I.References for StudyH. C. King,Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 105-27. Macmillan, $1.50.E. D. Starbuck,The Psychology of Religion, chaps., xvi-xxi. Scribner, $1.50.II.Further Reading1. ON YOUTHC. R. Brown,The Young Man's Affairs. Crowell, $1.00.Wayne,Building the Young Man. McClurg, $0.50.Swift,Youth and the Race. Scribner, $1.50.Wilson,Making the Most of Ourselves. McClurg, $1.00.2. ON RECREATIONSL. C. Lillie,The Story of Music and the Musicians. Harper, $0.60.Gustav Kobbe,How to Appreciate Music. Moffat, $1.50.P. Chubb,Festivals and Plays. Harper, $2.00.Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of Dramatic Plays, monographs published by the American Institute of Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.L. H. Gulick,Popular Recreation and Public Morality. American Unitarian Association. Free.M. Fowler,Morality of Social Pleasures. Longmans, $1.00.Addams,The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Macmillan, $1.25.The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see Herbert A. Jump,The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture(a pamphlet) andVaudeville and Moving Pictures, a report of an investigation in Portland, Ore.Reed College Record, No. 16.III.Topics for Discussion1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their evenings? Why is this the case?3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our young people?5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion to parents?6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of courtship?7. What are the special social needs of young people?8. What is the religious significance of the period of social awakening?9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?
I.References for Study
H. C. King,Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 105-27. Macmillan, $1.50.
E. D. Starbuck,The Psychology of Religion, chaps., xvi-xxi. Scribner, $1.50.
II.Further Reading
1. ON YOUTH
C. R. Brown,The Young Man's Affairs. Crowell, $1.00.
Wayne,Building the Young Man. McClurg, $0.50.
Swift,Youth and the Race. Scribner, $1.50.
Wilson,Making the Most of Ourselves. McClurg, $1.00.
2. ON RECREATIONS
L. C. Lillie,The Story of Music and the Musicians. Harper, $0.60.
Gustav Kobbe,How to Appreciate Music. Moffat, $1.50.
P. Chubb,Festivals and Plays. Harper, $2.00.
Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of Dramatic Plays, monographs published by the American Institute of Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.
L. H. Gulick,Popular Recreation and Public Morality. American Unitarian Association. Free.
M. Fowler,Morality of Social Pleasures. Longmans, $1.00.
Addams,The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Macmillan, $1.25.
The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see Herbert A. Jump,The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture(a pamphlet) andVaudeville and Moving Pictures, a report of an investigation in Portland, Ore.Reed College Record, No. 16.
III.Topics for Discussion
1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?
2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their evenings? Why is this the case?
3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.
4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our young people?
5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion to parents?
6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of courtship?
7. What are the special social needs of young people?
8. What is the religious significance of the period of social awakening?
9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?
10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?
11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?
12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?
If the family is engaged in the development of religious character through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained, these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.
As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of life.
Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the developingrelations of children to the church, would be largely solved if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time, interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.
But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or shortcomings and to criticize it if itfails to meet our standards, just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.
This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can analyze its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no more than our own selves associated for certain purposes. If the church fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting in the child's mind an aversion to this institution, based on my opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the churchand its services, I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.
The family cannot afford to take the attitude of hostile criticism, for it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other institution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes. The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children and young people.
This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds. Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the family's ally; it is our business to aid her togreater effectiveness. The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.
The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is really a religious institution it will seek natural alliance with all other truly religious institutions. Ideally, what is a church but a group of families associated for religious purposes? Is not the church simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the divine family?
Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church into which we succeed in projecting our families in a fair degree of integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family as persons associated for the development of spiritual persons, let us hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons associated in the broadest fellowship that includes both God and man for the purposes of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls God Father and man brother.
Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings, adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house, table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In an institution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most. Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church place the child in the midst. Justas the home exists for the child and thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.
The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church is an adult institution. Its buildings are designed for adults—save in rare and happy exceptions;46its services are designed for adults; it has a more or less extraneous institution called a school for the children. The church spends its money for adults; it compasses sea and land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his Kingdom as a family andmust, therefore, do what all true families do, become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.
The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an insistence on the family conception and the family program in the church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and specially designed worship for child-life—suitable forms of service and activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be carried over to provide them in the church.
Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church by their attitude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is notalways easy to maintain; the church includes many of different habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all minister to others.
The principal service which the family may render to the church is, then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for religious culture and service. Surely this should be the attitude toward membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship passes over from the passive to the active, fromthe involuntary to the voluntary—just as it does in the home—and develops, as the child comes into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to a social organization for specific purposes.
At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know whether he "belongs to the church." One must be very careful here, regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is essentially one with this body, this religious family. He may be too young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the full measure of unity appreciable by his mind. He must not be permitted to think of himself as an outsider. Indeed, no matter what our theology may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to God. Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?
The sense of unity must be developed. Writing the child's name on the "Cradle Roll" of the church school may help. Assuming, as he develops, that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he will have an increasing share in its life, will help more. Parents who dedicate their children to God pass on to them the stimulusof that dedication. A church service of dedication is likely to impress them with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early lives.
The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child. The church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing needs and capacities.
It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to provide these methods of attachment. But the church we have been sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to do.
But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child's spiritual life? There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where religion is so taught as to cultivate superstition and to lead eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a barren denial of all faith.There are churches of one type so devoted to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the flesh and the lust of things, that a child is likely to be trained to pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.
Parents must be true to their responsibilities. The family is the child's first religious institution. Fathers and mothers are not only the first and most potent quickeners and guides in the religious life, but they are primarily responsible for the selection of all other stimuli to that life. Under the drag of our own indifference we must not withhold from the child the good he would get even from the church we do not particularly enjoy; neither dare we, for fear of criticism or ostracism, force the child under influences which, in the name of religion, would chill and prevent his spiritual development, would twist, dwarf, or distort it. Responsibility to the spiritual purpose of the family is far higher than any responsibility to a church. The churches are ordered for the souls of men.
What shall we do in the family when the sermon is always tediously dull? Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for them parallel to the adult service ofworship.47Next, try to overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain if your children are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their childish appetites. When the sermon is poor, put it where it belongs proportionately and enlarge on the many good features of church fellowship and service.
In a word, let the church be to the family that larger home where families live together their life of fellowship and service in the spirit and purpose of religion and where there is a natural place for everyone.
I.References for StudyH. W. Hulbert,The Church and Her Children, chaps. i-v. Revell, $1.00.H. F. Cope,Efficiency in the Sunday School, chaps. xiv-xvi. Doran, $1.00.George Hodges,Training of Children in Religion, chap. xiv. Appleton, $1.50.II.Further ReadingA. Hoben,The Minister and the Boy. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.E. C. Foster,The Boy and the Church. Sunday School Times Co., $0.75.G. A. Coe,Education in Religion and Morals, Part II. Revell, $1.35.III.Topics for Discussion1. What are the special common interests of church and family?2. What are the fundamental relationships of the two?3. What conception of the church ought to be fostered in the children's minds?4. When is criticism of the church unwise?5. What changes might be made in church life for the sake of the children?6. What changes would bring the church and the home closer together?7. What should be the children's conception of unity with the church?8. Should children attend, in family groups, the church service of worship?9. Does the plan of a short service for children meet the need?
I.References for Study
H. W. Hulbert,The Church and Her Children, chaps. i-v. Revell, $1.00.
H. F. Cope,Efficiency in the Sunday School, chaps. xiv-xvi. Doran, $1.00.
George Hodges,Training of Children in Religion, chap. xiv. Appleton, $1.50.
II.Further Reading
A. Hoben,The Minister and the Boy. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.
E. C. Foster,The Boy and the Church. Sunday School Times Co., $0.75.
G. A. Coe,Education in Religion and Morals, Part II. Revell, $1.35.
III.Topics for Discussion
1. What are the special common interests of church and family?
2. What are the fundamental relationships of the two?
3. What conception of the church ought to be fostered in the children's minds?
4. When is criticism of the church unwise?
5. What changes might be made in church life for the sake of the children?
6. What changes would bring the church and the home closer together?
7. What should be the children's conception of unity with the church?
8. Should children attend, in family groups, the church service of worship?
9. Does the plan of a short service for children meet the need?
46See a pamphlet onChurch School Buildings(free) published by the Religious Education Association; also H. F. Evans,The Sunday-School Building and Its Equipment.47See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school inEfficiency in the Sunday School, chap. xv.
46See a pamphlet onChurch School Buildings(free) published by the Religious Education Association; also H. F. Evans,The Sunday-School Building and Its Equipment.
46See a pamphlet onChurch School Buildings(free) published by the Religious Education Association; also H. F. Evans,The Sunday-School Building and Its Equipment.
47See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school inEfficiency in the Sunday School, chap. xv.
47See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school inEfficiency in the Sunday School, chap. xv.
Wise parents will know the character of the influences affecting their children at all times. At no time can their responsibility be delegated to others. There is a tendency to think that when children go to school the family has a release from responsibility. But the school is simply the community—the group of families—syndicating its efforts for the formal training of the young. Every family ought to know what the community is doing with its children. The school belongs to all; it is not the property of a board, nor a private machine belonging to the teaching force; it belongs to us and we owe a social duty as well as a family obligation to understand its work and its influence on the children.
Parents ought to visit the school. Wise principals and teachers will welcome them, setting times when visits can best be made. The visitors come, not as critics, but as citizens and parents. The principal benefits will be an acquaintance with the teachers of our children and a better understanding of the conditions under which the children work for the greater part of the day. By far the larger number of teachers most earnestly desire character results from their work. It will help them to know that we are interested in what they are doing.
Parents and teachers, both desiring spiritual results, can find means of co-operation. Parent-teacher clubs and associations have done much to bring the home and the school together. Meeting regularly in the evening, so that fathers, too, can attend, gives opportunity to work out a common understanding to raise the spiritual aims of the school, and to discover means by which the families may aid in securing better conditions for school work.
One of the most important considerations relates to the moral effect of the school life and environment. We are committed in this country to the principle that the public school cannot teach religion, but this by no means relieves it of responsibility for moral character. The family needs this ally. Children expect instruction in the school and they feel keenly the power of its ideals and the standards established by its methods and requirements. The family and the school greatly need to co-ordinate their efforts here to the end that there may be under way in both an orderly program for the moral training of children.
The school may help the home if arrangements are made for parents to meet regularly and receive instruction in those forms of moral training which can best be given at home. This is one method of solving the vexed question of sex instruction. Many hesitate as to the wisdom of such instruction in schools; but no one doubts that it ought to be and could be given in families but for the fact that parents are both ignorant of what to tell and indifferent to the matter. It may be that some day the state will not only say that the child must go to school, but also that every parent intrusted with children must either prove ability to train and instruct in these and other matters or go to school to obtain the necessary training. The state would not go beyond its province if it required ignorant parents—and that means most of us in matters of moral training—to go to school and learn our business. And without waiting for such compulsion the school may now offer opportunity for all parents to obtain the desired information. Teachers are especially trained to an understanding of child-nature and to methods of pedagogy; they are prepared to teach many things we ought to know; why should not the family obtain the advantage of such expert knowledge?
The school would also be within its province if it undertook to stimulate the indifferent parents,both rich and poor, to an appreciation of the educational task and opportunity of the home. Each institution greatly needs the other. The school reaches all the children of all the people; might it not be made a larger means of helping all the parents of all the children to quickened moral responsibility and to greater educational efficiency?
The family ought to know the conditions at the school outside the recitation or working hours. Few parents have any conception of the power of the playground over moral character. Perhaps a smaller number realize how dangerous are some of the elements at work there. Play of itself is immensely valuable, but play means playfellows, and some of these are simply purveyors of indecency and moral contagion in conversation and act. We are required to send our children to school; we have a right to demand freedom from moral contagion. Do you know what goes on in secret places on the grounds? Do you know that the vilest ideas and phrases are current in pictures, cards, on scraps of paper, and in handwriting on walls, not only in the high schools, but often among children of from six to twelve years of age? This is too large a subject to be developed properly here. It is one familiar to all wide-awake schoolmen and women and ought to be equally so to the parents of children. Where the school combats this evil the home should intelligently aid; where the school is indifferent the family dare not rest until either the indifference is quite dispelled or the indifferent dismissed.
Do not expect to get the facts concerning these suggested conditions by inquiry among your children. They are reticent, naturally, on such matters when talking with adults; besides, the sense of school honor holds them to silence. If they tell you voluntarily, you are happy in their free confidence. Do not betray it; simply let it lead you to make further inquiry at the school from the authorities and stimulate you to insist that, for the sake of the spiritual good of the young, the school must furnish conditions of moral health.
I.References for StudyElla Lyman Cabot,Voluntary Help to the Schools, chaps. vii, viii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.W. A. Baldwin, "The Home and the Public Schools,"Religious Education, February, 1912. $0.65.II.Further ReadingM. Sadler,Moral Instruction and Training in Schools. 2 vols. Longmans.John Dewey,The School and Society. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.Smith,All the Children of All the People. Macmillan, $1.50.G. A. Coe, "Virtue and the Virtues,"Religious Education, February, 1912.III.Topics for Discussion1. What ought parents to know about public-school life?2. In visiting a school what may the parent do to acquire information in the proper way?3. How may the home co-operate with the school?4. What degree of instruction in morals ought the school to give?5. In what way does the school best help in moral training?6. What do you know about the conditions on the playgrounds of your own school?
I.References for Study
Ella Lyman Cabot,Voluntary Help to the Schools, chaps. vii, viii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.
W. A. Baldwin, "The Home and the Public Schools,"Religious Education, February, 1912. $0.65.
II.Further Reading
M. Sadler,Moral Instruction and Training in Schools. 2 vols. Longmans.
John Dewey,The School and Society. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.
Smith,All the Children of All the People. Macmillan, $1.50.
G. A. Coe, "Virtue and the Virtues,"Religious Education, February, 1912.
III.Topics for Discussion
1. What ought parents to know about public-school life?
2. In visiting a school what may the parent do to acquire information in the proper way?
3. How may the home co-operate with the school?
4. What degree of instruction in morals ought the school to give?
5. In what way does the school best help in moral training?
6. What do you know about the conditions on the playgrounds of your own school?
Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness, occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our children—or of our neighbors' children—to a focus and throw them in high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule, when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of development.
A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.
Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt, as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort of training.
The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the perfect tree in the sapling.Character comes by development; it is not born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper, sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?
When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the development of those powers, their training-field and school.
Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other, in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him to be born six feet tall.
A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent, then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his moralupward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not. And is it not to be the same with the child?
We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.
Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of will.
When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive, Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle and adjust itself with all other persons.
When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take time to think what it means.Keep your temper.Do not break before the other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied. From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from force and tradition to a moral plane.
Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request. You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his life.
Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an unjust man.
Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience. Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration—as a drop of acid on a finger tip—than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in other cases.
Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not drift,is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.
An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or that it was acquired in the adolescent period.
The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person; there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school of normal social living.
Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character of thechild or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons, first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control, to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace and interfere with the well-being of others.
It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.
In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.
It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant will not help the case. Hemay feel the emotion of your anger but misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first exercises in training character.
Consider the future.Each family is a social unit, a little world. Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality, under similar circumstances, serve in the business of mature life? Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character. Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must guide it.
When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own temper.
Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger,train him in self-control. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, butit is the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and school and street.
Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.
Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of forgiveness and, if the occasionwarrants, the dignity and courage of the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how great is the victory of forgiveness.48