and consequently unwelcome. There are fathers whose interest is a most inconvenient thing. When they are at home, they run everything, growl at everything, upset, as like as not, all that the mother has been trying to do during the day. I know wives who are distinctly glad to encourage their husbands in the habit of lunching down-town, so that they can have a little room for their own peculiar form of activity. And maybe we all have times of sympathizing with the woman in this familiar story: There was a man once who never left the house without a list of directions to his wife as to how she should manage things during his absence.

"Better have the children carry umbrellas this morning; it's going to rain," said he, as he went out of the door. "Be sure to put on their rubbers. And since the baby is so croupy I'd get out his winter flannels, if I were you."

"Yes, dear," said the patient wife. "Make your mind easy. I'll take just as good care of them as if they were my own children." Of course this is an extreme case.

There are other fathers whose whole idea of the parental relation seems to be indulgence. No system of discipline, however mild, can be carried out when such a man wins the children's hearts and ruins their dispositions. It is he, isn't it? (I don't quite recollect the tale) who was sent, after death, to the warm regions, there to expiate his many sins of omission. And his adoring children, who had been hauled to heaven by the main strength, let us say, of their mother, found that the only thing they could do for him was to call out celestial hose company number one and ask them to play awhile upon the overheated apartments of poor tired papa.

The truth is--sit close and let no man hear what we say!--that these fathers are much what we, the mothers, make them. If, under the mistaken idea of saving father from all the worries of the children, we hurry the youngsters off to bed before he comes home in the evening, conceal our heart-burnings over them, do our correspondence-school work in secret and solitude, meditate in the same fashion over plans for their upbringing, talk to our neighbors but never to him about the daily troubles, how can we expect any man on earth, no matter how susceptible of later angelic growth, to become a wise and devoted father? Tired or not, he is a father, not a mere bread-winner. Whether he likes it at the moment or not, it is for his soul's health for him to enter into the full life of his family, including those problems which are at the very heart of it, after his day of grinding, and very likely unloving, work at the office. Here love enters to interpret, to soften, to make all principles live. Here alone he can give himself to those gentler forms of judgment which are necessary as much to the completion of his own character as to the happiness and welfare of his wife and children. Someone has said that we wrong our friends when we ask nothing of them; and certainly it is true that we wrong our husbands when we do not demand big and splendid things of them.

That word demand troubles me a little. So many women demand--and demand terribly! But what they demand is indulgence, sympathy, interest--I think sometimes that they crave a man's utter absorption in themselves much as a man craves strong drink. It is their form of intoxication. Such demanding is not, of course, what I mean. Demand nothing for yourself, beyond simple justice. Not love, for that flies at the very sound of demand, and dies before nagging. But demand for the man himself, call upon his nobler qualities, and don't let him palm off on you his second-best. Many a man is loved and honored by his business associates whose wife and children never catch a glimpse of the finer side of him. Demand the exercise of these fine traits in the home. Demand that he be a fine man in the eyes of his children as in the eyes of his friends. Be sure that he will rise to the occasion with a splendid sense of having, now, a home that is a home, of having a wife who is wived to the man he likes best to be.

This bids fair to be--as I knew it would, if once I permitted myself to write at all on the subject--not a paragraph, but a whole essay--or perhaps, if I did not check myself, a whole volume! But after all, what I want to say is merely that as no child can be born without a father, so he cannot be properly trained without a father's daily assistance. And that, since most fathers come to the task even more untrained than the mothers, some training must be undertaken. By whom? By the mother. It is, I solemnly believe, your duty to go ahead a little on this part of the journey, find out what ought to be done, and teach, coax, induce your husband to co-operate with you in these things. No one knows better than you do that he is only a boy at heart after all--perhaps the very dearest boy of them all. This boy you have to help while yet the other children are little--but be sure that, as you teach him, so, all the time, will he teach you. Every principle laid down in this book, above all others the principle of _freedom_, will apply to him. He will take the lessons a trifle more reluctantly but more lastingly than the younger boys; and in a little while you will be envied of all your women friends because of the competency, the reliability, the contentment of your children's father.

THE UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE

When all is said and done, it remains true that the finest, the most subtle and penetrating influence in education is precisely that education for which no rules can be laid down. It is the silent influence of the motives which impel the persons who constantly surround us. If we examine for a little our own childhood we see at once that this is so. What are those canons of conduct by which we judge others and even occasionally ourselves? Whence came that list of _impossible_ things, those things that are so closed to us that we cannot, even under great stress, of temptation, conceive ourselves as yielding to them?

There is an enlightening story of a young man, born and bred a gentleman, who, by the way of fast living falls upon poverty. In the hard pressure of his financial affairs he is about to commit suicide, when suddenly he finds, in an empty cab, a roll of bills amounting to some thousands of dollars. The circumstances are such that he knows that he can, if he will, discover the owner; or, he can, without fear of detection, keep the money himself. He makes up his mind, deliberately, to keep it, and then, almost against his will, subconsciously as it were, walks to the office of the man who lost the money and restores it to him.

Now, doubtless, in his downward career he had done many things which judged by any absolute standard of morality were quite as wrong as the keeping of that money would have been, but the fact remained that he could not do that deed. Others, yes, but not that. He was a gentleman, and gentlemen do not steal private property, whatever they may do about public property. Yet probably, in all his life he had not once been told not to steal--not one word had he been taught, openly, on the subject. No one whom he knew stole. He was never expected to steal. Stealing was a sin beyond the pale. So strong was this unconscious, _but unvarying_ influence, that by it he was saved, in the hour of extreme need, from even feeling the force of a temptation that to a boy born and reared, say, in the slums, would have been overwhelming.

Now, considering such things, I take it that it behooves us, as parents, to look closely at the sort of persons that we are, clear inside of us. To examine, as if with the clear eyes of our own children, waiting to be clouded by our sophistries, the motives from which we habitually act in the small affairs of everyday life. Are we influenced by fear of what the neighbors will say? Have we one standard of courtesy for company times, and another for private moments? If so, why? Are we self-indulgent about trifles? Are we truthful in spirit as well as in letter? Do we permit ourselves to cheat the street-car and the railroad company, teaching the child at our side to sit low that he may ride for half-fare? Do we seek justice in our bargaining, or are we sharp and self-considerate? Do we practice democracy, or only talk it and wave the flag at it?

And so on with a hundred other questions as to those small repeated acts, which, springing from base motives, may put our unconscious influence with our children in the already over-weighted down-side of the scale; or met bravely and nobly, at some expense of convenience, may help to enlighten the weight of inherited evil. Sometimes I wonder how much of what we call inherited evil is the result not of heredity at all, but of this sort of unconscious education.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

THE SELF-DISTRUSTFUL CHILD.

"Your question is an excellent one. The answer to it is really contained in your answer to the question about obedience. If a child obey _laws_ not persons, and is steadily shown the reasonableness of what is required of him, he comes to trust those laws and to trust himself when he is conscious of obeying. But in addition to this general training, it might be well to give a self-distrustful child easy work to do--work well within his ability--then to praise him for performing it; give him something a little harder, but still within his reach, and so on, steadily calling on him for greater and greater effort, but seeing to it that the effort is not too great and that it bears visible fruit. He should never be allowed to be discouraged; and when he droops over his work, some strong, friendly help may well he given him. Sensitive, conscientious children, such as I imagine you were, are sometimes overwhelmed in this way by parents, quite unconscious of the pain they are giving by assigning tasks that are beyond the strength and courage of the young toilers.

"At the same time, much might be done by training the child's attention from _product_ to _process_. You know the St. Louis Fair does not aim to show what has been done, but _how_ things are done. So a child--so you--can find happiness and intellectual uplift in studying the laws at work under the simplest employment instead of counting the number of things _finished_."

COMPANY WAYS

"A boy who is visiting us is so beset with rules and 'nagged' even by glances and nudges, that I wonder that he is not bewildered and rebellious. He seems good and pleasant and obedient (12 years old), but I keep wondering why?"

"Perhaps these were company ways inspired by an over-anxiety on his mother's part that he should appear well. Oh, I have been so tempted in this direction!--for of course people look at my children to see if they prove the truth of my teachings, and as they are vigorous, free and active youngsters, with decided characteristics they often do the most unexpected and uncomfortable things! There must be good points both in the boy himself--the boy you mention--and in his training which offset the bad effects of the 'nagging' you notice--and possibly the nagging itself may not be customary when he is at home. And perhaps the mother knows that you are a close observer of children."

THEORY BEFORE PRACTICE

"There is only one danger in learning about the training of children in advance of their advent, and that is the danger of being too sure of ourselves--too systematic. The best training is that which is most invisible--which leaves the child most in freedom. Almost the whole duty of mothers is to provide the right environment and then just love and enjoy the child as he moves and grows in it. But to do this apparently easy thing requires so much simplicity and directness of vision and most of us are so complex and confused that considerable training and considerable effort are required to put us into the right attitude.

"For myself, soon after I took my kindergarten training, which I did with three babies creeping and playing about the schoolroom, I read George Meredith's 'Ordeal of Richard Feveril' (referred to on p. 33,