Chapter XV: Freedom and Discipline (3)

If you will look about among your acquaintances, I think you will find that those who get really intelligent obedience from their children are the ones who make the least ado about it, and perhaps never use the time-worn phrase, "Now you _must_ mind me." It is the weak person who is constantly forced to make appeals to his authority. It is the weak person who is constantly threatening the child with terrible retributions for his disobedience. Yet none are quicker to detect the weakness, none know better that the threats will not be carried out, than those very children whose obedience we desire thus to obtain.

Many of us get into the habit of placing too many of our wishes in the form of commands or orders to do or not to do, instead of requesting as we would of an equal. Wherever possible we should suggest to the child a line of conduct, so as to make the child feel that he is making a choice. You may say to Johnnie, "Go and get me a pail of water." Or you may say, "Johnnie, please get me a pail of water." Or you may say, "Johnnie, mother needs a pail of water." You will perhaps get just as good service in one case as in another; but the ultimate effect on Johnnie may make the difference between a man who finds work a necessary evil and one who finds work a means of service.

From men who have been successful in managing industries and from women who have managed large households with the least amount of friction we can learn that there is a way of obtaining obedience without imposing upon the minds of those under our authority. Whenever you wish to depart from the usual routine, there is a good reason for the change, and in most cases the reason can be stated with the request. When this is done the order loses the appearance of arbitrariness. If you say to Mary, "I wish you would go out without me this afternoon, as I have some important sewing to finish," you will most likely meet with ready acquiescence. If, however, you say, "You must go alone this afternoon, I can't go with you," and if when Mary dares ask "Why?" you say, "Because I tell you to," you will certainly sow the seeds of rebellion. No self-respecting child will accept such a reason. If at least you make an appeal to your superior judgment, and say, "Mother knows best," there would be something gained. For now you are shifting the basis of the child's conduct from your position of power over her to the highest authority within our reach, namely, good judgment. The child is thus learning to obey not a _person_, but a _principle_.

Expressing your wishes in the form of a request, modified wherever possible by a reason, does not mean that you are to give the child a reason for everything he is asked to do; for if the child has respect for you and feels your sympathy with him, he will do many things that are requested without understanding any reason, but confident, when he does think of the matter, that you have a good reason. In other words, where there have been close sympathy and habitual obedience the parent becomes, in the child's mind, the embodiment of those ideals or principles toward which he feels loyal.

In the same way men and women who give arbitrary commands may get from their assistants formal obedience, but they never get hearty and intelligent cooperation. Indeed, it is no doubt because we still cling to the traditions of earlier times, when personal loyalty and military types of virtue were so prominent in the minds of men, that we are so slow to learn the need for cooperation in modern times. The need to-day is for leaders who will inspire their fellows with enthusiasm for cooperation, who will wisely guide their fellows in effective service; and of the corresponding virtues in the followers obedience is _not_ the first.

And yet we must recognize all the time that there are occasions when a person must do what he is told to just because he is told; and it were well for one who has to take orders to be able to do so without fret and bitterness. The child should, however, come sooner or later to distinguish between those commands that arise out of real necessities and those that arise from the passion or caprice of other persons. To the former he must learn to submit with the best possible grace, with an effort at understanding, or even with a desire to assimilate to himself. To the latter he should submit, when forced to, only under protest, and with the resolve to make himself free.

That confidence is a strong factor in obtaining obedience is well illustrated by many boys in every village and town. These boys are notoriously disobedient at home and at school, but on the baseball field they will follow the orders of the captain without question. They feet that his commands are not arbitrary or thoughtless, that they are not petty and personal, but really for the greatest advantage to those concerned. If we can inspire in our children such confidence in our motives, we shall have little worry about the problem of obedience.

In the training of the child we often forget that the child will some time outgrow his childishness. We must consider not only what is the best kind of behavior for a _child_, but what kinds of habits it is best for a child to develop in view of his some day becoming an adult human being. We want men and women to develop into free agents, that is, people who act in accordance with the dictates of their own conscience and their best judgment. With this aim in view, how much emphasis should then be placed on the matter of obedience?

Since the infant has no will, he must be guided by others for his own safety and for the development of his judgment. But we do not wish him to retain his habits of obedience to others long enough to deprive him of his independence of thought and action. The growing child must learn to repress his own many and conflicting impulses, and to select those that he learns to be best. But if he obeys always, he cannot acquire judgment and responsibility. He learns through obedience to value various kinds of authority, and eventually to choose his authorities; his final authority being his conscience or principle, not impulse or whim. He learns also by questioning the principle of obedience to persons, and comes to guide his conduct by principle or conscience, and not by custom or convention.

We do not wish to train our children for submission, but for judgment and discernment. We must, therefore, respect the child's individuality. We are, however, not obliged to choose between blind, unquestioning obedience and the undignified situations which arise from habitual disobedience. Obedience to persons as a settled habit is bad. The ability to obey promptly and intelligently when the commander's authority is recognized,--to respond to suggestion and guidance,--is desirable. Obedience is a _tool_ the parent may use with wisdom and discretion. It is not an _end_ in discipline or in life.

We should educate _through_ obedience,--that is, cultivate the habit of intelligent response,--but we must not educate _for_ obedience,--that is, the habit of submitting to the will of others.

VII.

THE TRAINING OF THE WILL

After all, what is there about a person that really counts? All experience and all philosophy agree that it is the character; and the central fact in character is the _will_. Yet the will is not something in the soul that exists by itself, as a "faculty" of the mind. The will is a product of all the other processes that go on in the mind, and can not be trained by itself. Neither can the will of the child be expected to come to its own through neglect. Indeed, although the will can not be trained by itself, its training is even more important than the training of the intellect. The great defect in our moral training has been that we have generally attempted to train our children too exclusively through precepts and mottoes and rules, and too little through activities that lead to the formation of habits. The will depends upon the intellect, but it cannot be trained through _learning_ alone, though learning can be made to help. There are, as we all know, only too many learned men and women with weak wills, and there are many men and women of strong character who have had but little book learning. The will expresses itself through action, and must be trained through action. But action is impelled by feelings, so the will must be trained also through the feelings. All right education is education of the will. The will is formed while the child is learning to think, to feel, and to do.

We judge of character by the behavior. But our behavior is not made up entirely of acts of the will. Hundreds of situations occur that do not require individual decision, but are adequately met by acts arising from habit, or even from instinct. The experience of the race has given us many customs and manners which are for the most part satisfactory, and which the child should learn as a matter of course. It is thus important that the child should acquire certain habits as early in life as possible. These habits will not only result in saving of energy, but will also give assurance that in certain situations the child will act in the right way. If it is worth while to have a person knock on a door before entering an occupied room, or if it is worth while to have people look to the left and to the right before crossing a thoroughfare, the child can acquire the habit of doing these things always and everywhere without stopping to make a decision on each occasion.

But we must remember that in guiding the child to the formation of these habits, example and practice are far more important than precepts and rules. Example is more important because the child is very imitative; one rude act on the part of some older member of the household will counteract the benefit of many verbal lessons in politeness. Practice is important because it is through constant repetition of an act that it at last becomes automatic, and is performed without thought or attention. In fact, this is the only way in which a habit can be formed. Having acquired habits about the common relations of life that do not call for new adjustment every time they are met, the mind is left free to apply itself to problems that really need special consideration. Imagine how wasteful it would be if we had to attend to every movement in dressing ourselves! You can easily see that there are a great many acts that bring us in relation to others and that should be as mechanical and automatic as dressing and undressing.

It is when we pass from the routine acts which are repeated every day that we come to the field in which the will holds sway. There is nothing more helpful in the training of the will than the frequent performance of tasks requiring application, self control, and the making of decisions. The routine of fixed duties in a large and complex household furnished to our grandparents, during their youth, just the opportunity for the formation of habits in attending to what needed to be done, without regard to the momentary impulse or mood. Many of our modern homes are so devoid of such opportunities that there is great danger that our children will have altogether too much practice in following their whims and caprices--or in doing nothing.

It is just because the modern home is so devoid of the opportunities for carrying on these character-building activities that provision must be made in that other great educational institution, the school. All the newer activities of the school, the shop work and the school garden, the domestic science and the sewing, the recreation centres, the art and the music--all these so-called "fads and frills" against which the taxpayer raises his voice in protest-- these prove to be even more important in the making of men and women out of children than the respectable and acceptable subjects of the old-fashioned school; for these activities are but organized and planned substitutes for the incidental doings of the childhood of other days. They are the formal substitutes for the activities by means of which a past generation of men and women acquired that will-training and that insight into relations which distinguished their characters.

All systematic and sustained effort, whether in organizing a game or carrying a garden through from the sowing to the harvest, whether in making a dress or a chest of drawers, has its moral value as training in application, self-control, and decision, quite distinct from its contribution to knowledge or skill.

Two or three generations ago no thought whatever was given to the child's point of view; the authority of parents was absolute, and there were many unhappy childhoods. To-day we wish to avoid these errors, and by studying the child we hope to adjust our treatment to his nature and his needs.

But we must be on our guard against the danger of going to the extreme of attributing to the child ideas and instincts which he does not possess. In former times it was considered one of the mother's chief duties to "break the child's will"; to-day, realizing the importance of a strong will, we are in danger of assuming that a child's stubbornness or wilfulness is a manifestation of a strong will, and we hesitate to interfere with it.

This is an entirely false assumption. In the first place, a child up to the age of about three years has no will; he can only have strong desires or impulses, or pet aversions. During this period the mother's will must be his will, and there can be no clash of wills. But, to be his will, the mother must guide the child in accordance with _his_ needs, _his_ instincts,--that is, in accordance with his nature, and not in accordance with her convenience or caprice. She must bear constantly in mind that the child is not merely a miniature man or woman, but that each stage in his development represents a distinct combination of instincts, impulses and capacities. If, for example, your little girl is digging in the dirt--a very _natural_ and healthful activity--and you stop her for no better reason than that she will soil her hands or clothes, you are unduly interfering with her, and if you continue in that way, you will either make a defiant, disagreeable youngster or a servile, cringing slave to arbitrary authority. On the other hand, if Johnny should wish to play with a knife or a box of matches, it manifestly devolves upon you to take these objects away from him, no matter how strong his desire to have them may be. But it also devolves upon you to see that such harmful objects are not very easy for him to obtain and to see to it that plenty of other harmless things are provided for him.

This suggests a common mistake parents and loving friends often make in meeting the uncomfortable assertions of the child's will. When the child cries for the moon, you try to get him interested in a jack-in-the-box; and when he wants a fragile piece of bric-a-brac-- you try to substitute for it a tin whistle. With a very young child, that is about all you can do. But a time comes when the child is old enough to know the difference between that upon which he has set his heart and that which you have substituted for it in his hand. At this time you must stop offering substitutes. The child is now old enough to understand that some things are _not_ to be had, and that crying for them will not bring them. To offer him a substitute is now not only an insult to his intelligence, but it is demoralizing to his will; it makes for a loose hold upon the object of his desire--and it is the firmness of this hold that is the beginning of a strong will. It does not take the child long to learn that he is not to have a knife or a lighted lamp; nor does it take him long to get into the way of scattering his desires, so that he has no will at all.

In the second place, the assumption that stubbornness is a sign of strength is false, even for older children. Stubbornness is, in fact, a sign of weakness. It indicates that the child is either incapable of adjusting himself to the appeal that is made to his judgment or feelings, or that his weakness will make it impossible for him in the presence of his immediate desire to recognize the superior judgment and authority of his elders, at home or in school. It takes much more will power to give in than to carry one's point. But we must always make sure that _we_ are not the obstinate and wilful ones. If you have a very good reason for not wanting Helen to go to the dance--even if she is too young to understand that reason--you are perfectly justified in carrying your point. If your reason is a wise one, she will come to see it in time and will honor and respect you all the more for not having given in to her impetuous and immature desire. If she gives in gracefully, because she can understand the reasons, or just out of respect for your wishes, having found your guidance wise before, hers as well as yours is the triumph. The only thing of which we must make sure is that we are right to the best of our understanding, and that we do not insist upon having our way just because,--oh, well, just because we have a right to have our way, being in authority. As G. Stanley Hall, the father of child study in this country, has so well said: "Our will should be a rock, not a wave; our requirements should be uniform, with no whim, no mood or periodicity about them." Having made sure of ourselves, we need not fear that training our wilful children will weaken their will.

We must not neglect to consider the very close relation that exists between the health of the body and the health of the spirit. A strong will, showing itself in ability to concentrate its efforts on a chosen purpose, is not to be expected in a child whose muscles are flabby and whose nerves quickly tire. Since the will expresses itself in action, it can be best cultivated in a body capable of vigorous action.

The young child is not only a bundle of bones and muscles; it is also a bundle of impulses. And some of these impulses lead to actions that are quite desirable, while others lead to actions that are indifferent, and still others to actions that are decidedly undesirable. But, so far as the child is concerned, he has no means of discriminating between one kind of impulse and another. He would just as soon carry poison to his mouth as good food; he would rather grasp at a flame than at a harmless rattle. One of the essentials then becomes suitable knowledge. As the child grows older he should gradually learn that knowledge is necessary to wise choice. It is not so much the knowledge of what is commonly called "good" or "evil" as the knowledge of relations and needs that will enable him to choose ends, and to choose effective means toward those ends. Yet we cannot begin too early to have such considerations as "It is right," or "It is best," rather than "I want it," influence the conduct of our children. But, in order to do the right, we have to _know_ the right, and the children who get these moral lessons in their homes are fortunate indeed. It is here the child should acquire his feeling of loyalty to duty, for such lessons learned in the home are the most impressive and the most enduring. We must also make certain that children all through their lives at home are given opportunity for choice and decision.

In this matter of making decisions there is a great deal of individual variation, and even distinct types of persons have been described, according to the way they reach decisions. At one extreme is the child--or the grown person--who apparently without any effort balances the reasons that may be given on the opposite sides of a problem, and makes his choice solely on the strength of the reasoned argument. Herbert Spencer tells in his Autobiography how, when a young man, he wrote down, as in a ledger, all the advantages and all the disadvantages he could think of in regard to the married state. After checking off the items on the two sides of the account, he found a balance in favor of remaining single. Later in life he had his doubts as to whether the decision was a wise one, but it was the best he could make under the circumstances, for he made use of all the knowledge at his command and stood by his reasoned decision.

At the opposite extreme is the person who resolves to do what is right (although he may have no systematic means of discovering what is right), and carries out his resolution at the cost of frequently painful effort. To such persons there is a kind of association between what is easy and what is wrong on the one hand, and between what is difficult and what is right on the other. Our early Puritans were men of this type, and there is much to admire in the sturdiness with which they crushed their impulses in the resolve to carry out their ideals of the right.

Almost complete lack of will is shown by those who reach their decisions--by not reaching them. That is, there are those doubting, hesitating souls who postpone making a decision until action is forced upon them by some accidental event. These let other persons or the course of events make their decisions for them. There is such a delicate balancing of the desires--usually because all desires are equally weak--that none stands out to dominate the choice of a line of action. George wanted to go to the circus, and had saved enough from his weekly allowance; but he was saving up to buy a rifle, and he was undecided now as to whether he would go to the circus or add to his savings and get the rifle so much the sooner. The sight of some other boys on the way to the circus made the decision for him. This decision was not a reasoned one, but an accidental one.

Similar in its weakness is the will that reaches no decisions except as the balance is upset by later impulses from within. The girl or boy who allows a slight headache or a tired feeling to make important decisions cannot be said to have much strength of character. On Saturday Mabel was to have gone on a steamboat excursion--or on a visit to a friend, to stay over night. When she went to sleep Friday night she had not yet made up her mind; but she finally went to visit her friend because she had over-slept and was too late to join the excursion party.

Children that have not acquired habits of making definite decisions will find themselves badly adrift when they reach the adolescent period, with its rapid changes of mood and the masses of frequently conflicting impulses. To be able to restrain each impulse to action as it arises, and to hold it in abeyance until all the alternatives have been canvassed, is a power that comes only after years of thought and practice.

However, it is not enough to be able to refrain from doing what one is impelled to do. Many mothers think that they are training the child's will when they prohibit the taking or handling of various things about the house. It is true that the child should learn when quite young to avoid certain objects. But if the prohibitions are too general the child will be frequently tempted to break the rules, and then he will fall in his own esteem; or he will observe the rule and have too little outlet for his activity and initiative. The will does not thrive on what the child is _prevented_ from doing, but on what the child _actually does do_.

The child's need is for practice in doing and in choosing what he will do. When activities or games are suggested to a younger child, it is best to give him a choice of two or three. When the children are older they can be consulted about the purchase of their clothes, and they ought gradually to assume their share--a small one at first--of the responsibility of the household. As early as possible they should have their own money to spend, as in no other way can they learn the use of judgment and decision in the spending of money. In the households wherein children do not have such opportunities, but in which the parents rule everything with a high hand, the children grow up very inefficient in managing their time and their money; they have become accustomed to being ruled and flounder helplessly when called upon to decide for themselves.

The will, which is at the heart of moral conduct and which is so much in need of training, cannot, as we have seen, be trained as a thing by itself. All training and all education must contribute to the training of the will. Still, there are some definite points that we can profitably keep in mind when we are concerned with the child's will:

First of all comes sound bodily health.

Then there must be sound habits for most of the everyday activities, that the will may not be dissipated upon trivial matters, and that the common duties and virtues may be assured.

There must be constant practice in sustained effort and concentration upon useful tasks, in order to fix the habit of holding the attention upon the chosen purpose.

We must not confuse wilfulness with strength of will; and, finally,

There must be constant opportunity for making decisions that the child may feel responsibility in making of decisions as the highest type of conduct.

VIII.

HOW CHILDREN REASON

"Those children will not listen to reason," said a friend whom I discovered in an agitated state of mind one afternoon, when I came to make a call; and she was by no means the first to make this observation. Indeed, it is one of the characteristics of children that they will not listen to reason,--that is, _our_ reason. Which is not, however, saying anything against the children's good sense, for people with much more experience have refused to listen to reason--the children's reason.

Margaret told me her troubles. Her sister had rented a farm near the city for the summer and had offered to let Walter spend his vacation with her in exchange for such bits of help as he was able to render. But Walter had made up his mind to go to work in an office that summer, and, although he loved the country and had always wanted to drive a horse and go fishing, his mother's attempts to convince him of the wisdom of her choice were without avail. He would not listen to her reasons. She pointed to the health argument, to the opportunities for play, the free time, the driving, the fishing, and the fruit without limit. Knowing Walter as I did, I could not understand why it was so hard to convince him.

But every story has at least two sides to it, and of this story I had heard only one. The mother was so concerned with giving her son her good reasons for going to the country that she never even thought of finding out his equally good reasons for going to the office. Presently, however, Walter came in, and my first leading question brought out the true secret of the disagreement.

"What is there about working in an office," I asked the boy, "that you care so much about?"

"Oh, it isn't working in an office that I care about; I just want to earn some money. I never did make any money myself, and now I have a good chance and mother won't let me."

This was really too simple; here two sane persons had spent several days on the problem without coming to any solution. By placing Walter's services on the farm on a financial basis and making him pay for his board he managed to spend his vacation, healthfully and happily and profitably in every sense; and everybody was satisfied.

Over and over again we are impressed with the fact that most disagreements between people--whether between adults or between children, or between children and adults--are due to misunderstandings. As soon as parents resolve not to treat their children arbitrarily,-- that is, on the basis of their superior strength and authority,--they adopt a plan of "reasoning" with them. This plan might work very well, if the parents only understood the children's way of reasoning, if they but realized that the child does not reason as do adults, that he reasons differently in each stage of his development.

Our manner of reasoning depends very closely upon our language. But every significant word that we use has a distinct meaning in the mind of the individual, depending altogether upon his experience. As the experience of the child is very meagre, compared to that of the grown-up person, it is no wonder that our everyday remarks are constant sources of misunderstanding to children.

The little girl who had been frequently reproved for not using her _right_ hand came to have a positive dislike for her other hand, which she naturally understood to be _wrong_ hand, and she did not wish to have anything wrong about her person. A boy was trying to tell his sister the meaning of "homesick." "You know how it feels to be seasick, don't you? Well, it's the same way, only it's at home."

Children are apt to attach to a word the first meaning that they learn in connection with it. Only with the increase of experience can a word come to have more than one meaning. Moreover, the child will apply what he hears with fatal exactness and literalness.

Two little girls were at a party and the older one found occasion to slap her sister's hand. The hostess reproved her for this, whereupon the little girl asked, "Isn't she my own sister?" The hostess had to admit that she was. "Well, I heard papa say that he can do what he likes with his own."

Doing what we like with our own meant to the child exactly what the words said, without those qualifications which we naturally put in because of our greater experience.

Children learn with wonder that mother was once a baby, and that father was once a baby, and so on. Dr. Sully tells of the little girl who asked her mother, "When everybody was a baby, then who could be the nurse if they were all babies?" Thus shows real reasoning power; it was not the child's fault that she had no historical perspective, and so could not see the babyhoods of different people in their proper relations in time.

A little boy who was beginning to read deciphered a sign in a grocery store, "Families supplied." He asked his mother whether they could not get a new baby there.

When Herbert was passing through the scissors stage he cut a hole in his father's coat. The father scolded him for spoiling his suit; Herbert calmly replied, "I did not cut your suit; I only cut the coat." He resented this accusation, which in his mind was not merely an exaggeration, but entirely false, since a suit is a suit and a coat is a coat.

A little girl, while out with her nurse and brother, got lost by separating herself from the nurse's side. When she was at last found she was reprimanded for running away from the nurse. She felt that she was being unjustly treated, for she said, "I did not run away; I only _stood_ away," meaning, she had stepped around the corner to look in a window. If she had been scolded for getting out of sight of the nurse, she would have felt justly reproved; but, accused of doing something she never did and never thought of doing,--that is, running away,--she naturally resented this.

Those who have to deal with children in an intimate way cannot be too scrupulous about how they use their words.

The logic of children often appears to us all wrong until we take the trouble to see how they come to their queer conclusions.

The story is told of a boy who was sent to the circus in the neighboring town by his uncle, who gave him an additional quarter "so you can ride back in case it rains." Well, it did rain, and Howard came back riding on the top seat, next to the driver, wet to the skin. Now, any grown-up person knows why he was to ride back "in case it rains"; but to Howard the association of ideas was directly between raining and riding, and not between riding and coming home dry.

This illustrates a very common difference between the reasoning of children and that of adults. We _select_ ideas from a situation and combine them and come to conclusions. The child combines ideas, but he does not make any selection, and the simple explanation for this lies in the fact that the child has not enough experience to enable him to select what is significant. Thus a little girl, who had been too boisterous in her play, was called in by her mother and made to sit quietly in a chair for about ten minutes. At the end of this time her mother asked her whether she would "be good now." The child promised that she would, and was told that she might then go out to play again. As she arose she affectionately turned to the chair and said, "Thank you, dear chair, for making me so good." Having been declared "good" after sitting in the chair, she attributed the beneficent change in her behavior to the chair; and, being a polite little girl, she thanked the chair.

Very often these simple types of reasoning have their humorous aspects and we do not take them seriously. One winter a little boy who had always gone to bed regularly (he was four and a half years old then) began to call for some one to come to him after he was supposed to be asleep. He wanted to sit up and play, he wanted to get dressed, and he wanted something more to eat. This continued for several evenings, and it seemed impossible to get him back into his good habits. At last he was asked, "_Why_ do you want to get up now?" and he answered at once, "Because it is winter now."

"Yes, it is winter now, but it is time for you to be asleep," he was told.

"But it says in the book that I must get up," he insisted.

"Which book?"

"I will show you," and he took from his shelf a copy of Stevenson's "Garden of Verses," and turned to the picture opposite the poem that begins:

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle light.

To him this meant that in winter, after going to bed, _at night_, one must get up and dress. It is very likely many children who have had this delightful poem read to them have interpreted it in the same way, but probably very few parents have taken the pains to trace their children's unaccountable "misbehavior" at bedtime to such a source.

This same poem produced in another child quite a different train of reasoning, for "Why did the little girl get up at night and sleep in the daytime?" he asked, "Was she a trained nurse?" It then became necessary to recall that an aunt of the child's, who _was_ a trained nurse, often slept at home during the day, after having worked with some patient at night.

There is no doubt that many of the crotchets and "perversities" of a child have their origin in chains of reasoning that are perfectly legitimate, in view of the past experiences of the young mind, although not in harmony with the reasoning of more mature minds. The parent spends much time and energy, and much heartburning, sometimes, to overcome these whims. What is needed is a patient and sympathetic attempt to discover how the child has come to his queer ideas and desires.

The annoyance that children cause us with their questionings is due very largely to the fact that we cannot answer their questions, since the reasoning that prompts them is too searching. A little boy shocked and vexed his grandmother, who was trying to teach him the elements of theology, by asking "Who made God?" It is very likely that every normal child has asked the same question in one form or another. This attempt to reach back to the very beginning of causes resembles in many ways the speculations of the mediaeval metaphysicians, and should certainly not be discouraged. We need not, on the other hand, make the effort to answer every question a child may ask, for at a certain stage in his development he will get the habit of asking questions without really caring for the answers. But the questions are worth hearing, in most cases, just to help us understand how the child _does_ reason. Some of the questions indicate a great deal of reasoning of a very valuable kind. When the little boy asks, "Why don't I see two things with my two eyes?" or when the little girl looks up from her dolls and asks, "Am I real, or just pretend, like my doll?" they show that they have been thinking. When a child has passed through the metaphysical stage of reasoning, he will be more interested in animals and other objects of Nature; and his questions will have to do more with the operation of processes--how he grows, and how fishes breathe in the water, and how birds fly. Later, he wants to know how things work, what makes the locomotive go, how the noise goes through the telephone, how the incubator makes chickens come out of eggs. The reasoning of the child may lead to weird conclusions, but it is real reasoning, and can be improved not by being ridiculed, nor by being suppressed, but by being sympathetically understood and encouraged.

Perhaps the most serious phase of the peculiarities of children's reasoning appears with older children when it comes to reasoning about right and wrong conduct. Professor Swift, of Washington University, has made a careful study of this subject, from replies given by many men to questions about their ideas as boys. It seems that men who are irreproachable in their moral standards pass through a stage in which they consider it legitimate fun to rob orchards or to commit petty thefts.

Children draw fine distinctions between _wrong_ acts and acts that are _not very wrong_, though they may not be _quite right_. One man says, "I distinguished between _taking money_, _real stealing_, and _taking fruit_." Another says of fruit taking, "I only partly regarded it as stealing." One man writes, "When a close-fisted employer refused to let me have my clothes at cost, I pocketed enough of his change to bring my clothes down to the cost mark." Few regarded taking money from their parents as "very bad," and distinguished between such stealing and taking money from strangers.

A boy of fifteen was reproved for holding his ear to the keyhole of a room in which his mother and sisters were having an animated discussion. The appellation "eavesdropper" did not disconcert him in the least. On the contrary, he undertook to justify his conduct on the ground that he was being discussed, and as he had no "dictagraph" he was obliged to do the listening in person. The fact that the dictagraph had been so frequently used for getting information that was later used in court was to him a sufficient justification of his conduct.

It is well known that all children pass through the stage illustrated by these cases, in which they have the savage's conception of right and wrong. For most children the difference between going to the reformatory or jail and turning out decent men and women is one of wholesome and sympathetic environment. Undue severity, no less than bad example, confirms many a youth in these habits--which should represent but a passing stage in his development.

Adults should not read their own ideas of morality into the acts of their children and then catalogue them as right or wrong. Most children's acts are neither right nor wrong: they are merely expressions of feelings and ideas peculiar to the stage of development. With young children ideas of right and wrong divide themselves into acts which are permitted and those which are forbidden. They have no conception of right and wrong beyond that.

Many an act that a boy commits, which we consider wrong, is but the expression of the instincts of his age. Our duty consists in helping him to pass through that stage without making permanent habits of these temporary impulses. This help must not be given through branding the acts as wicked or criminal, nor is moralizing itself generally effective. Help must come through providing adequate opportunities for play and games and work that will use up surplus energy both of mind and body. Above all, help must come through the healthy examples and the constant manifestation of high ideals in the home.

Every normal child will in time respond to these influences. There are, unfortunately, some children that will not develop beyond this stage of primitive, savage instincts; but such abnormal children are rare and we cannot deal with them here.

With the problem of reasoning, then, as with all other aspects of child training, it is a question of understanding, of being in close relations with one's children, and being able to fathom the workings of their minds.

IX.

WORK AND PLAY

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And it is this same lack of play that produces so many dull men and women; for the spirit of play is the spirit of youth and spontaneity and joy. Yet work and play have so much in common that it seems unfortunate indeed that all of us have not learned to retain our youth when work becomes necessary.

I trust that there are few to-day who still believe that play is wicked. If we desire our children to grow up into healthy and joyful and moral men and women, then must we consider play a necessity of life. For play is more than merely a pleasant means for passing the time; it is a school of life, it is a means for physical, mental, and moral education.

The young child, before he is old enough to play horse, or to imitate other activities he sees going on around him, gets his play from handling a rattle or a ball, from random movements of his legs and arms, or from playing with his fingers and his toes. He derives satisfaction from the sensations of touch and sight and sound, as well as from the feeling of freedom and the sensation of his active muscles. But this infantile play is not only satisfying to the child; it is a means for learning the use of his little hands and arms and legs. When the baby learns to crawl, and later to walk, he derives pleasure from the exercise of his newly-acquired arts, and at the same time attains perfection in the use of his limbs and in the correlation of his muscles. He is also gaining strength with his growth, for these muscles will not gain in strength unless they are exercised. Of course, the child does not know about these advantages of play; but the mother should know and give the growing child every opportunity to exercise himself in every possible way; for thus alone can he gain in strength, in endurance, and in confidence.

When the child is a little older his play takes on new forms, for he is now deliberately _making_ things: the chairs become wagons and animals, the corner of the room may be made into a lake, a pencil or a button-hook is quite long enough for a fishing pole, and a handful of beans may be converted into all kinds of merchandise, coins for barter, a flock of birds, or seaside pebbles. That is, as the child's experience broadens, he finds more to imitate, he exercises his imagination more, and combines into more complex plays the materials he finds about him. But all the time the child is _working_, as much so as an artisan at his task; and all the time the child is _learning_, more rapidly probably than if he were at school; and all the time the child is _playing_, that is, enjoying the outlet of his impulses.

Play has been called the ideal type of exercise, because it is the kind of exercise that occupies the whole child, his mental as well as his physical side--and later, also, the moral side. In play the exercise is regulated by the interests, so that, while there may be extreme exertion, there is not the same danger of overstrain as is possible with work that he is forced to do. In play the exercise is carried on with freedom of the spirit, so that the flow of blood and the feeling of exhilaration make for health.

When children begin to play at work their activities are not entirely imitative, although the kind of work they choose will be determined by the kinds of activities that go on about them. The child has real interests in work; and these should be encouraged and cultivated. The chief interest is, perhaps, the growing sense of mastery over the materials which the child uses. He can make blocks take on any form he pleases; although the first houses he tries to build are apt to be just a random piling of his material, there follows a growing deliberation and planning, so that he comes at last to make what he has _intended_ to make, and not merely produce an accidental result.

The earlier plays of the child are not at all in the nature of games; there is not at first the need for a companion. There is no special order in which the various acts of his play have to be carried out. When he plays horse on a stick, or is a parade all by himself, or plays house in the corner, a few simple movements are repeated until the child is tired of them, or until something occurs to shift his interest. Nor is there in these early plays a special point that marks the end of the interest. In games, however, these three factors are always present: it takes two or more to play a game; there is a definite order or succession of events, and there is a definite finish or climax. And as we watch the children at their games we can see their whole mental and moral development unfold before us, for nothing is more characteristic of a child's stage of development than the games in which he is interested.

While we are content to let the younger children play as much as they like--because very often the more they play, the less they annoy us--we are all inclined to expect of the older children an increasing share of work and a declining interest in play. Some of us are even inclined to discourage the play instinct as the children grow older, because we have come to think of play as something not only frivolous and useless, but even a harmful waste of time. Now, the educational value of play keeps pace with the development of the child. That is to say, the child outgrows interest in games about as fast as these lose their educational value. The new games that the child takes up year after year always have something new to teach him.

The plays of the early period develop his sense perceptions, they give practice in seeing and hearing and touching with quick discernment. Then for four or five years play gives increased mastery of the child's own body, and over the objects and materials with which he plays. Running and jumping are for skill and for speed; the competitive instincts drive each to do the best he can for himself. Later the games give exercise in the adjustment of the child not only to his material surroundings, but also to other children; in other words, he learns to take his place among other human beings. From the games in which the children take their turns at some activity the timid child learns that he has equal rights with others, and acquires self-confidence; whereas the child disposed to be overbearing learns the equally necessary lesson that others have rights which he must respect. Every child learns from these games how to be a good loser as well as how to be a good winner. Just those qualities that make an adult an agreeable associate in business or in social dealings are brought out by these games as they can be by no ordinary form of work which the children have a chance to do.

It is only in very recent times that we have begun to notice that the work required of the children in the schools is of a kind that either ignores the development of the social instincts or actually hinders them, so that the moral or social effect of successful school work is frequently very undesirable. When a child is set to do some work by himself, even if the work is not too difficult for him, there is no exercise for the social instinct, and the work must be very interesting indeed to hold his continued attention. As the child grows older there is increasing need for social stimulation of the cooperative kind and less of the emulative kind. Where the experiment has been tried of having the children approach their school work as they approach a game, with the feeling of getting at an interesting goal, with opportunities for each to do his best for the whole group and to help the others, the work becomes as interesting as a game, and acquires the same educational value as a good game well played. In the home we might often get the necessary work done with more expedition and with better spirit if we recognized the child's need of constant outlet for his emotions, and if we recognized the depressing effect of routine and solitude and monotony. One of the chief reasons why working girls prefer to go to shops and factories, as against domestic service, lies just in this natural instinct for society. The work of the household has much more variety than the work of a factory; but most of it has to be done in solitude, without the stimulation that comes from the companionship of others doing the same thing, or at least working within reach of the voice.

The truly wonderful transformations in character that have been worked in girls and in boys by means of well-organized play have taught us the moral value of team-work for the older children. In these games, which come at a period when the child has already acquired considerable skill and strength, the chief interest is in doing the best for the team, so that the individual learns the importance of subordinating himself to a common purpose. He learns the joy of contributing his best to his "side" without considering his individual glory or gains. In this way he acquires that negative but very important side of self-control which consists in the ability to _avoid_ doing what the impulse would drive him to. He learns also the importance of dreary drudgery, in his practice work, for acquiring special skill, and a boy will spend hours in such dull practice, animated by the desire not to excel some other individual, but by the desire to help his team win. He learns not only to take his place in the game, but to judge his companions by their special ability and by their value to the group, rather than by clothes or personal feelings or other outward and incidental facts. All these things the team game teaches as no mere _instruction_, whether in school or home, can teach.