Mankind has been continuous upon earth for millions of years; children
have been equally continuous. Children constitute a permanent class,
the largest class in the population. There are men, there are women,
there are children, and the children outnumber the adults by three to
two.
In the order of nature, all things give way before the laws and
processes of reproduction; the individual is sacrificed to the race.
Natural forces, working through the unconscious submission of the
animal, tend steadily to improve a species through its young.
Social forces, working through our conscious system of education, tend
to improve our species through its young. Humanity is developed age
after age through a gradual improvement in its children; and since we
have seen this and learned somewhat to assist nature by art, humanity
develops more quickly and smoothly.
Every generation brings us more close to recognition of this great
basic law, finds us more willing to follow nature's principle and bend
all our energies to the best development of the child. We early learned
to multiply our power and wisdom by transmission through speech, and,
applying that process to the child, we taught him what we knew, saving
to humanity millennial periods of evolution by this conscious short-cut
through education.
Nature's way of teaching is a very crude one--mere wholesale capital
punishment. She kills off the erring without explanation. They die
without knowing what for, and the survivors don't know, either. We, by
education, markedly assist nature, transmitting quick knowledge from
mouth to mouth, as well as slow tendency from generation to generation.
More and more we learn to collect race-improvement and transmit it to
the child, the most swift and easy method of social progress. To-day,
more than ever before, are our best minds giving attention to this
vital problem--how to make better people. How to make better bodies and
better minds, better tendencies, better habits, better ideas--this is
the study of the modern educator.
Slowly we have learned that the best methods of education are more in
modifying influence than in transmitted facts; that, as the proverb
puts it, "example is better than precept." The modifying influences of
social environment have deeper and surer effect on the human race than
any others, and that effect is strongest on the young. Therefore, we
attach great importance to what we call the "bringing up" of children,
and we are right. The education of the little child, through the
influences of its early environment, is the most important process of
human life.
Whatever progress we make in art and science, in manufacture and
commerce, is of no permanent importance unless it modifies humanity for
the better. That a race of apes should live by agriculture,
manufacture, and commerce is inconceivable. They would cease to be apes
by so living; but, _if they could_, those processes would be of no
value, the product being only apes. We are here to grow, to become a
higher and better kind of people. Every process of life is valuable in
proportion to its contributing to our improvement, and the process that
most contributes to our improvement is the most important of human
life. That process is the education of the child, and that education
includes all the influences which reach him, the active efforts of
parent and teacher, the unconscious influence of all associates, and
the passive effect of the physical environment.
All these forces, during the most impressionable years of childhood,
and most of them during the whole period, are centered in the home. The
home is by all means the most active factor in the education of the
child. This we know well. This we believe devoutly. This we accept
without reservation or inquiry, seeing the power of home influences,
and never presuming to question their merit.
In our general contented home-worship we seem to think that a home--any
home--is in itself competent to do all that is necessary for the right
rearing of children. Or, if we discriminate at all, if we dare admit by
referring to "a good home" that there are bad ones--we then hold all
the more firmly that the usual type of "a good home" is the perfect
environment for a child. If this dogma is questioned, our only
alternative is to contrast the state of the child without a home to
that of the child with one. The orphan, the foundling, the neglected
child of the street is contrasted with the well-fed and comfortably
clothed darling of the household, and we relapse into our profound
conviction that the home is all right.
Again the reader is asked to put screws on the feelings and use the
reason for a little while. Let us examine both the child and the home,
with new eyes, seeing eyes, and consider if there is no room for
improvement. And first, to soothe the ruffled spirit and quiet alarm,
let it be here stated in good set terms that the author does NOT
advocate "separating the child from the mother," or depriving it of the
home. Mother and child can never be "separated" in any such sense as
these unreasoning terrors suggest. The child has as much right to the
home as anyone--_more_, for it was originated for his good. The
point raised is, whether the home, as it now is, is the best and only
environment for children, and, further, whether the home as an
environment for children cannot be improved.
What is a child? The young of the human species. First, a young animal,
whose physical life must be conserved and brought to full development.
Then, a young human, whose psychical life, _the_ human life, must
be similarly cared for.
How does the home stand as regards either branch of development? In
what way is it specifically prepared for the use, enjoyment, and
benefit of a child? First, as to the structure of the thing, the house.
We build houses for ourselves, modifying them somewhat according to
climate, position, and so on. How do we modify them for children? What
is there in the make-up of any ordinary house designed to please,
instruct, educate, and generally benefit a child? In so far as he
shares our own physical needs for shelter and convenience he is
benefited; but, _as a child_, with his own specific necessities,
desires, and limitations, what has the architect planned for the
child--what have the mason and carpenter built for the child? Is there
anything in the size and proportion, the material, the internal
arrangement, the finish and decoration, to hint of the existence of
children on earth?
The most that we find, in the most favoured houses, is "a sunny
nursery." In one home of a thousand we find one room out of a dozen
planned for children. What sort of an allowance is this for the largest
class of citizens? Suppose our homes had, among the more expensive
ones, one room for the adult family to flock into, and all the rest was
built and arranged for children! We should think ourselves somewhat
neglected in such an arrangement. But we are not as numerous as our
children, nor as important; and, in any case, the home _belongs_
to the child; he is the cause of its being; it is for him,
hypothetically, that we marry and start a home.
What, then, is the explanation of this lack of special provision for
the real founder of the home? This utter unsuitability of the house to
the child, and the child to the house, finds its crowning expression in
our cities, where house-owners refuse to let their houses to families
with children! What are houses for? What are homes for? For children,
first, last, and always! How, then, have we come to this vanishing
point of absurdity? What paradoxical gulf stretches between these
houses where "no children need apply" and the rest of the houses.
_There is no visible difference in their plans and construction._
No houses are built for children; and these particular landlords simply
accent the fact, and try to limit the use of the house to the persons
for whom it was intended--the adults.
What is there in the presence of children in a house to alarm the
owner? "They are so destructive," he will tell you; "they are
mischievous, they are noisy. Other tenants object to them. They injure
the house when old enough to run about, and squall objectionably when
babies." All this is true enough. Most babies are a source of distress
to their immediate neighbours because of their painful wailing, and
most little children continue to cause distress by their noise in play
and shrieks under punishment. Is all this outcry necessary? Must the
poor baby suffer by night and day; must the small child bang and yell,
and must it be punished so frequently? Why is the process of getting
acclimated to the world so difficult and agonising? Is there really no
way that the experience of all the ages may be turned to account to
facilitate the first years of a child's life?
Our behaviour to the child rests on several assumptions which are, at
least, not proven. We assume that he has to be sick. We assume that he
has to be naughty. We assume that life is hard and unpleasant, anyway,
and that, the sooner he learns this and gets broken into it, the
better. There is no more reason why a child should be sick than a calf
or colt. Infancy is tender, and needs care, but it is not a disease.
The Egyptian mother loves her baby, no doubt, though it goes blind
through her ignorance and neglect--she knows nothing of ophthalmia, and
lets the flies crawl over its helpless face, even while she loves it.
We scorn and pity her ignorance, but we accept the colic, disorders of
teething, and all the train of "preventable diseases" which kill off
our babies, precisely as she accepts ophthalmia.
We have not learned yet how to make a baby the happy, contented,
smoothly developing little animal that he should be. Some of us do
better than others, but the knowledge of one is no gain to the rest,
being confined to one family. Slowly the wider human care, the larger
love, the broader knowledge, of doctor, nurse, and teacher are
penetrating the innermost fortress of the home, and teaching the mother
how to care for the child. The home did not teach her, and never would.
In the untouched homes of ancient Eastern races, countless generations
of mothers transmit the same traditional mistakes, love in the same
blind way, and weep the same loss as unprofitably as they did ten
thousand years ago.
In the homes of civilised races, where the light of social progress is
most fully felt, we see the most improvement; but even here the
pressure of growing knowledge is still combated by the jealous
arrogance of the untaught mother, and the measureless inertia of the
home.
In plain fact, what does the average home offer to the newcomer, the
utterly defenceless baby, the all-important Coming Generation? See
physical conditions first. To what sort of world is the new soul
introduced? To a place built and furnished for several mixed and
conflicting industries; not to a place planned for babies--aired,
lighted, heated, coloured, and kept quiet to suit the young brain and
body; but a building meant for a number of grown people to cook in,
sweep and dust in, wash and iron in, cut and sew in, eat and wash
dishes in, see their friends in, dress, undress, and sleep in; and
incidentally, in the cracks and crevices of all these varied goings on,
to "bring up" children in.
In that very small percentage of families where a nursery is arranged
for children, and a nurse and a nursery-governess do deputy service for
the always alleged "mother's care," we find some provision made for
children; but of what sort? This deputy is inferior to the mother, save
in a certain rule-of-thumb experience which enables her to "manage
children." Her knowledge of infant hygiene is not much greater, nor of
infant psychology. Look, for instance, at the babies of our richer
classes, as we see them continually in the streets and parks. Our only
alternative from the home is the street, we having as yet no place for
our babies. If near a park so much the better, but in general the
sidewalk must serve, for rich or poor.
As one immediate physical condition, examine the dress of these babies
and young children; this among parents of wealth, and, presumably,
intelligence. See the baby in the perambulator so rolled and bedded in,
so tucked and strapped, that he cannot move anything but perhaps a
stiffly projecting arm. Think of an adult cocooned in this manner,
unable to roll, stir, turn, in any way relieve the pressure or change
the attitude. And, when you have considered the sensations of a tough
and patient adult frame, think further of those of a soft, tender,
active, and impatient baby body.
The dress of a baby or little child bears no relation to his immediate
comfort or to the needs of his incessant growth. Among our wisest
parents there is to-day a new custom, happily increasing, of barefoot
freedom, of dirt-proof overalls, of a chance for beautiful, unconscious
growth; but this does not reach the vast majority of suffering little
ones. It does not spread because of the seclusion and irresponsible
dominance of the separate home; and further--because of the low-grade
intelligence of the home-bound mother.
She whose condition of arrested development makes her unquestioningly
submit to the distortion, constriction, weight, and profusion of
fashion in clothing for her own body, is not likely to show much sense
in dressing a child. Beautiful fabrics, rich textures, expensive
adornments, she heaps upon it. She wishes it to look pretty, according
to her barbaric taste; and she disfigures the grave, sweet beauty of a
baby face, the lovely moving curves of the little body, with heavy
masses of stiff cloth, starched frippery, and huge, nodding, gaily
decorated hats that would please an Ashantee warrior.
If some cartoonist would give us a copy of the Sistine Mother and Child
in the costume of our mothers and children, showing those immortal
cherub faces blinking obliquely from under flopping hat brims and rich
plumes, perhaps we might in sudden shocked perception see with what
coarse irreverence we disfigure our blessed little ones.
The child does not find in the home any assurance of health, beauty, or
free growth. He, and especially she, must wear the dainty garments on
which our misguided mother love so wastefully lavishes itself; and must
then be restricted in all natural exercise lest they be torn or soiled.
To dress a little child so that he may be perfectly comfortable, and
grow in absolute freedom, has not occurred to the home-bound mother.
Neither has she learned how to feed it. If the home is the best place
for children, if the home is the best place for the preparation of
food, would it not seem as if in all these long, long years we might
have evolved some system of feeding little children so as to keep them
at least alive--to say nothing of their being healthy?
The animal mother, guided by her unspoiled instinct, does manage to
feed her young, and to teach it how to feed itself. The human mother,
long since cut off from that poor primitive guidance, and proudly
refusing to put knowledge in its place, feeds the baby in accordance
with her revered domestic traditions, and calls in the doctor to remedy
her mistakes. One man, in Buffalo, has recently saved fifteen hundred
babies in a year, lowering the annual death rate by that amount, by
public distribution of directions for preparing milk. He was not a
mother. He was not shut up in a home. He studied and he taught in the
light of public progress, in a growing world; and succeeded in
filtering some of this saving knowledge into the darkness of fifteen
hundred homes.
The average child is not fed properly; and there is nothing in the home
to teach the mother how. She must learn outside, but she is not willing
to. She still believes, and her husband with her, in the infallible
power of "a mother's love" and "a mother's care"; and our babies are
buried by thousands and thousands without our learning anything by the
continual sacrifice. This is owing to the isolation of the home. If
there were any general knowledge, general custom, association,
comparison; if mothers considered their enormous responsibility _as a
class_, instead of merely as individuals, this could not be.
Knowledge and experience have to be gathered by wide and prolonged
study; they do not come by an infinite repetition of the same private
experiments.
We have to-day the first stirring of this great multitude of separately
concealed experimenters toward that association and exchange of view,
that carefully recorded observation, that reasonable study, which are
necessary for any human advance. Our mothers are beginning to come out
of their isolation into normal human contact; to take that first step
toward wisdom--the acknowledgment of ignorance; and to study what
little is known of this new science, Child-culture.
But it is only a beginning, very scant and small, and ridiculed
unmercifully by the great slow dead-weight of the majority. The
position of the satirist of modern motherhood is a safe and easy one.
To ally one's self with the great mass of present humanity, and the far
greater mass of the past, of all our hoary and revered traditions, and
to direct this combined weight against the first movement of a new
idea--this is an old game. Humanity has thus resisted every step of its
own progress; but, though it makes that progress difficult and slow, it
cannot wholly prevent it.
If the home and the home-bound mother do not ensure right food or
clothing for the child, what do they offer in safety, and in the
increasing educational influence which early environment must have? As
to safety--the shelter of the home--we have already seen that even to
the adult the home offers no protection from the main dangers of our
time: disease, crime, and fire or other accident. The child not only
shares these common dangers, but is more exposed to them, owing to more
absolute confinement to the home and greater susceptibility. Whatever
we suffer from sewer-gas, carbonic dioxide, or microbes and bacteria,
the child suffers more.
He breathes the dust of our carpets, and eats it if we do not watch
him. "I can't take my eyes off that child one minute," cries the
admiring mamma, "or he'll be sure to put something in his mouth!" That
a perfectly clean place might be prepared for a creeping baby, where
there was nothing whatever he could put in his mouth, has never
occurred to her. The child shares and more than shares every danger of
the home, and furthermore suffers an endless list of accidents peculiar
to his limitations. Even our dull nerves are roused to some sort of
response by the terrible frequency of accidents to little children.
I have here a number, taken from one newspaper in one city during one
year; not exhaustive daily scrutiny either; merely a casual collection:
"Mother and Baby Both Badly Burned." A three-year-old baby this--a
match, a little night-dress flaming, struggle, torture, death! "Choked
in Mother's Arms" is the next one; the divine instinct of Maternity
giving a two-year-old child half a filbert to eat. It was remarked in
the item that the "desolate couple" had lost two other little ones
within two months. It did not state whether the two others were
accidentally murdered by a mother's care.
"Child's Game Proved Fatal" is the next. Three-years-old twins were
these; "playing fire engine in the parlour while their mother prepared
the midday meal."
One climbed on the table and lit a newspaper at a gas jet, and set fire
to the other. It is then related "Both children cried out, but their
mother, thinking they were only playing, did not hasten to find what
was the matter." "The child died at 3 P.M." is the conclusion.
"Accidentally Killed His Baby" follows. The fond father, holding his
two-year-old son on his knee, shot and killed him with a revolver
"which he believed to be empty."
"Escaping Gas Kills Baby"--"Boy Has Cent in His Throat"--"Insane
Mother's Crime"--"Drowns her Eight-year-old Daughter"--and here a
doctor says, "It would be an excellent idea for every family to have a
little book giving briefly prompt antidotes for various poisons.
Physicians know that there are scores of cases of accidental poisoning
never heard of outside the family concerned. I've had several cases of
poisoning by an accidental dose of chloroform and aconite liniment, and
one woman gave her child muriatic acid that was kept for cleaning the
marbles."
Another "Mother and Child Burned"--"Child Scratched by a 60-foot
Fall"--(this one was saved by striking several clothes-lines after she
fell out of the window)--"Kitten was Life Preserver"--another fall out
of a window, but the child was holding a kitten, and her head struck on
it--so only the kitten was smashed.
"A Governor's Child badly Hurt"--"will probably prove fatal," this was
a two-story drop over a staircase; and shows that it is not only in the
homes of the poor that these things happen. Another "Baby Burned"
follows--this poor little one was left strapped into its carriage, and
set fire to by an enterprising little brother.
"Tiny Singer Fell Dead" describes a five-year-old boy as singing a
selection from "Cavalleria Rusticana" as a means of entertaining a
party of young friends--and burst a blood-vessel in the brain. Then
there is a story of a grisly murder in which a tiny child testifies as
to seeing her father kill her mother; the child was not hurt--physically.
And then a bit of negative evidence quite striking in its way,
describing "The Mother of Twenty-five Children" and incidentally
stating "of these only three sons and four daughters are now living."
Seven out of twenty-five does not seem a large proportion to survive
the perils of the home.
These are a few, a very few, instances of extreme injury and death.
They are as nothing to the wide-spread similar facts we do not hear of;
and as less than nothing to the list of minor accidents to which little
children are constantly exposed in the shelter of the home. We bar our
windows and gate our stairs in some cases; but our principal reliance
is on an unending watchfulness and a system of rigid discipline.
"Children need constant care!" we maintain; and "A child must be taught
to mind instantly, for its own protection." A child is not a
self-acting poison or explosive. If he were in an absolutely safe place
he might be free for long, bright, blessed hours from the glaring
Argus-eyed watchfulness which is so intense an irritant. Convicts under
sentence of death are in their last hours kept under surveillance like
this, lest they take their own lives. Partly lest the child injure
himself among the many dangers of the home, and partly lest he injure
its frail and costly contents, he grows up under "constant watching."
If this is remitted, he "gets into mischief" very promptly. "Mischief"
is our broad term for the natural interaction of a child and a home.
The inquiry of the young mind, and the activity of the young body,
finding no proper provision made for them, inevitably fall foul of our
complicated utensils, furniture, and decorations, and what should be a
normal exercise becomes "mischief."
Our chapter of accidents here leads us to the great underlying field of
education. Say that the child lives to grow up, during these wholly
home-bound years; in spite of wrong clothing, wrong feeding, and the
many perils we fatuously call "incident to babyhood" (when they are
only incident to our lack of proper provision for babyhood). If he
battles through his infancy and early childhood successfully, what has
he gained from his early environment in education? What are the main
facts of life, as impressed upon every growing child by his home
surroundings?
The principal fact is eating. This he learns perforce by seeing his
mother spending half her time on that one business; by seeing so much
house-space given to it; by the constant arrival of food supplies,
meat, groceries, milk, ice, and the rest; and excursions to get them.
The instincts of early savagery, which every child has to grow through,
are heavily reinforced by the engrossing food-processes of the home.