I.References for StudyThe Problem of Temper.Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.E. P. St. John,Child Nature and Child Nurture, chap. v. Pilgrim Press, $0.50.J. Sully,Children's Ways, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.II.Further ReadingPatterson Du Bois,The Culture of Justice, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.75.E. H. Abbott,The Training of Parents. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.M. Wood-Allen,Making the Best of Our Children. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each.H. Y. Campbell,Practical Motherhood. Longmans, $2.50.III.Topics for Discussion1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral crises?2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in children?3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy authority?6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly developed life?
I.References for Study
The Problem of Temper.Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
E. P. St. John,Child Nature and Child Nurture, chap. v. Pilgrim Press, $0.50.
J. Sully,Children's Ways, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.
II.Further Reading
Patterson Du Bois,The Culture of Justice, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.75.
E. H. Abbott,The Training of Parents. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.
M. Wood-Allen,Making the Best of Our Children. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each.
H. Y. Campbell,Practical Motherhood. Longmans, $2.50.
III.Topics for Discussion
1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral crises?
2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in children?
3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?
4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?
5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy authority?
6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?
7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?
8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly developed life?
48See Gow,Good Morals and Gentle Manners, chap. viii.
48See Gow,Good Morals and Gentle Manners, chap. viii.
48See Gow,Good Morals and Gentle Manners, chap. viii.
A child who never quarrels probably needs to be examined by a physician; a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some underlying cause for nervous irritability.
It is perfectly natural for healthy people to differ; in childhood's realm, where the values and proportions of life are not clearly seen, where social adjustments have not been acquired, the differences in opinions, as in possessions, lead to the expression of feeling in sharp and emphatic terms. Rivalry and conflict are natural to the young animal. Children do not wilfully enter into conflicts any more than adults; they are only less diplomatic in their language, more direct, and more likely to follow the word with attempts at force.
In few things do parents need more patience than in dealing with children's quarrels. First, seek to determine quietly the merits of the cause; but do not attempt to pronounce a verdict. It is seldom wise to act as judge unless you allow thechildren to act as a jury. But ascertain whether the quarrel is an expression somewhere of anger against injustice, wrong, or evil in some form. Sometimes their quarrels have as much virtue as our crusades. It is a sad mistake to quench the feeling of indignation against wrong or of hatred against evil. A boy will need that emotional backing in his fights against the base and the foes of his kind. While rejoicing in his feeling, show him how to direct it, train him to discriminate between hatred of wrong and bitterness toward the wrongdoer. Help him to see the good that comes from loving people, no matter what they do.
Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their sense of justice than all our decisions can. Be sure to get each one to state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital. Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light. Usually that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary acknowledgment of wrong. The boys—or girls—have for the first time seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we when convinced against our wishes.
When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side, in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their differences.
The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own attitude.
Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new, self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them. Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he will have to live some day.
The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys' fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much of a fight, every day struggling in competition and rivalry; we have not yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good tofind causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot, nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle their differences as honestly at least as do men.
Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.
Does all this mean that boys should be encouraged to fight? No; but it does mean that when Billy comes home with one eye apparently retired from business, we must not scold him as though he were the first wanderer from Eden. That fight may have been precisely the same thing as a croquet game to his sister, or any test of skill to his big brother, or a business transaction to his father; it was a mere contest of two healthy bodies at a time when the body was the outstanding fact of life. The fight may give us our chance, however, to aid him to a sense of the greatness of life's conflict, to a sense of the qualities that make thetrue fighter. It may leave him open to the appeal of true heroism. We must make light of the victory of brute strength, just as we may make light of his wounds and scars, and glorify the victory of the mind and will.
The boy who fights because he lacks control of temper needs careful training. He gets a good deal of discipline on the playground and street, but it is not always effective; the beatings may only further undermine control. But the lack of self-control will manifest itself in many ways and must be remedied at all points. The discipline of daily living in the family must come into play here.
The matter of self-control is not separable into special features; one cannot learn control under one set of moral circumstances without learning it for all. The boy who strikes without thinking is simply one who acts without thinking. He tends to throw away the brakes of the will. The regain of control comes only through training at every point in deliberation of action.
Probably there is no other point at which children so frequently and readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of uncontrolled actionto the children. Just to learn to wait, even after the thought is formed into words, until it shall be my turn or my opportunity to speak is a fine discipline of control. To do that every day, year after year, tends to break up the hair-trigger process of action.
Control is gained also by the acquisition of the habit of thought regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over the day and its deeds.
The evident danger of undue deliberation of action must be met by another cure of the personal-conflict spirit; that is, the substitution of games of rivalry and skill for the unorganized rivalry and "game" of fighting. The transition from the bloody arena to the excitement of a game is very easy and natural. But the game is the boy's great chance to learn life as a game to be played according to the rules. All that the fight calls for—courage, endurance, skill, quickness ofaction, and grim persistence—comes out in a good game. Here is a suitable youthful realization of the fight that is worth waging. Our participation in the youths' games, our appreciation of their points, our joy in honestly won success, is the best possible way to lead up to their taking life in terms of a good fight, a grand game, a real chance to call out the heroic qualities. Turn every fighting instinct into the good fight that will clarify and elevate them all.
I.References for StudyW. L. Sheldon,Ethics in the Home, chaps. xi, xii, xiii. Welch & Co., $1.25.E. A. Abbott,Training of Parents, chap. v. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.II.Further ReadingElla Lyman Cabot,Every Day Ethics. Holt, $1.25.M. Wood-Allen,Making the Best of Our Children. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each.III.Topics for Discussion1. Do all children quarrel? Should one punish for small quarrels?2. What are the facts which ought to be ascertained regarding any quarrel?3. What special opportunities do children's differences offer?4. What are the causes of habitual petulance? What are the dangers of this habit of mind?5. Is fighting necessarily wrong? What part does it play in the lives of men?6. What are the dangerous elements in boys' fights?7. What special quality of character needs development in this connection?8. What are the valuable possibilities in the fighting tendency?
I.References for Study
W. L. Sheldon,Ethics in the Home, chaps. xi, xii, xiii. Welch & Co., $1.25.
E. A. Abbott,Training of Parents, chap. v. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.
II.Further Reading
Ella Lyman Cabot,Every Day Ethics. Holt, $1.25.
M. Wood-Allen,Making the Best of Our Children. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each.
III.Topics for Discussion
1. Do all children quarrel? Should one punish for small quarrels?
2. What are the facts which ought to be ascertained regarding any quarrel?
3. What special opportunities do children's differences offer?
4. What are the causes of habitual petulance? What are the dangers of this habit of mind?
5. Is fighting necessarily wrong? What part does it play in the lives of men?
6. What are the dangerous elements in boys' fights?
7. What special quality of character needs development in this connection?
8. What are the valuable possibilities in the fighting tendency?
Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children. But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child appears as a wilful liar.
"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"
First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles Dickens wroteOliver Twisthe described a burglary that never happened, so far as he knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No; because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying. He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.
Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My dolly is sick," she is sayingthat which is not so, but instead of reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll. Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue, should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect, jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just so."
But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguishing between the world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom with ideas to pass over into habits of carelessly handling realities. Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red, green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly their colors and forms. Daily training in exactitude of statements of realfacts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the essence of truth-telling.
But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form. It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers "No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief; he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.
What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and sufficientto establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others, and against his own good.
Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper, and confidant. I like better the God to whom a littlefellow in Montana prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help him to do and know the right.
But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life. Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description. Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the larger general virtue of precision. Help children at every turn of life to be right—right in doing things, right in thinking, in saying, and in execution. Precision at any point in life helps lift the life's whole level. Truth-telling is not a separable virtue. You cannot make a boy truthful in word if you let him lie in deed. You cannot expect he will speak the truth if you do not train him to do the truth, in his play, in ordering his room, in thinking through his school problems, and in thinking through his religious difficulties. Truth-telling is the verbal reaction of the lifewhich habitually holds that nothing is right until it is just right.
Two things would, ordinarily, make sure of a truthful statement, instead of a protective lie, in answer to your question: first, that the young person has been trained to the habit of seeing and stating things as they are—and that you really give him a chance so to state them, and, secondly, that to some degree there has been developed a recognition of considerations or values that are higher than either escape from punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on the other, escape from punishment.
Everything in that crisis will depend on how real you have made the good to be, how much the sense of the reality of God and his companionship has brought of joy and friendship, and how high are his values of the actual, the real, the true.
But what shall we do as we meet the lie on the lips of the child? First, as already suggested, do not wait until you meet it. Train the child to the truthful life. Second, be sure you do not maketoo heavy moral demands. Remember the instinct to protect himself from immediate punishment or disapprobation is stronger than any other just then. Do not ask him to do what the law says the prisoner may not do, incriminate himself. We have no right to put on our children tests harder than they can bear. Often we put those which are harder than we could face. What you will do just then depends on what you have been doing for the training of the child or youth. Do not expect him to solve problems in moral geometry if you have neglected simple addition in that realm.
Punishment by the blow or the immediate sentence will be futile. The offender must know he has trespassed in a realm beyond your administration and rule; he has done more than commit an offense against you. Whatever consequences follow—such as your hesitation to accept his word—must evidently be a part of the operation of the entire moral law. Help him to see that lying strikes at the root of all social relations and would make all happy and prosperous living, all friendship, and all business impossible by destroying social confidence.
Facing the crisis, do not demand more than your training gives you a right to expect. Often, instead of the direct categorical question as to guilt, we must gradually draw out a narrative of the events in question; we must patiently helpthe child to state the facts and to see the values of exactitudes. Without preaching or posing we must bring the events into the light of larger areas of time and circles of life, help him to see them related to all his life and to all mankind and to the very fringes of existence, to God and the eternal. That cannot be done in a moment; it is part of a habit of our own minds or it is not really done at all. At the moment we can, however, make the deepest impression by insistence on the importance of the actual, the real, the exactly true.
I.References for StudyE. L. Cabot,Every Day Ethics, chaps. xix, xx. Holt, $1.25.W. B. Forbush,On Truth Telling. Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.J. Sully,Children's Ways, pp. 124-33. Appleton, $1.25.II.Further ReadingG. S. Hall, "A Study of Children's Lies,"Educational Problems, I, chap. vi. Appleton, $2.50.E. P. St. John,A Genetic Study of Veracity. Pamphlet.J. Sully,Studies in Childhood.E. H. Griggs,Moral Education. Huebsch, $1.60.III.Topics for Discussion1. Are there degrees of lying?2. When is a lie not a lie?3. How can we discriminate among the statements of children?4. How can we help them to recognize the qualities of truth?5. In what ways are parents to blame for forcing children to protective lying?6. What of the relation of the thought of God to the demands for truth?7. Would you punish a child for lying and, if so, in what way?
I.References for Study
E. L. Cabot,Every Day Ethics, chaps. xix, xx. Holt, $1.25.
W. B. Forbush,On Truth Telling. Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
J. Sully,Children's Ways, pp. 124-33. Appleton, $1.25.
II.Further Reading
G. S. Hall, "A Study of Children's Lies,"Educational Problems, I, chap. vi. Appleton, $2.50.
E. P. St. John,A Genetic Study of Veracity. Pamphlet.
J. Sully,Studies in Childhood.
E. H. Griggs,Moral Education. Huebsch, $1.60.
III.Topics for Discussion
1. Are there degrees of lying?
2. When is a lie not a lie?
3. How can we discriminate among the statements of children?
4. How can we help them to recognize the qualities of truth?
5. In what ways are parents to blame for forcing children to protective lying?
6. What of the relation of the thought of God to the demands for truth?
7. Would you punish a child for lying and, if so, in what way?
Many parents appear to think that the child's concepts of property rights and of fair dealing are without importance. Habits of pilfering are permitted to develop and success in cheating wins admiration. Low standards are accepted and religion is divorced from moral questions. The family attitude practically assumes that all persons cheat more or less and that it is necessary only to use wisdom to insure freedom from conviction.
Responsibility lies at home. We shall never have an honest generation until we have honest men and women to breed and train it. It is folly to think we can lay on the public schools the burden of the moral education of the young. Much is already being attempted there; yet little seems to be accomplished because the home, having the child before and after school and for a longer period each day, furnishes no adequate basis in habits, ideals, and instruction for the moral work of the school. If parents assume that one cannot succeed with absolute integrity, that dishonesty in some degree is necessary to prosperity, then children will learn that lesson despite all that maybe said elsewhere. Honest children grow where, in answer to the false statement, "You will starve if you do business honestly," parents say, "Then we will starve."
But the very home life itself can be a teacher of dishonesty. Is it largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory? Does it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article? Is the front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a slattern? Is the home striving for more than it deserves? Is it trying to get more out of life than it puts in? Evading taxes, avoiding duties, a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social cheating and lying? Such homes teach so loudly that no voice could be heard in them.
Given the atmosphere, ideals, and practices of the honest life in the home itself, the problems of conduct, in the realm of these rights, are more than half solved. Here in the home the real training for the life of business takes place. Not for an instant can we afford to lower standards here, nor to lose sight of the life-long power of our ideals, our habits, and our attitudes on the conduct of the next generation. Do parents know that the problems of lying, cheating, quarreling are the great, vital questions for their children, much more important than industrial or professional success in life; that on these all success is predicated? Ifthey do, surely they cannot regard the problems which arise as mere incidents; surely they will provide for the culture of the moral life as definitely as for the culture of the physical or the intellectual!
But children also acquire habits from their playmates. Whenever the act of pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear. Some sense of property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and usefully employ it. Help children to see the difference between mine and thine. Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in forgetful borrowing within the family. In this little social group the members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of others. Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so early that it becomes a part of the normal order of things.
Children can learn that the game of life has its rules and that the breach of these rules spoils the game and prevents our own happiness. They can learn, too, that these are not arbitrary rules; they are like the laws of nature; they are the conditions under which alone it is possible for people to live together and to make life worth while. Gambling is wrong because it is unsocial; it is the attempt to gain without an equivalent giving.Cheating is wrong, no matter how many practice it, just as surely as cheating is wrong in the game on the playground.
Children are really peculiarly sensitive to the social consciousness. In school under no circumstances will they do that which the school custom forbids or the older boys condemn. In the home, despite contrary appearances, the opinion of elders, brothers, sisters, and parents is the recognized law. Every small boy wants to be like his big brother. Children's conduct may be guided by an understanding of the social will outside the school and home. Help them to know that all people everywhere in organized society condemn cheating and dishonesty.49
Sentiment and emotional feeling must back up all teaching of conduct. Your stories and readings should be selected with this in mind. The approbation of parents and of the great Father of all enters as an effectual motive.
But parents seldom understand these problems; they attempt to deal with each one as it arises until they are weary of the seemingly endless procession and abandon the task. Their endeavors are based on faint memories of such problems in their own youth or on rule-of-thumb proverbialphilosophy about morals and children. Does not the development of moral ability and culture deserve at least as much attention as any other phase of the child's life? After all, what do we most of all desire for all our children—position, fame, ease? or is it not rather simply this, that, no matter what else they do, they may be good and useful men and women? Then what are we doing to make them good and useful?
A clear view of the need for moral training, a belief that is possible, will surely lead to serious attempts to learn the art of moral training. In this they need not be without guidance. There is a number of good books on character development in the child.50The foundation for all such training of parents ought to be laid in an understanding of what the moral nature is, and then of the laws of its development. Later the specific problems may be separately considered.
Teasing is the child's crude method of experimentation in psychological reactions; the teaser desires to discover just how the teased will respond. It degenerates, by easy steps, into a thoughtless infliction of pain in sheer enjoyment of another's misery, and then into brutal bullying. When only two children are together mere teasing will notlast long; either the teaser will tire of his task or his teasing will turn to that lowest of all brutalities, delight in inflicting pain on weaker ones.
But teasing is a serious problem in many families; the whole group sometimes lives in an atmosphere of ridicule, derision, and annoyance. Teasing is likely to appear at its worst wherever a group is gathered, for the guilty ones are under the stimulus of the praise of others; they inflict mental pain for the sake of winning approbation.
Teasing has a pedagogical basis. A certain amount of ridicule acts healthfully on most persons. Even children need sometimes to see their weaknesses, and especially their faults of temper, in the light of other eyes, in the aspect of the ridiculous. But children are seldom to be trusted to discipline one another; freedom to do so is likely to develop hardness, indifference to the sufferings of others, and arrogance from the sense of lordship. The corrective of ridicule is safe only as it is a kindly expression of the sense of humor. The ability to see and to show just how foolish or funny some situations are will turn many a tragedy of childhood into a comedy. Whenever children laugh at the distresses or faults of others, help them to laugh at their own. Cultivate the habit of seeing the odd, the whimsical, the humorous side of things. A sound sense of kindly humor often will save us all from unkind teasing.
Help the habitual and unkind teaser to see how cowardly the act is, to see how it is against the spirit of fair play. Call on him to help the weaker one. If he is teasing for some fault of temper or some habit, show him the chance that is afforded to do the nobler deed of helping another to overcome that fault.
Let the cowardly teaser reap the consequences of his own act; he must bear the burden of the critic, the expectation of perfection. Teasing him for his own shortcomings will sometimes cure him, but usually he loses his temper quickly. Make him feel the injustice of the teaser's method. If he is a bully he needs bullying. If ever corporal punishment is wise it is in such a case. He who inflicts pain simply because he can deserves to endure pain inflicted by someone stronger. But one must be careful not to confirm him in the coward's code. The injustice of it he must see, see by smarting under it. If ever punishment before others is wise it is in this case; for surely he who delights in humiliating others must be humiliated. But though justice suggests this course, experience shows that it does not always work; the bully only bides his time, and, cherishing resentment, he wreaks it on the weaker ones.
The best cure for brutal teasing will take a longer time than is involved in a thrashing. Besides,the teaser will get his thrashings very soon from other boys. It requires time to change the habits that make bullying possible. Try gradually helping him to see the beauty and pleasure of helpfulness. Give him a chance to give pleasure instead of pain. Help him to taste the joy of praise, the praise that helps more than all teasing criticism. Help him to see that it is more truly a mark of superiority to help, to cheer, to do good, than to oppress and tease. Take time to habituate him in helpfulness.
In dealing with teasing in the family, two other things are worth remembering: First, the teased must be taught the protective power of indifference. Teasers stop as soon as their barbs fail to wound; the fun ends there. Laugh at those who laugh at you, and they will soon cease. Secondly, the atmosphere and habit of the family determine the course of teasing. Where carping criticism and unkindly ridicule abound, children cannot be blamed for like habits. Where the sense of humor lightens tense situations, where we sacrifice the pleasure of stinging criticism for the sake of encouraging those who most need it, children are quick to catch those habits too. The teasing child usually comes out of a family of similar habits. On seeing our children engaged in teasing others, our first thought ought to be as to the extent to which we may have been their examplein this respect. Constant watchfulness on our part against the temptations to tease will have an effect far more potent than all attempts to talk them out of the habit; it will lead them out.
I.References for Study1. HONESTYP. Du Bois,The Culture of Justice, chaps. iii, x. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.75.E. P. St. John,Child Nature and Child Nurture, chap. viii. Pilgrim Press, $0.50.2. TEASINGW. L. Sheldon,A Study of Habits, chap. xvii. Welch & Co., Chicago, $1.25.II.Further ReadingON GENERAL MORAL TRAININGSneath & Hodges,Moral Training in School and Home. Macmillan, $0.80.E. O. Sisson,The Essentials of Character. Macmillan, $1.00.H. Thisleton Mark,The Unfolding of Personality. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.Paul Carus,Our Children. Open Court Publishing Co., $1.00.III.Topics for Discussion1. Of what importance is the child's sense of possession?2. What are the first evidences of a consciousness of property rights?3. How do homes train in dishonesty?4. What is the relation between cheating and dishonesty?5. What is a child seeking to do when he teases another?6. What are the unfortunate features of teasing?7. What is the relation of teasing to bullying?8. What cures would you suggest for either?
I.References for Study
1. HONESTY
P. Du Bois,The Culture of Justice, chaps. iii, x. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.75.
E. P. St. John,Child Nature and Child Nurture, chap. viii. Pilgrim Press, $0.50.
2. TEASING
W. L. Sheldon,A Study of Habits, chap. xvii. Welch & Co., Chicago, $1.25.
II.Further Reading
ON GENERAL MORAL TRAINING
Sneath & Hodges,Moral Training in School and Home. Macmillan, $0.80.
E. O. Sisson,The Essentials of Character. Macmillan, $1.00.
H. Thisleton Mark,The Unfolding of Personality. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.
Paul Carus,Our Children. Open Court Publishing Co., $1.00.
III.Topics for Discussion
1. Of what importance is the child's sense of possession?
2. What are the first evidences of a consciousness of property rights?
3. How do homes train in dishonesty?
4. What is the relation between cheating and dishonesty?
5. What is a child seeking to do when he teases another?
6. What are the unfortunate features of teasing?
7. What is the relation of teasing to bullying?
8. What cures would you suggest for either?
49Parents will be helped by the practical discussions of cheating, cribbing, and other boy problems in Johnson,Problems of Boyhood.50See "Book List" in Appendix.
49Parents will be helped by the practical discussions of cheating, cribbing, and other boy problems in Johnson,Problems of Boyhood.
49Parents will be helped by the practical discussions of cheating, cribbing, and other boy problems in Johnson,Problems of Boyhood.
50See "Book List" in Appendix.
50See "Book List" in Appendix.
Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught, while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says. The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.
There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality. The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the persons away you remove all educational potencies.
The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people. Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives. Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational agency, from its religious reality.
All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers, save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and, besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of fathers.
There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood wholly in physiological terms, imagining—if they think about it at all—that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only they know how to bear, feed,and clothe children properly. True, such duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good provider" who provides onlythingsfor his family, no matter with what generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves first of all.
He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best business in the world, the development of children's characters.
Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them those social advantages which he missed in youth.
But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality. It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home is left headless and soon heartless. Ifwe at all desire the fruits of character in the home we must give ourselves personally.
It is not alone the habitué of the saloon or the idler in clubs and fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of being worse than an infidel.A father belongs to his home more than he belongs to his church.There have been men, though probably their number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.
The father owes it to his familyto give himself at his best, that is, as far as possible, when hisvitality is freshest and his powers keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children, time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith, did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public propaganda.
Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families. Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, whileso readily granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge? There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but they are not willing to learn how to grow them.
It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you. Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in real touch with the boy's world.
Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the homeand the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion. Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.
Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves. All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal selfas well as the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of peace.
Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of our children.
The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious person to them.