THAT SPOILED CHILD.
I was the other day one of many passengers in a railroad train in
which a small girl of four or five years of age was making a journey,
accompanied by her mother and an aunt. The child was beautiful, with a
mass of golden curls. Her velvet coat and the felt hat trimmed
elaborately with ostrich plumes were faultless in their style; her
behavior would compare unfavorably with the manners of a young
Comanche Indian. She insisted upon standing in the centre of the
aisle, where she effectually blocked all passage, and, as the train
was going rapidly, ran a great risk of being thrown violently against
the seats. When remonstrated with by her guardians, she slapped her
aunt full in the face, pulled herself free from her mother's
restraining grasp, and, in a frenzy of rage, threw herself down right
across the aisle. There she lay for a full half hour. When her mother
would have raised her to her feet she uttered shriek after shriek,
until her fellow-travelers' ears rang. After this triumph of young
America over the rule and command of tyrannizing mamma, the innocent
babe was allowed to remain prostrate in her chosen resting-place,
while brakemen, conductor and passengers stepped gingerly over the
recumbent form. She varied the monotony of the situation by occasional
wrathful kicks in the direction of her mother or at some would-be
passer-by.
"It is best to let sleeping dogs lie," sighed the mother of this
prodigy to her sister. "When she gets one of these attacks (and she
has them quite often) I just leave her alone until she becomes
ashamed of it. She can't bear to be crossed in anything."
When I stepped from the train at my destination the humiliation for
which her attendants longed was still a stranger to the willful child.
Trouble-fearing persons have a belief to the effect that it is, in the
long run, easier to let a child have his own sweet way until he has
attained the age of discretion,--say at fourteen or fifteen
years,--when his innate sense of propriety will convince him of the
error of his ways. Such a theorist was a dear old gentleman who, many
years ago, remonstrated with me upon the pains and time I spent in
training my first born. The children of this aged saint had been
reared according to the old-fashioned notion, but when they had babies
of their own they departed from it, and the rising generation had full
and free sway. Their grandparent, albeit frequently the victim of
their pranks, loved them dearly. He now assured me that--
"While they are regular little barbarians, my dear, still they have
all that freedom and wild liberty which should accompany childhood.
They eat when and what they please, go to bed when they feel like it,
rise early or late as the whim seizes them, and know no prescribed
rules for diet and deportment. But they come of good stock and will
turn out all right."
They did come of good, honest parents, and this may have been what saved
their moral, while their physical being has suffered from the course
pursued during their infancy and early youth. There were six children;
now there are four. One died when a mere baby from cold contracted from
running about the house in winter weather in her bare feet. She was so
fond of doing this that her mother could not bear to put shoes and
stockings on the dear little tot. The other, a sweet, affectionate boy,
suffered at regular intervals during the fifteen years of his life from
acute indigestion. Directly after one of these attacks, he, as was his
habit, followed the cravings of an undisciplined appetite, and attended,
late at night, a pea-nut-and-candy supper, almost immediately after
which he was taken violently ill and died in three days. The four
remaining children do not, all told, possess enough constitution to make
one strong man. They are all delicate and constant sufferers.
In this case judicious care might have averted the above-mentioned
evils. Would the game have been worth the candle?
This is a question which parents cannot afford to disregard. It is
expedient for them to consider seriously whether or not the stock on
both sides of the family, of which their children come, is so good as
to warrant neglect or to justify over-indulgence.
Our mother-tongue does not offer us a phrase by which we may express
what we mean by _l'enfant terrible_. But our father-land produces many
living examples which may serve as translations of the French words.
Such an one was the small boy who, while eagerly devouring grapes,
threw the skins, one after another, into the lap of my new light silk
gown. His mother entered a smilingly gentle protest in the form of--
"Oh, Frankie dear! do you think it is pretty to do that?" to which he
paid as much attention as to my look of distress. The reader who
believes in "lending a hand" in righting the minor evils of society
must have more temerity and a larger share of what the boy of the
period denominates "nerve" than I possess, if she interferes with a
child while in the presence of the mother. It is as unsafe as the
proverbial act of inserting the digits between the bark and the tree.
It is, moreover, a liberty which I should never permit the dearest
friend to take. In fact, so strong is my feeling on this subject, that
I should have allowed "Frankie dear" to make a fruit-plate and
finger-bowl of the shimmering folds of my gown rather than utter a
feeble objection before his doting mamma.
The practice of spoiling a child is unjust to the little one and to
the parent. The latter suffers tenfold more than if she, day by day,
inculcated the line-upon-line, protest-upon-protest system. That she
does not do this is sometimes due to mistaken kindness, but oftener to
self-indulgence or dread of disagreeable scenes, that brings a harvest
of misery as surely as he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind.
A spoiled child is an undutiful child. This must be true. The constant
humoring and considering of one's whims will, in course of time,
produce a stunted, warped and essentially selfish character, that
considers the claims of gratitude and affection as _nil_ compared with
the furtherance of personal aims and desires. Never having learned
self-control or obedience, parents and their timid remonstrances must
go to the wall before the passions or longings which these same
parents in days gone by have fostered. "Only mother" or "nobody but
father" are phrases that are so frequent as to become habitual, while
the "you yourself used to let me do this or that" is the burden of
many an excuse for misdemeanors. And after all the years of parental
indulgence, what is your reward? The spring is gone from your own
being, while your children will not let you live your life over again
in theirs.
We all recall Æsop's fable of the young man about to be executed, who
begged on the scaffold for a last word with his mother, and when the
wish was granted, stooped to her and bit off the tip of her ear, that
the pain and disfigurement might serve as a constant reminder of the
hatred he felt for the over-indulgence and lack of discipline which
had brought him to this shameful death. The hurt which the mother's
heart feels at the thought of causing her child's downfall is pain too
great to be endured.
The letting-alone principle is a short-sighted one. Even in infancy a
spoiled child may make such a nuisance of himself as to produce a
disagreeable impression upon all who know him,--an impression which it
takes many years of model behavior to eradicate. It is actual cruelty
to throw upon the child the work the parent should have performed. It
is easy to train the growing plant, but after the bark is tough and
the fibre strong it is a terrible strain upon grain and vitality to
bend it in a direction to which it is unaccustomed.
Much of the insubordination to be found in the children of the present
day is due to the growing habit of entrusting the little ones to
servants whose own wills and tempers are uncontrolled and untrained. A
child knows that his nurse has no right to insist upon obedience, and
he takes advantage of the knowledge until he is a small tyrant who is
conscious of no law beyond that of his own inclinations.
The prime rule in the training of children should be implicit
obedience. The child is happier for knowing that when a command or
prohibition is stated there is no appeal from the sentence, and that
coaxing avails naught. Uncertainty is as trying to small men and women
as to us who are more advanced in the school of life.
So much depends upon this great principle of obedience, that it is
marvelous that parents ever disregard it. I have known in my own
experience three cases in which it was impossible to make a child take
medicine, and death has followed in consequence. One of the most
painful recollections I have is of seeing a child six years old forced
to swallow a febrifuge that was not unpalatable in itself. The mother,
father, and nurse held the struggling boy, while the physician pried
open the set teeth and poured the liquid down his throat. Under these
circumstances it is probable that the remedy proved worse than the
disease.
I have not space to do more than touch upon the great influence of
early training on the future life. All my days I have been thankful
for the gentle but firm hand that, as a child, taught me moral
courage, self-denial and submission. The temptations of life have been
more easily resisted, the trials more lightly borne, because of the
years in which I was in training for the race set before me. We do not
want to enter our children on the course as unbroken, "soft" and wild
colts, whose spirits must be crushed before they will submit to the
work assigned them. They may be young, yet strong; spirited, yet
gentle; patient, yet resolute.