DIRECTED ACTIVITY
Probably all parents find themselves at some time thinking that the
real, fundamental problem of training their children lies in dealing
with their superabundant energy. "He is such an active child!" mothers
complain. Were he otherwise a physician might properly be consulted. But
the child's activity does seriously interfere with parental peace. It
takes us all a long time to learn that we are not, after all, in our
homes in order to enjoy peaceful rest, but in order to train children
into fulness of life. That does not mean that the home should be without
quiet and rest, but that we must not hope to repress the energy of
childhood. One might as well hope to plug up a spring in the hillside.
Our work is to direct that activity into glad, useful service.
§ 1. VALUE OF ACTIVITY
The things we do not only indicate character, they determine it. Our
thoughts have value and power as they get into action. To bend our
energies toward an ideal is to make it more real, to make it a part of
ourselves. Children learn by doing--learn not only that which they are
doing but life itself.
It may be doubted whether a child ever grew who did not plead to have a
share in the work he saw going on about him. That desire to help is part
of that fundamental virtue of loyalty of which we have spoken above; it
is his desire to be true to the tendency of the home, to give himself to
the realization of its purposes. Of course he does not think this out at
all. But this desire on the part of the child to have a hand in the
day's work is the parent's fine opportunity for a most valuable and
influential form of character direction.
One of the tests of a worthy character is whether the life is
contributory or parasitic, whether one carries his load, does his work,
makes his contribution, or simply waits on the world for what he can
get. A religious interpretation of and attitude toward life is
essentially that of self-giving in service. "My Father worketh hitherto
and I work." "I must be about my Father's business." How noticeable is
the child's interest in the vivid word-picture of One who "went about
doing good"!
§ 2. THE BLESSING OF LABOR
The home is the first place for life's habituation to service. The child
is greatly to be pitied who has no duties, no share in the work. Where
the hands are unsoiled the heart is the easier sullied. It is the height
of mistaken kindness, one of the common errors of an unthinking,
superficial affection, to protect our children from work. This is a
world of the moral order and of the glory of work.
When the child is very small it must learn this by having committed to
it very simple duties. As soon as it is able to handle things it may
learn to do that which is most helpful with those things, to care for
its toys, to put them away neatly. A child can learn while very young to
take care of its spoon, of certain clothes, of chair, and pencil and
paper. True, it is much easier to "pick up" after the child; but to do
so is to yield to our own sloth. The more tedious way is the one we must
follow if we would train the child.
Besides the care of his possessions the child will gladly take a share
in the general work of the home. Let some daily duty be assigned to each
one; such simple responsibilities as picking up all papers and magazines
and seeing that they are properly stacked or disposed of may be given to
one; another may sweep the stairs every day with a whisk broom (in one
instance a boy of eight did this daily); another may be "librarian,"
caring for all books; each one, after eight years of age, should make
her own bed; each one should be entirely responsible for his own table
in his room. Many homes permit of many other "chores," such as keeping
up the supply of small kindling, caring for a pet or even a larger
animal, keeping a little personal garden or vegetable plot. Under those
normal conditions of living, which some day we may reach, where each
family, or all families, have trees and flowers and ample space, the
opportunities are increased for joyous child activities which
consciously contribute to social well-being as a whole.
§ 3. RELIGION IN ACTION
Perhaps some will say, this is not religious education, it is everyday
training. Yes, it is "everyday training," but it is the training of a
religious person with the religious purpose of habituating the child to
give his life in service to his world. That is precisely what we
need--_religion in everyday action_. The atmosphere and habitual
attitude and conversation of the family must be depended on to give a
really religious meaning to these everyday acts, to make them as
religious as going to church, perhaps more so, and so to make them a
training for the life that is religious, not in word only, but in deed
and in truth.
Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether
directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and worship, must
pass over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It
must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is
that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet
that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act has religious
significance to us, if we form the habit of really worshiping God with
our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We
cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to
the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or
spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious
significance.
At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a
really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home
is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick
neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing
the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the
life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are
acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary.
The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the
willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it
becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the
flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a
share in all our ministries.[12]
The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in
forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social
activities for students to carry out.[13] The parents ought to know what
is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to
co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of
service suggested for the children, these activities lose all
perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a
normal part of life.
Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we
were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we
were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a
sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our
thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for,
and that joy will be their strength.
§ 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE
The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own
activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may
acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the
chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life.
Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or ride in private
cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted
life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have
without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy
remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he
is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert
him from the pauper habit.
The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of
passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to
shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The
religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the
days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and
finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men.
Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless
we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the
imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in
heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.
If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of
the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see
itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and
helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people
the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in
self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in
relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial,
and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a
child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere
is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.
The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of
the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping
home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than
the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the
ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship
in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or
week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of
envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home.
Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.
It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power
of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective
method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole
social duty unselfishly.
§ 5. FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING
The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men
as brothers and to cause the conditions of the divine family to be
realized on earth. If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to
bring men into the family of God, that the aim of all religious endeavor
is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that
family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the
human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.
The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the
family. We all go out into life through widening circles, first the
mother's arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state,
the nation, the world-life. Each circle prepares for the next. The
family is the child's social order; its life is his training for the
larger life of nation and human brotherhood.
Just how men and women will live in society is determined principally by
the bent of their characters in the social order of the family. Their
attitude to the world follows the attitude of the family, especially of
the parents. They interpret the larger world by the lesser. The home is
the great school of citizenship and social living.
All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the
purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its
cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and
motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the
coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will
steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations
through brotherhood and fatherhood. Its business is not to get children
ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly. Its aim
is not alone children who will not tear down the parents' reputation,
but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all
lives.
The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to
social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things:
a spirit and passion in the family for social justice and order, and the
direction of the activities of the family toward training in social
usefulness.
Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit. True lovers
of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give
their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more
abundant life, come out of the families where the passion of human love
burns high. The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any
deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice
of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to
make the social highwayman, the oppressor. From such a family comes he
who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws
lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who
hates his brother man--unless that brother has more than he has; the foe
of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.
And goodness is as contagious as badness. Children catch the spirit of
social love and idealism in the family. Where men and women are deeply
concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for
babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the
spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives;
where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where
habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all
worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction,
habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that
binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them
think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a
better world, and to bring God's great family closer together here.
I. References for Study
G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, pp. 142-50. Revell,
$1.35.
W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_, pp. 85-102. Pilgrim Press,
$1.00.
G. Johnson, _Education by Plays and Games_, Part I. Ginn & Co.,
$0.90.
II. Further Reading
E.D. Angell, _Play_. Little, Brown & Co., $1.50.
Fisher, Gulick, _et al._, "Ethical Significance of Play,"
_Materials for Religious Education_, pp. 197-215. Religious
Education Association, $0.50.
Publications of the Play Ground Association.
III. Methods and Materials
PLAY
Forbush, _Manual of Play_. Jacobs, $1.00.
A. Newton, _Graded Games_. Barnes, $1.25.
Von Palm, _Rainy Day Pastimes_. Dana Estes, $1.00.
Johnson, _When Mother Lets Us Help_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $0.75.
WORK
Canfield, _What Shall We Do Now?_ Stokes, $1.50.
Beard, _Jack of All Trades_. Scribner, $2.00.
Beard, _Things Worth Doing_. Scribner, $2.00.
Bailey, _Garden Making_. Macmillan, $1.50.
Bailey (ed.), _Something to Do_ (magazine). School Arts Publishing
Co.
IV. Topics for Discussion
1. Is the quiet child an ideal child? How far should we go in
restraining activity?
2. The relative advantages of work and leisure for children. What
of the value of chores to you; did you do them? Describe any forms
of children's service in the home which have come under your
observation.
3. What forms of community service can be done by children and by
young people?
4. Recall any lessons learned by activity in your early home life.
5. Give in their order, according to your judgment, the potencies
for religious character in the home.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] A short list of books on child activity in the home is appended at
the end of this chapter; a fairly complete list, long enough for any
family, will be found on p. 117 of _The Church School_, by W.S. Athearn.
[13] See W.N. Hutchins, _Graded Social Service for the Sunday School_.