Chapter 1

The American Child

by Elizabeth Mccracken

With Illustrations from photographs by Alice Austin

1913

to My Father And Mother

PREFACE

The purpose of this preface is that of every preface--to say "thank you" to the persons who have helped in the making of the book.

I would render thanks first of all to the Editors of the "Outlook" for permission to reprint the chapters of the book which appeared as articles in the monthly magazine numbers of their publication.

I return thanks also to Miss Rosamond F. Rothery, Miss Sara Cone Bryant, Miss Agnes F. Perkins, and Mr. Ferris Greenslet. Without the help and encouragement of all of these, the book never would have been written.

Finally, I wish to say an additional word of thanks to my physician, Dr. John E. Stillwell. Had it not been for his consummate skill and untiring care after an accident, which, four years ago, made me a year-long hospital patient, I should never have lived to write anything.

E. McC.

CAMBRIDGE, January, 1913

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. THE CHILD AT HOME II. THE CHILD AT PLAY III. THE COUNTRY CHILD IV. THE CHILD IN SCHOOL V. THE CHILD IN THE LIBRARY VI. THE CHILD IN CHURCH CONCLUSION

ILLUSTRATIONS

COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS THREE SMALL GIRLS THE BOY OF THE HOUSE "DID YOU PLAY IT THIS WAY?" THE DEAR DELIGHTS OF PLAYING ALONE "THE CHILDREN--THEY ARE SUCH DEARS" A SMALL COUNTRY BOY ARRAYED IN SPOTLESS WHITE THEY PAINT PICTURES AS A REGULAR PART OF THEIR SCHOOL ROUTINE THEY DO SO MANY THINGS! THEY HAVE SO MANY THINGS! THE STORY HOUR IN THE CHILDREN'S ROOM THE CHILDREN'S EDITION IN THE INFANT CLASS "DO YOU LIKE MY NEW HYMN?" CHILDREN GO TO CHURCH

INTRODUCTION

One day several years ago, when Mr. Lowes Dickinson's statement that he had found no conversation and--worse still--no conversationalists in America was fresh in our outraged minds, I happened to meet an English woman who had spent approximately the same amount of time in our country as had Mr. Lowes Dickinson. "What has been your experience?" I anxiously asked her. "Is it true that we only 'talk'? Can it really be that we never 'converse'?"

"Dear me, no!" she exclaimed with gratifying fervor. "You are the most delightful conversationalists in the world, on your own subject--"

"Our own subject?" I echoed.

"Certainly," she returned; "your own subject, the national subject,--the child, the American child. It is possible to 'converse' with any American on that subject; every one of you has something to say on it; and every one of you will listen eagerly to what any other person says on it. You modify the opinions of your hearers by what you say; and you actually allow your own opinions to be modified by what you hear said. If that is conversation, without a doubt you have it in America, and have it in as perfect a state as conversation ever was had anywhere. But you have it only on that subject. I wonder why," she went on, half- musingly, before I could make an attempt to persuade her to qualify her rather sweeping assertion. "It may be because you do so much for children, in America. They are always on your mind; they are hardly ever out of your sight. You are forever either doing something for them, or planning to do something for them. No wonder the child is your one subject of conversation. You do so _very_ much for children in America," she repeated.

Few of us will agree with the English woman that the child, the American child, is the only subject upon which we converse. Certainly, though, it is a favorite subject; it may even not inaptly be called our national subject. Whatever our various views concerning this may chance to be, however, it is likely that we are all in entire agreement with regard to the other matter touched upon by the English woman,--the pervasiveness of American children. Is it not true that we keep them continually in mind; that we seldom let them go quite out of sight; that we are always doing, or planning to do, something for them? What is it that we would do? And why is it that we try so unceasingly to do it?

It seems to me that we desire with a great desire to make the boys and girls do; that all of the "_very_ much" that we do for them is done in order to teach them just that--to do. It is a large and many-sided and varicolored desire, and to follow its leadings is an arduous labor; but is there one of us who knows a child well who has not this desire, and who does not cheerfully perform that labor? Having decided in so far as we are able what were good to do, we try, not only to do it ourselves, in our grown-up way, but so to train the children that they, too, may do it, in their childish way. The various means that we find most helpful to the end of our own doing we secure for the children,--adapting them, simplifying them, and even re-shaping them, that the boys and girls may use them to the full.

There is, of course, a certain impersonal quality in a great deal of what we, in America, do for children. It is not based so much on friendship for an individual child as on a sense of responsibility for the well-being of all childhood, especially all childhood in our own country. But most of what we do, after all, we do for the boys and girls whom we know and love; and we do it because they are our friends, and we wish them to share in the good things of our lives,--our work and our play. To what amazing lengths we sometimes go in this "doing for" the children of our circles!

One Saturday afternoon, only a few weeks ago, I saw at the annual exhibit of the State Board of Health, a man, one of my neighbors, with his little eight-year old boy. The exhibit consisted of the customary display of charts and photographs, showing the nature of the year's work in relation to the milk supply, the water supply, the housing of the poor, and the prevention of contagious diseases. My neighbor is not a specialist in any one of these matters; his knowledge is merely that of an average good citizen. He went from one subject to the other, studying them. His boy followed close beside him, looking where his father looked,--if with a lesser interest at the charts, with as great an intentness at the photographs. As they made their way about the room given over to the exhibit, they talked, the boy asking questions, the father endeavoring to answer them.

The small boy caught sight of me as I stood before one of the charts relating to the prevention of contagious diseases, and ran across the room to me. "What are _you_ looking at?" he said. "That! It shows how many people were vaccinated, doesn't it? Come over here and see the pictures of the calves the doctors get the stuff to vaccinate with from!"

"Isn't this an odd place for a little boy on a Saturday afternoon?" I remarked to my neighbor, a little later, when the boy had roamed to the other side of the room, out of hearing.

"Not at all!" asserted the child's father. "He was inquiring the other day why he had been vaccinated, why all the children at school had been vaccinated. Just before that, he had asked where the water in the tap came from. This is just the place for him right now! It isn't odd at all for him to be here on a Saturday afternoon. It is much odder for _me_" he continued with a smile. "I'd naturally be playing golf! But when children begin to ask questions, one has to do something about answering them; and coming here seemed to be the best way of answering these newest questions of my boy's. I want him to learn about the connection of the state with these things; so he will be ready to do his part in them, when he gets to the 'voting age.'"

"But can he understand, yet?" I ventured.

"More than if he hadn't seen all this, and heard about what it means," my neighbor replied.

It is not unnatural, when a child asks questions so great and so far- reaching as those my neighbor's small boy had put to him, that we should "do something about answering them,"--something as vivid as may be within our power. But, even when the queries are of a minor character, we still bestir ourselves until they are adequately answered.

"Mamma," I heard a little girl inquire recently, as she fingered a scrap of pink gingham of which her mother was making "rompers" for the baby of the family, "why are the threads of this cloth pink when you unravel it one way, and white when you unravel it the other?"

The mother was busy; but she laid aside her sewing and explained to the child about the warp and the woof in weaving.

"I don't _quite_ see why _that_ makes the threads pink one way and white the other," the little girl said, perplexedly, when the explanation was finished.

"When you go to kindergarten, you will," I suggested.

"But I want to know now," the child demurred.

The next day I got for the little girl at a "kindergarten supply" establishment a box of the paper woofs and warps, so well-known to kindergarten pupils. Not more than three or four days elapsed before I took them to the child; but I found that her busy mother had already provided her with some; pink and white, moreover, among other colors; and had taught the little girl how to weave with them.

"She understands, _now_, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one way and white the other!" the mother observed.

"Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some curiosity.

"Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time. She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do the spending the better for knowing just what she is buying,--what it is made of, and how it is made!"

It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents of all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me, however, that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of any other era or nation, think, in training their children, of what one might designate as a most minutely detailed future. The mother of whom I have been telling wished to teach her little girl not only how to buy, but how to buy gingham; and the father desired his small boy to learn not alone that his state had a board of health, but that he might hope to become a member of a particular department of it.

We occasionally hear elderly persons exclaim that children of the present day are taught a great many things that did not enter into the education of their grandparents, or even of their parents. But, on investigation, we scarcely find that this is the case. What we discover is that the children of to-day are taught, not new lessons, but the old lessons by a new method. Sewing, for example: little girls no longer make samplers, working on them the letters of the alphabet in "cross- stitch"; they learn to do cross-stitch letters, only they learn not by working the entire alphabet on a square of linen merely available to "learn on," but by working the initials of a mother or an aunt on a "guest towel," which later serves as a Christmas or a birthday gift of the most satisfactory kind! Perhaps one of the best things we do for the little girls of our families is to teach them to take their first stitches to some definite end. Certainly we do it with as conscientious a care as ever watched over the stitches of the little girls of old as they made the faded samplers we cherish so affectionately.

The brothers of these little girls learned carpentry, when they were old enough to handle tools with safety. The boys of to-day also learn it; some of them begin long before they can handle any tools with safety, and when they can handle no tool at all except a hammer. As soon as they wish to drive nails, they are allowed to drive them, and taught to drive them to some purpose. I happened not a great while ago to pass the day at the summer camp of a friend of mine who is the mother of a small boy, aged five. My friend's husband was constructing a rustic bench.

The little boy watched for a time; then, "Daddy, _I_ want to put in nails," he said.

"All right," replied his father; "you may. Just wait a minute and I'll let you have the hammer and the nails. Your mother wants some nails in the kitchen to hang the tin things on. If she will show you where she wants them, I'll show you how to put them in."

This was done, with much gayety on the part of us all. When the small boy, tutored by his father, had driven in all the required nails, he lifted a triumphant face to his mother. "There they are!" he exclaimed. "Now let's hang the tin things on them, and see how they look!"

The boy's father did not finish the rustic bench that day. When a neighboring camper, who stopped in to call toward the end of the afternoon, expressed surprise at his apparent dilatoriness, and asked for an explanation, the father simply said, "I did mean to finish it to- day, but I had to do something for my boy instead."

One of the things we grown-ups do for children that has been rather severely criticized is the lavishing upon them of toys,--intricate and costly toys. "What, as a child, I used to _pretend_ the toys I had, were, the toys my children have now, _are_!" an acquaintance of mine was saying to me recently. "For instance," she went on, "I had a box with a hole in one end of it; I used to pretend that it was a camera, and pretend to take pictures with it! I cannot imagine my children doing that! They have real cameras and take real pictures."

The camera would seem to be typical of the toys we give to the children of to-day; they can do something with it,--something real.

The dearest treasure of my childhood was a tiny gold locket, shaped, and even engraved, like a watch. Not long ago I was showing it to a little girl who lives in New York. "I used to pretend it _was_ a watch," I said; "I used to pretend telling the time by it."

She gazed at it with interested eyes. "It is very nice," she observed politely; "but wouldn't you have liked to have a _real_ watch? _I_ have one; and I _really_ tell the time by it."

"But you cannot pretend with it!" I found myself saying.

"Oh, yes, I can," the little girl exclaimed in surprise; "and I do! I hang it on the cupola of my dolls' house and pretend that it is the clock in the Metropolitan Tower!"

The alarmists warn us that what we do for the children in the direction of costly and complicated toys may, even while helping them do something for themselves, mar their priceless simplicity. Need we fear this? Is it not likely that the "real" watches which we give them that they may "really" tell time, will be used, also, for more than one of the other simple purposes of childhood?

The English woman said that we Americans did so much, so _very_ much, for the children of our nation. There have been other foreigners who asserted that we did _too_ much. Indubitably, we do a great deal. But, since we do it all that the children may learn to do, and, through doing, to be, can we ever possibly do too much? "It is possible to converse with any American on the American child," the English woman said. Certainly every American has something to say on that subject, because every American is trying to do something for some American child, or group of children, to do much, _very_ much.

I

THE CHILD AT HOME

In one of the letters of Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, to her mother, Queen Victoria, she writes: "I try to give my children in their home what I had in my childhood's home. As well as I am able, I copy what you did."

There is something essentially British in this point of view. The English mother, whatever her rank, tries to give her children in their home what she had in her childhood's home; as well as she is able, she copies what her mother did. The conditions of her life may be entirely different from those of her mother, her children may be unlike herself in disposition; yet she still holds to tradition in regard to their upbringing; she tries to make their home a reproduction of her mother's home.

The American mother, whatever her station, does the exact opposite--she attempts to bestow upon her children what she did not possess; and she makes an effort to imitate as little as possible what her mother did. She desires her children to have that which she did not have, and for which she longed; or that which she now thinks so much better a possession than anything she did have. Her ambition is to train her children, not after her mother's way, but in accordance with "the most approved modern method." This method is apt, on analysis, to turn out to be merely the reverse side of her mother's procedure.

I have an acquaintance, the mother of a plump, jolly little tomboy of a girl; which child my acquaintance dresses in dainty embroideries and laces, delicately colored ribbons, velvet cloaks, and feathered hats. These garments are not "becoming" to the little girl, and they are a distinct hindrance to her hoydenish activities. They are not what she ought to have, and, moreover, they are not what she wants.

"I wish I had a middy blouse, and some bloomers, and an aviation cap, and a sweater, and a Peter Thompson coat!" I heard her say recently to her mother: "the other children have them."

"Children are never satisfied!" her mother exclaimed to me later, when we were alone. "I spend so much time and money seeing that she has nice clothes; and you hear what she thinks of them!"

"But, for ordinary wear, for play, wouldn't the things she wants be more comfortable?" I ventured. "You dress her so beautifully!" I added.

"Well," said my acquaintance in a gratified tone, "I am glad you think so. _I_ had _no_ very pretty clothes when I was a child; and I always longed for them. My mother didn't believe in finery for children; and she dressed us very plainly indeed. I want my little girl to look as I used to wish _I_ might look!"

"But she doesn't care how she looks--" I began.

"I know," the child's mother sighed. "I can _see_ how _her_ little girls will be dressed!"

Can we not all see just that? And doubtless the little girls of this beruffled, befurbelowed tomboy--dressed in middy blouses, and bloomers, and aviation caps, and sweaters, and Peter Thompson coats, or their future equivalents--will wish they had garments of a totally different kind; and _she_ will be exclaiming, "Children are never satisfied!"

If this principle on the part of mothers in America in providing for their children were confined to such superficialities as their clothing, no appreciable harm--or good--would come of it. But such is not the case; it extends to the uttermost parts of the child's home life.

Only the other day I happened to call upon a friend of mine during the hour set aside for her little girl's piano lesson. The child was tearfully and rebelliously playing a "piece." Her teacher, a musician of unusual ability, guided her stumbling fingers with conscientious patience and care. A child of the least musical talent would surely have responded in some measure to such excellent instruction. My friend's little girl did not. When the lesson was finished, she slipped from the piano stool with a sigh of intense relief.

She started to run out of doors; but her mother detained her. "You may go to your room for an hour," she said, gently but gravely, "and stay there all alone. That will help you to remember to try harder tomorrow to have a good music lesson." And the child, more tearful, more rebellious than before, crept away to her room.

"When I was her age I didn't like the work involved in taking music lessons any better than she does," my friend said. "So my mother didn't insist upon my taking them. I have regretted it all my life. I love music; I always loved it--I loved it even when I hated practising and music lessons. I wish my mother had made me keep at it, no matter how much I objected! Well, I shall do it with _my_ daughter; she'll thank me for it some day."

I am not so sure that her daughter will. Her music-teacher agrees with me. "The child has no talent whatever," she told me. "It is a waste of time for her to take piano lessons. Her mother now--_she_ has a real gift for it! I often wish _she_ would take the lessons!"

American mothers are no more prone to give their children what they themselves did not have than are American fathers. The man who is most eager that his son should have a college education is not the man who has two or three academic degrees, but the man who never went to college at all. The father whose boys are allowed to be irregular in their church attendance is the father who, as a boy, was compelled to go to church, rain or shine, twice on every Sunday.

In the more intimate life of the family the same principle rules. The parents try to give to the children ideals that were not given to them; they attempt to inculcate in the children habits that were not inculcated in themselves.

I know a family in which are three small girls, between whom there is very little difference in age. These children all enjoy coming to take tea with me. For convenience, I should naturally invite them all on the same afternoon.

Both their father and mother, however, have requested me not to do this. "Do ask them one at a time on different days," they said.

"Of course I will," I assented. "But--why?" I could not forbear questioning.

"When I was a child," the mother of the three little girls explained, "I was never allowed to accept an invitation unless my younger sister was invited, too. I was fond of my sister; but I used to long to go somewhere sometime by myself! My husband had the same experience--his brother always had to be invited when he was, or he couldn't go. Our children shall not be so circumscribed!"

There is not much danger for them, certainly, in that direction. Yet I rather think they would enjoy doing more things together. One day, not a great while ago, I chanced to meet all three of them near a tearoom. I asked them--perforce all of them--to go in with me and partake of ice cream. As we sat around the table, the oldest of the three glanced at the other two with a friendly smile. "It is nice--all of us having ice cream with you at the same time," she remarked, and her younger sisters enthusiastically agreed.

To be sure, they are nearer the same age and they are more alike in their tastes than their mother and her sister, or their father and his brother. Perhaps their parents needed to take their pleasures singly; they seem able quite happily to take theirs in company.

I have another friend, who was brought up in a household in which, as she says, "individuality" was the keynote. In her own home the keynote is "the family." She encourages her children to "do things together." Furthermore, she and her husband habitually participate in their children's occupations to a greater degree than any other parents I have ever seen.

Their friends usually entertain these children "as a family"; but not long ago, happening to have only two tickets to a concert, I asked one, and just one, of the little girls of this household to attend it with me. She accepted eagerly. During an intermission she looked up at me and said, confidingly, "It is nice sometimes to do things not 'as a family,' but just as one's self!"

Then, for the first time, it occurred to me that she was the "odd one" of her family. All its pleasures, all its interests, were not equally hers. She needed sometimes to do things as herself.

In matters of discipline, too, we find the same theory at work. Parents who were severely punished as children do not punish their children at all; and the most austere of parents are those who, when children, were "spoiled." Almost regardless of the natures of their children, parents deal with them, so far as discipline is concerned, as they themselves were not dealt with.