children,--easy for the trainer and for the trained; and have we
developed a race of beings with plain, strong, clear perceptions of
right and wrong behaviour and an easy and accurate fulfilment of those
perceptions?
It must be admitted that we have not; but two claims will be made in
excuse: first, that, however unsuccessful, this method of discipline
is better than any other; and, second, that the bad behaviour of
humanity is due to our inherent depravity, and cannot be ameliorated
much even by physical punishment. Some may go further, and say that
whatever advance we have made is due to this particular system.
Unfortunately, we have almost no exact data from which to compute the
value of different methods of child-training.
In horse-training something definite is known. On one of the great
stock ranches of the West, for instance, where some phenomenal racers
have been bred, the trainers of colts not only forbid any rough
handling of the sensitive young animals, but even rough speaking to
them. It has been proven that the intelligent and affectionate horse
is trained more easily and effectually by gentleness than by severity.
But with horses the methods used are open to inspection, and also the
results.
With children each family practises alone on its own young ones, and
no record is kept beyond the casual observation and hearsay reports of
the neighbours. Yet, even so, there is a glimmer of light. The
proverbial uncertainty as to "ministers' sons" indicates a tendency to
reaction when a child has been too severely restrained; and the almost
sure downfall of the "mamma's darling," the too-much-mothered and
over-indulged boy, shows the tendency to foolish excesses when a child
has not been restrained enough.
Again, our general uncertainty as to methods proves that even the
currently accepted "rod" system is not infallible. If it were, we
should have peace of mind and uncounted generations of good citizens.
As it is, we have the mixed and spotty world we all know so well,--a
heavy percentage of acknowledged criminals, a much larger grade of
those who just do not break the law, but whose defections from
honesty, courage, truth, and honour weigh heavily upon us all.
Following that comes the vast mass of "good people," and their
behaviour is sometimes more trying than that of the bad ones.
Humanity does gain, but not as fast as so intelligent a race should.
In penology something has been learned. Here, dealing with the extreme
criminal, we are slowly establishing the facts that arbitrary and
severe punishment does not proportionately decrease crime; that crime
has causes, which may be removed; and that the individual needs to be
treated beforehand, preventively, rather than afterward,
retributively. This would seem to throw some light on infant penology.
If retributive punishment does not proportionately decrease crime in
adult criminals, perhaps it does not decrease "naughtiness" among
little children. If there is an arrangement of conditions and a
treatment which may prevent the crime, perhaps there may be an
arrangement of conditions and a treatment which will prevent the
naughtiness.
One point may be clearly established, to begin with; and that is the
need of an open court for our helpless little offenders. Whatever else
we think of human nature, we know it to be fallible, and that a
private individual cannot be expected to administer justice in secret
and alone.
Suppose Mr. Jones steals a cow from Mr. Smith, is Mr. Smith capable of
being himself both judge and executioner? Does not the very conception
of justice involve a third party, some one to hold the scales, to
balance, to decide? And, if circumstances compel much power to be
invested in an individual for a season, should not that individual be
previously instructed from some code of law which many have
sanctioned, and afterward be held responsible to public judgment?
A ship captain, for instance, has absolute authority for a while; but
his authority rests on law, and, if he breaks that law, he is liable
to punishment. Moreover, if he goes too far while in command, he is
liable to dangerous mutiny as well. But in domestic discipline the
child is absolutely in the power of the parent. There is no appeal.
There is no defence. There are no witnesses. The child offends against
the parent, and the offended one is both judge and executioner. A
number of children may commit exactly the same offence, as, for
instance, if six boys all go swimming when forbidden; yet they are
liable to six several punishments at the hands of their six several
mothers or fathers,--punishments bearing relation to the views,
health, and temper of the parent at the time rather than to the nature
of the misdeed. The only glimmer of protection which the child gets
from an enlightened community is in the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children,--a small, feeble body, acting in few localities,
and intervening only to save the child from the parent when gross
physical cruelty is practised. That in many cases parents are even
violently cruel to little children gives reason to believe that many
others are a little cruel; and that still more, while not cruel, are
unwise.
There is no society for the prevention of over-indulgence to children,
for instance; yet this is a frequent injury to our young people.
Whatever the views of the separate parents, and whatever their
standard of justice, a great improvement would be made if there were
some publicity and community of action in their methods. A hundred men
together can decide upon and carry out a higher course of action than
they could be trusted to follow severally. Our beautiful growth in
justice and equity (for grown people) has always required this
openness and union. Many a mother, tired and cross with her housework,
does things to her child which she would be ashamed to retail to a
cool and unprejudiced circle of friends. And many another mother
consistently and conscientiously inflicts punishments which she would
learn to be ashamed of if she heard them discussed by her respected
associates with a consensus of disapproval.
In the ordinary contact of neighbourly life, some little development
of this sort goes on: a few sporadic Mothers' Clubs lead to more
concerted discussions; and to-day the Mothers' Congress, lately become
the Parents' Congress, and other bodies, together with a growing field
of literature on the subject, is leading to far wider and deeper
thought, and some experiment. But the field is as wide as the world,
and very little is yet accomplished. We have swung wide from the stern
severity of earlier times, so that American children are notoriously
"indulged"; but merely to leave off a wrong method, without
introducing a better one, is not all that can be hoped.
The discipline of life lies before us all. The more carefully and
wisely we teach and train our children, the less they and others need
suffer afterward. But there does seem to be some grave deficiency in
our method of domestic discipline. Here is little Albert being
educated. He is not going to school yet. He is "not old enough." That
is, he is not old enough to be taught anything systematically by
persons whose business it is to teach; but he is old enough to be
learning the a, b, c of life at the hands of those with whom he
chances to be. A child learns every day. That cannot be helped. What
he learns, and how, we can largely dictate; but we cannot keep his
brain shut until he gets to school, and then open it for three or four
hours a day only. What does little Albert learn? Put yourself in his
place for a little while. Here are new sensations coming to him
momently, through the eager nerves of sense. Here is a new brain,
fresh to receive impressions, store them, and act upon them. The
pleasure of perceiving is keen, the pleasure of his limited but
growing reflection is keen, and the pleasure of action is best of all.
Life is full of interest. All the innumerable facts which form our
smooth background of behaviour, in the knowledge of which we avoid the
water and the fire and go down hill circumspectly, are to him fresh
discoveries and revelations. He has to prove them and put them
together, and see how they work. The feelings with which we have
learned to associate certain facts and actions do not exist to him. He
knows nothing of "should" or "should not," except as he learns it by
personal trial or through the reaction of other persons upon him.
This open state of mind we early destroy by labelling certain acts as
good and others as bad; and, since we do not see our way to exhibiting
the goodness or badness to the baby brain in natural colours, we paint
them in sharp black and white, with no shading. He has to gather his
sense of relatively good and bad from the degree of our praise and
punishment; and strange, indeed, are his impressions.
The loving and cuddling which delight his baby soul are associated
with so many different acts, and in such varying proportion, that he
does not clearly gather whether it is more virtuous to kiss mamma or
to pull grandpa's whiskers; and it takes him some time to learn which
dress he must not hug. But, if the good things confuse him, the bad
ones are far more complex and uncertain.
Little Albert is, we will say, investigating his mother's work-basket.
A tall object stands before him. He just bumped his head against it,
and it wiggled. He felt it wiggle. He reaches forth an inquiring hand,
and finds graspable wicker legs within reach. To grasp and to pull are
natural to the human hand and arm. To shake was early taught him.
Things were put in his hands, the shaking of which produced an
agreeable noise and admiration from the beloved ones. So he shakes
this new object; and, to his delight, something rattles. He puts forth
his strength, and, lo! the tall, shakable object falls prostrate
before him, and scatters into a sprawling shower of little things
that clink and roll. Excellent! Lovely! Have not persons built up tall
creations of vari-colored blocks, and taught baby to knock them down
and rejoice in their scattering!
But mamma, to whom this group of surfaces, textures, colours,
movements, and sounds, means much besides infantile instruction,
asserts that he is "naughty," and treats him with severity. "If you do
that again," says irate mamma, "I'll whip you!" If Albert has not
already been whipped, the new word means nothing. How is an unwhipped
child to know what whipping means? She might save her breath. The
lesson is not taught by words. But if she promptly whips him, and does
so inevitably when he repeats the offence, he does learn a definite
lesson; namely, that the act of pulling over a work-basket results in
a species of physical pain, _via_ mamma.
Then the unprejudiced young brain makes its deduction,--"The pulling
over of things causes physical pain, named whipping." This much being
established, he acts on the information. Presently he learns, with
some little confusion, that going out of the gate without leave is
also productive of whipping,--dissimilar acts, but the same
result,--and lays this up with the other,--"Pulling over things and
going out of gates are two causes with the same result,--whipping."
Then comes another case. He begins to investigate that endless wonder
and attraction, the fire. If ever cause and effect were neatly and
forcibly related, it is in this useful and dangerous element. So
simple and sure is its instructive and deterrent action that we have
built a proverb on it,--"The burnt child dreads the fire."
But the mother of Albert has a better plan than mother Nature. She
interposes with her usual arbitrary consequence,--"If you play with
fire, I will whip you," and Albert learns anew that this third cause
still produces the same unpleasant result; and he makes his
record,--"Pulling things over, going out of gates, playing with fire,
result in whipping." And he acts accordingly. Then one day he makes a
new and startling discovery. Led by some special temptation, he slips
out of the gate and safely back again, unseen of any. No whipping
follows. Then his astonished but accurate brain hastily revises the
previous information, and adds a glaring new clause,--"It is not just
going out of gates that makes a whipping come: it is being seen!" This
is covertly tried on the other deeds with the same result. "Aha! Aha!"
clicks the little recording machine inside. "Now I know! Whipping does
not come from those things: it comes from mamma; and, if she doesn't
see me, it doesn't come! Whipping is the result of being seen!" Of
course, a little child does not actually say this to himself in so
many words; but he does get this impression very clearly, as may be
seen from his ensuing behaviour.
The principle in question, in considering this usual method of
discipline, is whether it is better to associate a child's idea of
consequences with the act itself or with an individual, and
conditioned upon the chance of discovery. Our general habit is to make
the result of the child's deed contingent upon the parental knowledge
and displeasure rather than upon the deed itself. As in this
hackneyed instance of the fire, instead of teaching the child by mild
and cautious experiment that fire burns, we teach him that fire whips.
The baby who is taught not to play with fire by the application of a
rearward slipper does not understand the nature of the glittering
attraction any better than before; and, as soon as he learns that
whippings are contingent upon personal observation, he fondly imagines
that, if he can play with fire without being seen, no pain will
follow.
Thus the danger we seek to avert is not averted. He is still liable to
be burned through ignorance. We have denied the true lesson as to the
nature of fire, and taught a false one of arbitrary but uncertain
punishment. Even if the child is preternaturally obedient and never
does the things we tell him not to do, he does not learn the lesson.
He is no wiser than before. We have saved him from danger and also
from knowledge. If he is disobedient, he runs the same risk as if we
had told him nothing, with the added danger of acting alone and
nervously. Whereas, if he were taught the simple lesson that fire
burns, under our careful supervision to see that the burn was not
serious, then he would know the actual nature of fire, and dread it
with sure reason, far more than he dreads the uncertain slipper.
This has been dwelt upon so fully by previous writers that there would
seem small need of further mention; but still our mothers do not read
or do not understand, and still our babies are confronted with
arbitrary punishment instead of natural consequence. The worst result
of this system is in its effect on the moral sense. We have a world
full of people who are partially restrained from evil by the fear of
arbitrary punishment, and who do evil when they imagine they can do so
without discovery. Never having been taught to attach the evil
consequence to the evil act, but instead to find it a remote
contingency hinging on another person's observation, we grow up in the
same attitude of mind, afraid not of stealing, but of the policeman.
If there is no slipper, why not tip over the work-basket: if there is
no policeman, why not steal? Back of slipper and police we hold up to
the infant mind a still more remote contingency of eternal punishment;
but this has to be wholly imagined, and is so distant, to a child's
mind, as to have little weight. It has little weight with grown
persons even, and, necessarily, less with a child.
The mental processes involved in receiving by ear an image of a thing
never seen, of visualising it by imagination and then remembering the
vision, and finally of bringing forward that remembered vision to act
as check to a present and actual temptation, are most difficult. But
where a consequence is instant and clear,--when baby tries to grab the
parrot, and the parrot bites,--that baby, without being promised a
whipping or being whipped, will thereafter religiously avoid all
parrots.
A baby soon learns to shun certain things for reasons of his own. What
he dislikes and fears he will not touch. It is no effort for the young
mind to observe and remember a prompt natural consequence. We do make
some clumsy attempts in this direction, as when we tie up, in an
ill-tasting rag, the thumb too often sucked. If thumb-sucking is a
really bad habit and a general one, we should long since have invented
a neat and harmless wash, purchasable in small bottles at the drug
store, of which a few applications would sicken the unhappy suckling
of that thumb most effectually. But thumb-sucking we do not consider
as wrong, merely as undesirable. When the child does what we call
wrong, we think he should be "punished." Our ideas of domestic
discipline are still of the crudely savage era; while in social
discipline, in penology, we have become tolerably civilised.
Some will say that the child is like a savage, and is most open to the
treatment current at that time in our history. It is true that the
child passes through the same phases in personal development that the
race passed long ago, and that he is open to the kind of instruction
which would affect a primitive-minded adult. But this means (if we are
seeking to benefit the child), not the behaviour of one savage to
another, but such behaviour as would elevate the savage. One of the
most simple and useful elements in primitive discipline is
retaliation. It is Nature's law of reaction in conscious form.
To retaliate in kind is primitive justice. If we observe the code of
ethics in use among children, it resolves itself into two simple
principles: that of instant and equal retaliation; or, when that
fails, the dread ultimatum which no child can resist,--"I won't play!"
A child who is considered "mean" and disagreeable by his fellows meets
the simple and effectual treatment of snubbing, neglect, ostracism.
These two principles may be applied in domestic discipline gently,
accurately, fairly, and without ill-feeling; and their effect is
admirable. "What is the difference between this and the other method?"
will be asked. "Is not this also descending to the plane of
childishness, of savagery, to which you were just now objecting?" Here
is the difference.
To apply a brutal and arbitrary punishment to the person of the
offender is what savages do, and what we do, to the child. To receive
a just and accurate retaliation is what child and savage understand,
are restrained and instructed by. We should treat the child in methods
applicable by the savage, not with the behaviour of savages. For
instance, you are playing with a little child. The little child is
rude to you. You put him down, and go away. This is a gentle reaction,
which, being repeated, he soon learns to associate with the behaviour
you dislike. "When I do this," observes the infant mind, "the play
stops. I like to play. Therefore, I will not do the thing that stops
it."
This is simple observation, and involves no ill-feeling. He learns to
modify his conduct to a desired end, which is the lesson of life. In
this case you treat him by a method of retaliation quite perceptible
to a savage, and appealing to the sense of justice without arousing
antagonism. But, if you are playing with the little one, he is rude to
you, and you spank him, he is conscious of a personal assault which
does arouse antagonism. It is not only what a savage could
understand, but what a savage would have done. It arouses savage
feelings, and helps keep the child a savage. Also, it helps keep the
race a savage; for the child who grows up under the treatment common
in that era finds it difficult to behave in a manner suitable to
civilisation.
Discipline is part of life; and, if met early and accepted, all life
becomes easier. But the discipline which the real world gives us is
based on inexorable law, not on personal whim. We make the child's
idea of right and wrong rest on some person's feeling, not on the
nature of the act. He is trained to behave on a level of primitive
despotism, and cannot successfully adjust himself to a free democracy.
This is why our American children, who get less of the old-fashioned
discipline, make better citizens than the more submissive races who
were kept severely down in youth, and are unable to keep themselves
down in later life.
There is a painful paucity of ideas on child-training in most
families, as clearly shown in the too common confession, "I'm sure I
don't know what to do with that child!" or, "What would you do with
such a child as that?"
If we may not use the ever-ready slipper, the shrill, abusive voice,
the dark closet, or threat of withheld meal, what remains to us in the
line of discipline? What is to be done to the naughty child? We need
here some knowledge of what naughtiness really is. The child is a
growing group of faculties, the comparative development of which makes
him a good or bad member of society. His behaviour has, first, the
limitations of his age, and, second, of his personality.
A child is naturally more timid than a grown person, and a given child
may be afflicted with more timidity than is natural to his age. Acts
which indicate such a condition show need of training and discipline.
A certain amount of selfishness is natural to childhood: acts
indicating unusual selfishness call for correction.
So with the whole field of childish behaviour: whatever acts show evil
tendencies need checking; but the acts natural to every child only
show that he is a child,--which is not "naughty"! If we considered the
field beforehand, asked ourselves what we expected during this day or
this year in the behaviour of such a child, and were not displeased
when he behaved within those lines, much unnecessary pain and trouble
would be saved to both parties. Then, when things really indicative of
evil were done, we should carefully examine and test the character so
manifested, and begin to apply the suitable discipline.
For example, it is natural to childhood to be inconsiderate of others.
The intense little ego, full of strong new sensations, has small
sympathy for the sensations of his associates. The baby may love the
kitten, and yet hurt it cruelly because he does not know how kittens
feel. This is not naughty, and needs only the positive training which
shall hasten his natural growth in extension of sympathy. To show him
the right methods of handling the pet, and especially of not handling
it; to teach him to enjoy watching the kitten's natural activities and
to respect its preferences,--all that is education, and needs no
"discipline." But, if the child shows a pleasure in hurting the
kitten after he knows it hurts, then you have real evil to deal with.
A character is indicated which may grow to callous indifference to the
feelings of others, and even to their actual injury. These acts are
"wrong"; and wise, strong measures are necessary.
There are two main lines on which to work. One is to take extra
measures to cultivate sympathy, using nature study, and to examine and
care for such pronounced cases of suffering as must arouse even the
most dominant interest. The too-callous child might be taken to a
children's hospital, and helped to minister to the needs of the small
sufferers. His pets, meanwhile, should be large and strong creatures,
which he would depend on more or less, and his enjoying their company
made absolutely contingent on right treatment. Special attention
should also be paid to all such acts as showed consideration of
others,--to encourage and reward them.
Again, if a child shows a too violent or sullen temper, or is
distinctly sly and untrustworthy, these are serious indications, and
need careful and thorough treatment.
But the great majority of acts for which children are punished are not
at all evil. "Carelessness," for instance, is incident to the young
brain,--essential to it. The power always to properly co-relate and
remember is an adult power, and not always strong in the adult. We
need, of course, to encourage a growing carefulness, but not to expect
it nor punish its natural lack.