OBSERVATIONS IN THE NURSERY
_(a)_ THE IMITATIVENESS OF THE CHILD
It is in the second and third years of the child's life that the
rapidity of the development of the mental processes is most apparent,
and it is with that age that we may begin a closer examination. At
first sight it might seem more reasonable to adopt a strictly
chronological order, and to start with the infant from the day of his
birth. Since, however, we can only interpret the mind of the child by
our knowledge of our own mental processes, the study of the older
child and of the later stages is in reality the simpler task. The
younger the infant, the greater the difficulties become, so that our
task is not so much to trace the development of a process from simple
and early forms to those which are later and more complex, as to
follow a track which is comparatively plain in later childhood, but
grows faint as the beginnings of life are approached.
At the age, then, of two or three the first quality of the child which
may arrest our attention is his extreme imitativeness. Not that the
imitation on his part is in any way conscious; but like a mirror he
reflects in every action and in every word all that he sees and hears
going on around him. We must recognise that in these early days his
words and actions are not an independent growth, with roots in his own
consciousness, but are often only the reflection of the words and
actions of others. How completely speech is imitative is shown by the
readiness with which a child contracts the local accent of his
birthplace. The London parents awake with horror to find their baby an
indubitable Cockney; the speech of the child bred beyond the Tweed
proclaims him a veritable Scot. Again, some people are apt to adopt a
somewhat peremptory tone in addressing little children. Often they do
not trouble to give to their voices that polite or deferential
inflection which they habitually use when speaking to older people.
Listen to a party of nurses in the Park addressing their charges. As
if they knew that their commands have small chance of being obeyed,
they shout them with incisive force. "Come along at once when I tell
you," they say. And the child faithfully reflects it all back, and is
heard ordering his little sister about like a drill sergeant, or
curtly bidding his grandmother change her seat to suit his pleasure.
If we are to have pretty phrases and tones of voice, mothers must see
to it that the child habitually hears no other. Again, mothers will
complain that their child is deaf, or, at any rate, that he has the
bad habit of responding to all remarks addressed to him by saying,
"What?" or, worse still, "Eh?" Often enough the reason that he does so
is not that the child is deaf, nor that he is particularly slow to
understand, but simply that he himself speaks so indistinctly that no
matter what he says to the grown-up people around him, they bend over
him and themselves utter the objectionable word.
We all hate the tell-tale child, and when a boy comes in from his walk
and has much to say of the wicked behaviour of his little sister on
the afternoon's outing, his mother is apt to see in this a most horrid
tendency towards tale-bearing and currying of favour. She does not
realise that day by day, when the children have come in from their
walk, she has asked nurse in their hearing if they have been good
children; and when, as often happens, they have not, the nurse has
duly recounted their shortcomings, with the laudable notion of putting
them to shame, and of emphasising to them the wickedness of their
backsliding--and this son of hers is no hypocrite, but speaks only, as
all children speak, in faithful reproduction of all that he hears.
Those grown-up persons who are in charge of the children must realise
that the child's vocabulary is their vocabulary, not his own. It is
unfortunate, but I think not unavoidable, that so often almost the
earliest words that the infant learns to speak are words of reproof,
or chiding, or repression. The baby scolds himself with gusto,
uttering reproof in the very tone of his elders: "No, no," "Naughty,"
or "Dirty," or "Baby shocked."
Speech, then, is imitative from the first, if we except the early baby
sounds with reduplication of consonants to which in course of time
definite meaning becomes attached, as "Ba-ba," "Ma-ma," "Na-na,"
"Ta-ta," and so forth. Action only becomes imitative at a somewhat
later stage. The first purposive movements of the child's limbs are
carried out in order to evoke tactile sensations. He delights to
stimulate and develop the sense of touch. At first he has no knowledge
of distance, and his reach exceeds his grasp. He will strain to touch
and hold distant objects. Gradually he learns the limitations of
space, and will pick up and hold an object in his hand with precision.
Often he conveys everything to his mouth, not because his teeth are
worrying him, or because he is hungry, as we hear sometimes alleged,
but because his mouth, lips, and tongue are more sensitive, because
more plentifully furnished with the nerves of tactile sensation. By
constant practice the sense of touch and the precision of the movement
of his hands are slowly developed, and not these alone, for the child
in acquiring these powers has developed also the centres in the brain
which control the voluntary movements. When the child can walk he
continues these grasping and touching exercises in a wider sphere. As
the child of fifteen or eighteen months moves about the room, no
object within his reach is passed by. He stretches out his hand to
touch and seize upon everything, and to experience the joy of
imparting motion to it. The impulse to develop tactile sensation and
precision in the movements of his hands compels him with irresistible
force. It is foolish to attempt to repress it. It is foolish, because
it is a necessary phase in his development, and moreover a passing
phase. No doubt it is annoying to his elders while it lasts, but the
only wise course is to try to thwart as little as we can his
legitimate desire to hold and grasp the objects, and even to assist
him in every way possible. But the mother must assist him only by
allowing free play to his attempts. To hand him the object is to
deprive the exercise of most of its value. Incidentally she may teach
him the virtue of putting things back in their proper places, an
accomplishment in which he will soon grow to take a proper pride. If
she attempts continually to turn him from his purpose, reproving him
and snatching things from him, she prolongs the grasping phase beyond
its usual limits. And she does a worse thing at the same time. Lest
the quicker hands of his nurse should intervene to snatch the prize
away before he has grasped it, he too learns to snatch, with a sudden
clumsy movement that overturns, or breaks, or spills. If left to
himself he will soon acquire the dexterity he desires. He may overturn
objects at first, or let them fall, but this he regards as failure,
which he soon overcomes. A child of twenty months, whose development
in this particular way has not been impeded by unwise repression, will
pick out the object on which he has set his heart, play with it,
finger it, and replace it, and he will do it deliberately and
carefully, with a clear desire to avoid mishap. Dr. Montessori, who
has developed into a system the art of teaching young children to
learn precision of movement and to develop the nerve centres which
control movement, tells in her book a story which well illustrates
this point.[1]
[Footnote 1: _The Montessori Method_, pp. 84, 85.]
"The directress of the Casa del Bambini at Milan constructed under one
of the windows a long, narrow shelf, upon which she placed the little
tables containing the metal geometric forms used in the first lesson
in design. But the shelf was too narrow, and it often happened that
the children in selecting the pieces which they wished to use would
allow one of the little tables to fall to the floor, thus upsetting
with great noise all the metal pieces which it held. The directress
intended to have the shelf changed, but the carpenter was slow in
coming, and while waiting for him she discovered that the children had
learned to handle these materials so carefully that in spite of the
narrow and sloping shelf, the little tables no longer fell to the
ground. The children, by carefully directing their movements, had
overcome the defect in this piece of furniture."
By slow degrees the child learns to command his movements. If his
efforts are aided and not thwarted, before he is two years old he will
have become capable of conducting himself correctly, yet with perfect
freedom. The worst result of the continual repression which may be
constantly practised in the mistaken belief that the grasping phase is
a bad habit which persistent opposition will eradicate, is the nervous
unrest and irritation which it produces in the child. A passionate fit
of crying is too often the result of the thwarting of his nature, and
the same process repeated over and over again, day by day, almost hour
by hour, is apt to leave its mark in unsatisfied longing,
irritability, and unrest. Above all, the child requires liberty of
action.
We have here an admirable example of the effect of environment in
developing the child's powers. A caged animal is a creature deprived
of the stimulus of environment, and bereft therefore to a great extent
of the skill which we call instinct, by which it procures its food,
guarantees its safety from attack, constructs its home, cares for its
young, and procreates its species. If, metaphorically speaking, we
encircle the child with a cage, if we constantly intervene to
interpose something between him and the stimulus of his environment,
his characteristic powers are kept in abeyance or retarded, just as
the marvellous instinct of the wild animals becomes less efficient in
captivity.
The grasping phase is but a preliminary to more complex activities.
Just as in schooldays we were taught with much labour to make
pot-hooks and hangers efficiently before we were promoted to real
attempts at writing, so before the child can really perform tasks with
a definite meaning and purpose, he must learn to control the finer
movements of his hands. Once the grasping phase, the stage of
pot-hooks, is successfully past--and the end of the second year in a
well-managed child should see its close--the child sets himself with
enthusiasm to wider tasks. To him washing and dressing, fetching his
shoes and buttoning his gaiters, all the processes of his simple
little life, should be matters of the most enthralling interest, in
which he is eager to take his part and increasingly capable of doing
so. In the Montessori system there is provided an elaborate apparatus,
the didactic material, designed to cultivate tactile sensation and the
perception of sense stimuli. It will generally suffice to advise the
mother to make use of the ordinary apparatus of the nursery. The
imitativeness of the young child is so great that he will repeat in
almost every detail all the actions of his nurse as she carries out
the daily routine. At eighteen months of age, when the electric light
is turned on in his nursery, the child will at once go to the curtains
and make attempts to draw them. At the same age a little girl will
weigh her doll in her own weighing-machine, will take every precaution
that the nurse takes in her own case, and will even stoop down
anxiously to peer at the dial, just as she has seen her mother and
nurse do on the weekly weighing night. But at a very early age
children appreciate the difference between the real and the
make-believe. They desire above all things to do acts of real service.
At the age of two a child should know where every article for the
nursery table is kept. He will fetch the tablecloth and help to put it
in place, spoons and cups and saucers will be carried carefully to the
table, and when the meal is over he will want to help to clear it all
away. All this is to him a great delight, and the good nurse will
encourage it in the children, because she sees that in doing so they
gain quickness and dexterity and poise of body. The first purposive
movements of the child should be welcomed and encouraged. It is
foolish and wrong to repress them, as many nurses do, because the
child in his attempts gets in the way, and no doubt for a time delays
rather than expedites preparations. The child who is made to sit
immobile in his chair while everything is done for him is losing
precious hours of learning and of practice. It is useless, and to my
mind a little distasteful, to substitute for all this wonderful child
activity the artificial symbolism of the kindergarten school in which
children are taught to sing songs or go through certain semi-dramatic
activities which savour too much of a performance acquired by precise
instruction. If such accomplishments are desired, they may be added
to, but they must not replace, the more workaday activities of the
little child. The child whose impulses towards purposive action are
encouraged is generally a happy child, with a mind at rest. When those
impulses are restrained, mental unrest and irritability are apt to
appear, and toys and picture books and kindergarten games will not be
sufficient to restore his natural peace of mind.
_(b)_ THE SUGGESTIBILITY OF THE CHILD
We may pass from considering the imitativeness of the child to study a
second and closely related quality, his suggestibility. His conception
of himself as a separate individual, of his ego, only gradually
emerges. It is profoundly modified by ideas derived from those around
him. Because of his lack of acquired experience, there is in the child
an extreme sensitiveness to impressions from outside. Take, for
example, a matter that is sometimes one of great difficulty, the
child's likes and dislikes for food. Many mothers make complaint that
there are innumerable articles of diet which the child will not take:
that he will not drink milk, or that he will not eat fat, or meat, or
vegetables, or milk puddings. There are people who believe that these
peculiarities of taste correspond with idiosyncrasies of digestion,
and that children instinctively turn from what would do them harm. I
do not believe that there is much truth in this contention. If we
watch an infant after weaning, at the time when his diet is gradually
being enlarged to include more solid food, with new and varied
flavours, we may see his attention arrested by the strange sensations.
With solid or crisp food there may be a good deal of hesitation and
fumbling before he sets himself to masticate and swallow. With the
unaccustomed flavour of gravy or fruit juice there may be seen on his
face a look of hesitation or surprise. In the stolid and placid child
these manifestations are as a rule but little marked, and pleasurable
sensations clearly predominate. With children of more nervous
temperament it is clear that sensations of taste are much more acute.
Even in earliest infancy, children have a way of proclaiming their
nervous inheritance by the repugnance which they show to even trifling
changes in the taste or composition of their food. We see the same
sensitiveness in their behaviour to medicines. The mixture which one
child will swallow without resentment, and almost eagerly, provokes
every expression of disgust from another, or is even vomited at once.
In piloting the child through this phase, during which he starts
nervously at all unaccustomed sensations and flavours, the attitude of
mother and nurse is of supreme importance. It is unwise to attempt
force; it is equally unwise, by excessive coaxing, cajoling, and
entreaty, to concentrate the child's attention on the matter. If
either is tried every meal is apt to become a signal for struggling
and tears. The phase, whether it is short or long continued, must be
accepted as in the natural order of things, and patience will see its
end. The management of this symptom,--refusal of food and an
apparently complete absence of desire for food,--which is almost the
commonest neurosis of childhood, will be dealt with later. Here it is
mentioned because I wish to emphasise that if too much is made of a
passing hesitation over any one article of food, if it becomes the
belief of the mother or nurse that a strong distaste is present, then
if she is not careful her attitude in offering it, because she is
apprehensive of refusal, will exert a powerful suggestion on the
child's mind. Still worse, it may cause words to be used in the
child's hearing referring to this peculiarity of his. By frequent
repetition it becomes fixed in his mind that this is part of his own
individuality. He sees himself--and takes great pleasure in the
thought--as a strange child, who by these peculiarities creates
considerable interest in the minds of the grown-up people around him.
When the suggestion takes root it becomes fixed, and as likely as not
it will persist for his lifetime. It may be habitually said of a child
that, unlike his brothers and sisters, he will never eat bananas, and
thereafter till the day of his death he may feel it almost a physical
impossibility to gulp down a morsel of the offending fruit. So, too,
there are people who can bolt their food with the best of us, who yet
declare themselves incapable of swallowing a pill.
Another example of the force of suggestion, whether unconscious or
openly exercised by speech, is given us in the matter of sleep. Among
adults the act of going to bed serves as a powerful suggestion to
induce sleep. Seldom do we seek rest so tired physically that we drop
off to sleep from the irresistible force of sheer exhaustion. Yet as
soon as the healthy man whose mind is at peace, whose nerves are not
on edge, finds himself in bed, his eyes close almost with the force of
a hypnotic suggestion, and he drops off to sleep. With some of us the
suggestion is only powerful in our own bed, that on which it has acted
on unnumbered nights. We cannot, as we say, sleep in a strange bed. It
is suggestion, not direct will power, that acts. No one can absolutely
will himself to sleep. In insomnia it is the attempt to replace the
unconscious auto-suggestion by a conscious voluntary effort of will
that causes the difficulty. A thousand times in the night we resolve
that now we _will_ sleep. If we could but cease to make these
fruitless efforts, sleep might come of itself and the suggestion or
habit be re-established.
In little children the suggestion of sleep, provoked by being placed
in bed, sometimes acts very irregularly. Often it may succeed for a
week or two, and then some untoward happening breaks the habit, and
night after night, for a long time, sleep is refused. The wakeful
child put to bed, resents the process, and cries and sobs miserably,
to the infinite distress of his mother. It then becomes just as likely
that the child will connect his bed in his mind, not with rest and
sleep, but with sobbing and crying on his part, and mingled entreaties
and scoldings from his nurse or mother. An important part in this
perversion of the suggestion is played by the attitude of the person
who puts the child to bed. Often the nurse is uniformly successful,
while the mother, who is perhaps more distressed by the sobbing of the
child, as consistently fails, because she has been unable to hide her
apprehension from him, and has conveyed to his mind a sense of his own
power.
Just in the same way, grown-up people, filled with anxiety because of
the helplessness of the young child, unable to divest their minds of
the fears of the hundred and one accidents that may befall, or that
within their own experience have befallen, a little child at one time
or another, unconsciously make unwise suggestions which fill his mind
with apprehension and terror. They do not like their children to show
fear of animals. Nor would they if it were not that their own
apprehension that the child may be hurt communicates itself to him.
The child is not of himself afraid to fall, it is they who suffer the
anxiety and show it by treating the fall as a disaster. The child is
not of himself afraid to be left alone in a room. It is they who sap
his confidence in himself, because they do not venture to leave him
out of their sight, from a nameless dread of what may happen. A little
girl cut her finger and ran to her nurse, pleased and interested:
"See," she said, seeing it bleed, "fingers all jammy." Only when the
nurse grasped her with unwise expressions of horror did she break into
cries of fear. A town-bred nurse, who is afraid of cows, will make
every country walk an ordeal of fear for the children.
Every mother must be made to realise the ease with which these
unconscious suggestions act upon the mind of the little child, and
should school herself to be strong to make her child strong, and to
see to it that all this suggestive force is utilised for good and not
for evil.
It is upon this susceptibility to suggestion that a great part of his
early education reposes. No one who is incapable of profiting by this
natural disposition of the child can be successful in her management
of him. Turn where you will in his daily life the influence of this
force of suggestion is clearly apparent. The child does without
questioning that which he is confidently expected to do. Thus he will
eat what is given him, and sleep soundly when he is put to bed if only
the appropriate suggestion and not the contrary is made to him. Again
we have seen that a perversion of suggestion of this sort is a common
source of constipation in early childhood. If the child's attention is
directed towards the difficulty, if he is urged or ordered or appealed
to to perform his part, if failure is looked upon as a serious
misfortune, the bowels may remain obstinately unmoved. In children as
in adults a too great concentration of attention inhibits the action
of the bowels, and constipation, in many persons, is due to the
attempt to substitute will power for the force of habitual suggestion.
No matter what other treatment we adopt, the mother must be careful to
hide from the child that his failure is distressing to her. A cheerful
optimism which teaches him to regard himself as one who is
conspicuously regular in his habits, and who has a reputation in this
respect to live up to is sure to succeed. To talk before him of his
habitual constipation, and to worry over the difficulty, is as surely
to fail. In the same way unwise suggestion can interfere with the
passing of water at regular and suitable intervals. There are children
who constantly desire to pass water on any occasion, which is
conspicuously inappropriate, because their attention has been
concentrated on the sensations in the bladder. Often enough when at
great inconvenience opportunity has been found, the desire has passed
away, and all the trouble has proved needless. It is not too much to
say that every occupation and every action of the day can be made
delightful or hateful to the child, according to the suggestion with
which it is presented and introduced. Dressing and undressing, eating
and drinking, bathing, washing, the putting away of toys, even going
to bed, can be made matters of enthralling interest or delight, or a
subject for tears and opposition, according to the bias which is given
to the child's mind by the words, attitude, and actions of nurses and
mothers.
Here we approach very near to the heart of the subject. Stripped of
all that is not essential we see the problem of the management of
children reduced to the interplay between the adult mind and the mind
of the receptive suggestible child. That which is thought of and
feared for the child, that he rapidly becomes. Placid, comfortable
people who do not worry about their children find their children
sensible and easy to manage. Parents who take a pride in the daring
and naughty pranks of their children unconsciously convey the
suggestion to their minds that such conduct is characteristic of them.
Nervous and apprehensive parents who are distressed when the child
refuses to eat or to sleep, and who worry all day long over possible
sources of danger to him, are forced to watch their child acquire a
reputation for nervousness, which, as always, is passively accepted
and consistently acted up to. Differences in type, determined by
hereditary factors, no doubt, exist and are often strongly marked. Yet
it is not untrue to say that variations in children, dependent upon
heredity, show chiefly in the relative susceptibility or
insusceptibility of the child to the influences of environment and
management. It is no easy task to distinguish between the nervous
child and the child of the nervous mother, between the child who
inherits an unusually sensitive nervous system and the child who is
nervous only because he breathes constantly an atmosphere charged with
doubt and anxiety.
(_c_) THE CHILD'S LOVE OF POWER
Let us study briefly a third quality of the child which, for want of a
better name, I have called after the ruling passion of mankind, his
love of power. Perhaps it would be better to call it his love of being
in the centre of the picture. It is his constant desire to make his
environment revolve around him and to attract all attention to
himself. Somewhat later in life this desire to attract attention, at
all costs, is well seen in the type of girl popularly regarded as
hysterical. The impulse is then a morbid and debased impulse; in the
child it is natural and, within limits, praiseworthy. A girl of this
sort, who feels that she is not likely to attract attention because of
any special gifts of beauty or intellect which she may possess,
becomes conscious that she can always arouse interest by the severity
of her bodily sufferings. The suggestion acts upon her unstable mind,
and forthwith she becomes paralysed, or a cripple, or dumb, presenting
a mimicry or travesty of some bodily ailment with which she is more or
less familiar. "Hysterical" girls will even apply caustic to the skin
in order to produce some strange eruption which, while it sorely
puzzles us doctors, will excite widespread interest and commiseration.
Now little children will seldom carry their desire to attract
attention so far as to work upon the feelings of their parents by
simulating disease. They have not the necessary knowledge to play the
part, and even if they make the attempt, complaining of this or that
symptom which they notice has aroused the interest of their elders,
the simulation is not likely to be so successful as to deceive even a
superficial observer. But within the limits of their own powers,
children are past masters in attracting attention. The little child is
unable to take part in any sustained conversation; most of his
talking, indeed, is done when he is alone, and is addressed to no one
in particular. But he knows well that by a given action he can produce
a given reaction in his mother and nurse. A great part of what is said
to him--too great a part by far--comes under the category of reproof
or repression. He is forbidden to do this or that, coaxed, cajoled,
threatened long before he is old enough to understand the meaning of
the words spoken, although he knows the tone in which they are uttered
and loves to produce it at will. How he enjoys it all! Watch him draw
near the fire, the one place that is forbidden him. He does not mean
to do himself harm. He knows that it is hot and would hurt him, but
for the time being he is out of the picture and he is intent on
producing the expected response, the reproof tone from his mother
which he knows so well. He approaches it warily, often anticipating
his mother's part and vigorously scolding himself. He desires nothing
more than that his mother should repeat the reproof, forbidding him a
dozen times. The mind of all little children tends easily to work in a
groove. It delights in repetition and it evoking not the unexpected
but the expected. If his sport is stopped by his mother losing
patience and removing him bodily from the danger zone, his sense of
impotence finds vent in passionate crying. But if his mother takes no
notice, the sport soon loses its savour. He is conscious that somehow
or other it has fallen flat, and he flits off to other employment.
Mothers will complain that children seem to take a perverse pleasure
in evoking reproof, appeals, entreaties, and exhortations. A small boy
of four who had several times repeated the particular sin to which his
attention had been directed by the frequency of his mother's warnings
and entreaties, finding that on this occasion she had decided to take
no notice, approached her with a troubled face: "Are you not angry?"
he said; "are you not disappointed?" In reality the naughty child is
often only the child who has become master of his mother's or his
nurse's responses, and can produce at will the effect he desires. The
idea that the child possesses a strong will, which can and must be
broken by persistent opposition, is based upon this tendency of the
child. It is an entire misconception of the situation: Strength of
will and fixity of purpose are among the last powers which the human
mind develops. In little children they are conspicuously absent. What
appears to us as a fixed and persistent desire to perform a definite
action in spite of all we can say or do, is often no more than the
desire to produce the familiar tones of reproof, to traverse again the
familiar ground, to attract attention and to find himself again the
centre of the picture. If no one pays any attention and no one
reproves, he soon gives up the attempt. If too much is made of any one
action of the child, a strong impression is made on his mind and he
cannot choose but return to it again and again.
This little drama of the fireplace may teach us a great deal in the
management of children. The wise mother and nurse will find a hundred
devices to catch the child's attention and lure him away from the
danger zone without the incident making any impression on his mind at
all, and will not call attention to it by repeated reproofs or
warnings which will certainly lead him straight back to the spot.
In matters of greater moment the same impulse to oppose the will of
those around him is seen. In considering the point of the child's
susceptibility to suggestion, we have mentioned the refusal of sleep
and the refusal of food. In both it is possible to detect the
influence of this pronounced force of opposition. As the child lies
sobbing or screaming in bed, every new approach to him, every fresh
attempt at pacification, renews the force of his opposition in a
crescendo of sound. But it is in his refusal of food that the child is
apt to find his chief opportunity. Meal-times degenerate into a
struggle. There at least he can show his complete mastery of the
situation. No one can swallow his food for him, and he knows it. He
can clench his teeth and shake his head and obstinately refuse every
morsel offered. He can hold food in his mouth for half an hour at a
time and remain deaf to all the appeals of his helpless nurse. If she
tries force, he quells the attempt by a storm of crying. If she
declines upon entreaty and coaxing, he will not be persuaded. It is
the little scene of the fireplace over again. The attempts at force or
the attempts at persuasion, by making much of it, have concentrated
the attention of the child upon the difficulty, and have taught him
his own power to dominate the situation.
It is right that parents should realise that the disturbing and
irritating element in the child's environment is nearly always
provided by the intrusion of the adult mind and its contact with the
child's. Some supervision and some intrusion, therefore, is of course
absolutely necessary, but the best-regulated nursery is that in which
it is least evident. Something is definitely wrong if a child of two
years will not play for half an hour at a time happily and busily in a
room by himself. It is an even better test if the child will play
amicably by himself with nurse or mother in the room, without the two
parties crossing swords on a single occasion, without reproof or
repression on the one side or undue attempts to attract attention on
the other. If the child is entirely dependent upon the participation
of grown-up persons in his pursuits, then not only do those pursuits
lose much of their educative force, but they become a positive source
of danger because of the constant interplay of personality with
personality. The child who, seated on the ground, will play with his
toys by himself, rises with a brain that is stimulated but not
exhausted. Only very rarely do we find that solitary play, or play
between children, is too exciting. In older children of very quick
intelligence and nervous temperament we occasionally find that the
pace which they themselves set is too exciting or exhausting. I recall
a little boy of seven, an only child of particularly wise and
thoughtful parents, who was brought to me with the complaint that he
exhausted himself utterly both in body and mind by the intense nervous
energy which he threw into his pursuits. For instance, he had been
interested in the maps illustrating the various fronts in the European
War, with which the walls of his father's study were hung, and
although left entirely by himself he had become intensely excited and
exhausted by the eagerness with which he had spent a whole morning,
with a wealth of imaginative force, in drawing a map of the garden of
his house and converting it into the likeness of a war map, filled
with imaginary Army Corps. Such excessive expenditure of nervous force
is unusual even in older children, and as in this case is found
usually only when there is a pronounced nervous inheritance. In little
children in the nursery, solitary play or play between themselves
seldom produces nervous exhaustion. It is quite otherwise when the
child is dependent to a too great extent upon the participation of
adults. It is almost impossible for the mother and nurse not to take
the leading part in the exchange of ideas, and no matter what may be
their good intentions, the pace set is apt to be too great.
Environment, without the intrusion of the adult mind, is best able to
adjust the necessary stimulus and produce development without
exhaustion. Play with grown-up persons, the reading aloud of story
books, the showing of pictures, and so forth, undoubtedly have their
own importance, but they should be confined within strict limits and
to a definite hour in the daily routine. There is sometimes too great
a tendency for parents to make playthings of their little children.
Save at stated times, they must curb their desire to join in their
games, to gather them in their arms, to hold them on their knee, while
they stimulate their minds by a constant succession of new
impressions. With an only child, whose existence is the single
preoccupation of the nurse and mother, and, often enough, of the
father as well, it is difficult to avoid this fault. Yet, if wisdom is
not learnt, the damage to the child may be distressingly serious. He
rapidly grows incapable of supporting life without this excessive
stimulation. Without the constant society and attention of a grown
person, he feels himself lost. He cannot be left alone, and yet cannot
enjoy the society he craves. He grows more and more restless,
dominating the whole situation more and more, constantly plucking at
his nurse's skirts, perversely refusing every new sensation that is
offered him to still his restlessness for a moment. The result of all
this stimulation is mental irritability and exhaustion, which in turn
is often the direct cause of refusal of food, dyspepsia, wakefulness,
and excessive crying.
The devices by which children will attract to themselves the
attention of their elders, and which, if successful, are repeated with
an almost insane persistence, take on the most varied forms. Sometimes
the child persistently makes use of an expression, or asks questions,
which produce a pleasant stir of shocked surprise and renewed reproofs
and expostulations. One little boy shouted the word "stomachs" with
unwearied persistence for many weeks together. A little girl dismayed
her parents and continued in spite of all they could do to prevent her
to ask every one if they were about to pass water.
Disorders of conduct of this sort are not really difficult to control.
Suitable punishment will succeed, provided also that the child is
deprived of the sense of satisfaction which he has in the interest
which his conduct excites. His behaviour is only of importance because
it indicates certain faults in his environment and a certain element
of nervous unrest and overstrain.
The young child demands from his environment that it should give him
two things--security and liberty. He must have security from shocks to
his nervous system. It is true that from the greater shocks the
children of the well-to-do are as a rule carefully guarded. No one
threatens or ill-uses them. They are not terrified by drunken brawls
or scenes of passion. They are not made fearful by the superstitions
of ignorant people. Nevertheless, by the summation of stimuli little
emotions constantly repeated can have effects no less grave upon
their nervous system. From this constantly acting irritation the child
needs security. In the second place, he requires liberty to develop
his own initiative, which should be stimulated and sustained and
directed. Without liberty and without security conduct cannot fail to
become abnormal.
(_d_) THE REASONING POWER OF THE CHILD
Before we proceed to a closer examination of the various symptoms of
nervous unrest in detail, we may very briefly consider the scope and
power of the child's understanding. As a rule I am sure that it is
grossly underestimated. The mental processes of the child are far
ahead of his power of speech. The capacity for understanding speech is
well advanced, and an appeal to reason is often successful while the
child is still powerless to express his own thoughts in words. Because
he cannot so express himself there is a tendency to underestimate the
acuteness of his reasoning, to talk down to him, and to imagine that
he can be imposed upon by any fiction which seems likely to suit the
purpose of the moment. A child of eighteen months is not too young to
be talked to in a quiet, straightforward, sensible way. Only if he is
treated as a reasonable being can we expect his reasoning faculties to
develop. Children dislike intensely the unexplained intervention of
force. If a pair of scissors, left by an oversight lying about, has
been grasped, the first impulse of the mother is to snatch the danger
hurriedly from the child's hands, and her action will generally be
followed by resistance and a storm of weeping. She will do better to
approach him quietly, telling him that scissors hurt babies, and show
him where to place them out of harm's way. Watch a child at play after
his midday meal. He has been out in his perambulator half the morning,
and for the other half has been deep in his midday sleep. Now that
dinner is over he is for a moment master of his time and busily
engaged in some pursuit dear to his heart. At two o'clock inexorable
routine ordains that he must again be placed in the perambulator and
wheeled forth on a fresh expedition. If the nurse does not know her
business she will swoop down upon him, place him on her knee, and
begin to envelop his struggling little body in his outdoor clothes,
scolding his naughtiness as he kicks and screams. If she has a way
with children she will open the cupboard door and call on him to help
find his gaiters and his shoes because it is time for his walk. In a
moment he will leave his toys, forgetting all about them in the joy of
this new activity.
If the reason for things is explained to children they grow quick to
understand quite complicated explanations. A little girl, not yet two,
was playing with her Noah's Ark on the dining-room table with its
polished surface. The mother interposed a cloth, explaining that the
animals would scratch the table if the cloth were not there. Within a
few minutes the child twice lifted the cloth, peering under it and
saying, "Not scratch table." Yet how often do we find
facetiously-minded persons confound their reasoning and confuse their
judgment by foolish speeches and cock-and-bull tales, which, just
because of their foolishness, seem to them well adapted to the infant
intelligence.
An attempt to deceive the child is almost always wrong, and because of
our tendency to underestimate the child's intelligence it generally
fails. If a little girl has a sore throat, and the doctor comes to see
her, she knows quite well that she is the prospective patient. It is
useless for the mother to begin proceedings by trying to convince her
that this is not so--that mother has a sore throat too. Such a plan
only arouses apprehension, because the child scents danger in the
artifice.
Closely connected with the reasoning powers of the child is the
difficult question of the growth of his appreciation of right and
wrong, or, to put it in another way, the growth of obedience or
disobedience. Sooner or later the child must learn to obey; on that
there can be no two opinions. Nevertheless, I think there can be no
doubt that far more harm is done by an over-emphasis of authority than
by its neglect. If the nurse or mother is of strong character, and the
authority is exercised persistently and remorselessly, so that the
whole life of the child is dominated, much as the recruit's existence
in the barrack yard is dominated by the drill sergeant, his
independence of nature is crushed. He is certain to become a
colourless and uninteresting child; he runs a grave risk of growing
sly, broken-spirited, and a currier of favour. If a child is
ruthlessly punished for disobedience from his earliest years, there
is, it need hardly be said, a grave risk that he will learn to lie to
save his skin. I have seen a few such cases of what I may call the
remorseless exercise of authority, and the result has not been
pleasing. Fortunately, perhaps, not many women have the heart to adopt
this attitude to the waywardness of little children--a waywardness to
which their whole nature compels them by their pressing need to
cultivate tactile sensations, to experiment, and to explore.
Therefore, much more commonly, the authority is exercised
intermittently and capriciously, with the result that the child's
judgment is clouded and confused. Conduct which is received
indulgently or even encouraged at one moment is sternly reprimanded at
another. Every one who has the management of little children must
above all see to it, whatever the degree of stringency in discipline
which they decide to adopt, that their attitude is always consistent.
The less that is forbidden the better, but when the line is drawn it
must be adhered to. If once the child learns that the force which
restrains him can be made to yield to his own efforts, the future is
black indeed. From that day he sets himself to strike down authority
with a success which encourages him to further efforts. I have known a
child of five years terrorise his mother and get his own way by the
threat, "I will go into one of my furies."
The difficulty of successfully enforcing authority, and of carrying
off the victory if that authority is disputed, should make mothers
wary of drawing too tight a rein. The conflict between parent and
child must always be distressing and must always be prejudicial to the
child, whatever its outcome, whether it brings to him victory or
defeat. He learns from it either an undue sense of power or an undue
sense of helplessness, and the knowledge of neither is to his benefit.
Although frequently worsted in the conflict, nurses will often return
to the attack again and again and hour after hour, restraining,
reproving, forbidding, and even threatening. Nor do they see that they
are really goading the children into disobedience by their misdirected
efforts at enforcing discipline. Reproof, like punishment, loses all
its effect when it is too often repeated, and the child soon takes it
for granted that all he does is wrong, and that grown-up people exist
only to thwart his will, to misunderstand, to reprove, or even to
punish.
In the nursery the word "naughty" is far too frequently heard. It is
naughty to do this, it is naughty to do that. There is no gradation in
the condemnation, and the child loses all sense of the meaning of the
word. He himself proclaims himself naughty almost with satisfaction:
his doll is naughty, the dog is naughty, his nurse and mother are
naughty, and so forth. In reality the little child is peculiarly
sensitive to blame, if he is not reproof-hardened. It is hardly
necessary to use words of blame at all. If he is asked kindly and
quietly to desist, much as we would address a grown-up person, and
does not, he can be made to feel that his conduct is unpopular by
keeping aloof from him a little, by disregarding him for the time
being, and by indicating to him that he is a troublesome little person
with whom we cannot be bothered.
Any one who has had much to do with children will realise that, if
wrongly handled, they are apt to take a positive delight in doing what
they conceive to be wrong. There is clearly a delightful element of
excitement in the process of being naughty, of daring and of braving
the wrath to come, with which they are so familiar and for which they
care nothing at all. But the perverseness of which we are now speaking
has a different origin. It arises only when children are reproved,
appealed to, and expostulated with too often and too constantly.
Negativism is a symptom which is common enough in certain mental
disorders. The unhappy patient always does the opposite of what is
desired or expected of him. If he be asked to stand up he will
endeavour to remain seated, or if asked to sit he will attempt to rise
to his feet. Like many other symptoms of nervous disturbance which we
shall study later, this negativistic spirit is often displayed to
perfection by little children when the environment is at fault and
when grown-up people have too freely exercised authority. A mother,
anxious to induce her little son to come to the doctor, and knowing
well that her call to him to enter the room, as he stands hesitating
at the door, will at once determine his retreat to the nursery, has
been heard to say, "Run away, darling, we don't want _you_ here," with
the expected result that the docile child immediately comes forward.
To the doctor, that such a device should be practised almost as a
matter of course and that its success should be so confidently
anticipated, should give food for thought. It may shed light on much
that is to follow later in the interview.
The question of punishment, like that of reproof, is beset with
difficulty. There are fortunately nowadays few educated mothers who
are so foolish as to threaten punishment which they obviously do not
intend to administer and which the child knows they will not
administer. It is clear that punishment must be rare or else the child
will grow habituated to it, and with little children we cannot be
brutal or push punishment to the point of extreme physical pain. It is
more difficult to say, as one is tempted to say, that all punishment
is futile and should be discarded. Probably mothers are like
schoolmasters in that no two schoolmasters and no two mothers obtain
their effects in exactly the same way or by precisely the same means.
Nor do all children accept reproof or submit to punishment in the same
way. Some make light of it and take a pleasure in defying authority.
Others are unduly cast down by the slightest adverse criticism. It is
generally true that extreme sensitiveness to reproof is a sign of a
certain elevation of character. Always we must remember that for a
mother to inflict punishment, whether by causing physical pain or
mental suffering, is to take on her shoulders a certain
responsibility. It is a serious matter if she has misapprehended the
child's act--if the sin was not really a sin, but only some perverted
action, the intention of which was not sinful, but designed for good
in the faulty reasoning of the child. A little girl, in bed with a
feverish cold, was found shivering, with her night-dress wet and
muddy. It was an understanding mother who found that her little
brother, having heard somehow that ice was good for fevered heads, had
brought in several handfuls of snow from the garden, not of the
cleanest, and had offered them to aid his sister's recovery. It need
hardly be said that punishment should always be deliberate. The hasty
slap is nothing else than the motor discharge provoked by the
irritability of the educator, and the child, who is a good observer on
such points, discerns the truth and measures the frailty of his judge.
The frequent repetition of words of reproof and acts of punishment has
a further disadvantage that the older children are quick to practise
both upon their younger brothers and sisters. There is something wrong
in the nursery where the lives of the little ones are made a burden to
them by the constant repression of the older children. But although
set and artificial punishments are as a general rule to be used but
sparingly, the mother can see to it that the child learns by
experience that a foolish or careless act brings its own punishment.
If, for example, a child breaks his toy, or destroys its mechanism,
she need not be so quick in mending it that he does not learn the
obvious lesson. If the baby throws his doll from the perambulator, in
sheer joy at the experience of imparting motion to it, she need not
prevent him from learning the lesson that this involves also some
temporary separation from it. Throughout all his life he is to learn
that he cannot eat his cake and have it too. The use of rewards is
also beset with difficulties. Their coming must be unexpected and
occasional. They must never degenerate into bribes, to be bargained
for upon condition of good behaviour. Rewards which take the form of
special privileges are best.
The æsthetic sense of children develops very early. From the very
beginning of the second year they take delight in new clothes, and in
personal adornment of all sorts. They show evident pleasure if the
nursery acquires a new picture or a new wall-paper. They have
pronounced favourites in colours. Even tiny children show dislike of
dirt and all unpleasant things. Personal cleanliness should be clearly
desired by all children. A sense of what is pleasant and what is
unpleasant should be encouraged. Any delay in its appearance is apt to
imply a backwardness in development of mind or of body. Only children
who are tired out by physical illness or by nervous exhaustion will
lie without protest in a dirty condition.
Affection and the attempt to express affection appear clearly marked
even in the first year. Too much kissing and too much being kissed is
apt to spoil the spontaneity of the child's caresses. We must not,
however, expect to find any trace in the young child of such a complex
quality as unselfishness or self-abnegation. The child's conception of
his own self has but just emerged. It is his single impulse to develop
his own experience and his own powers, and his attitude for many
years is summed up in the phrase: "Me do it." We must not expect him
to resign his toys to the little visitor, or the little visitor to
cease from his efforts to obtain them. In all our dealings with
children we must know what we may legitimately expect from them, and
judge them by their own standards, not by those of adult life. We
cannot expect self-sacrifice in a child, and, after all, when we come
to think of it, obedience is but another name for self-sacrifice. If
the tiny child could possibly obey all the behests that are heaped
upon him in the course of a day by many a nurse and mother, he would
truly be living a life of complete self-abnegation. Surely it is
because the virtue of obedience, the virtue that is proclaimed
proverbially the child's own, is so impossible of attainment that it
is become the subject of so much emphasis. As Madame Montessori has
put it: "We ask for obedience and the child in turn asks for the
moon." Only when we have developed the child's reasoning powers, by
treating him as a rational being, can we expect him deliberately to
defer his wishes to ours, because he has learned that our requests are
generally reasonable.