What has just been said indicates some possibilities which may be
worked out in the direction of governing children through the playful
use of this instinct. Sully reports this: “‘When R. is naughty and in
a passion’ (writes a lady friend of her child, aged three and a half)
‘I need only suggest to him that he is some one else--say, a friend of
his--and he will take it up at once. He will pretend to be the other
child, and at last go and call himself, now a good boy, back again.’
This mode of suggestion, by helping the ‘higher self’ to detach itself
from and control the lower might, one suspects, be much more widely
employed in the moral training of children.”
One mother, when her little boy sulked upon being requested to do some
little thing for her, would pretend to telephone for a messenger boy
with certain characteristics which were not much in evidence in her
own son at the time, explaining that her little son, who usually ran
errands for her, was not at home to-day. The latter, in his interest
in the “game,” would immediately forget to sulk, knock politely at the
door of his mother’s room, and upon being invited to enter, present
himself as the messenger boy for whom she had telephoned. When asked
how long he could stay, he would reply “All day if you wish,” and in
the role of messenger boy, he cheerfully performed his mother’s errands.
When her sister’s little children seemed averse to washing their
hands and faces in preparation for dinner, Mrs. Chenery tells of how
their mother made this duty, so disagreeable to all children, really
pleasurable through the use of military commands which always appealed
to them.
“Attention! Forward march! one, two, one, two. Right face--to the
bathroom, march!”
Then, after their hands and faces were shining and their tangled curls
combed out, “Attention! Left face! Forward march!”--downstairs, through
the hall, then once more, “Left face--to the dining-room--march!”
Not only does imagination help a child cheerily to obey, but it helps
an adult wisely to command. Throughout childhood and youth can there be
a better maxim for government than that which is the very heart of the
imaginative instinct: put yourself in the child’s place?