DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES
Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain
an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness,
occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our
children--or of our neighbors' children--to a focus and throw them in
high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual
placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule,
when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty
wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we
suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher
life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly
a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of
development.
A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such
results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their
inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual
and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be
valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.
Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to
bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of
getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to
remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the
crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one
in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt,
as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort
of training.
§ 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION
The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins
to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a
child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the
perfect tree in the sapling. _Character comes by development_; it is not
born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore
parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are
pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time
Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper,
sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a
psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the
picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?
When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they
are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the
natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in
which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The
child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The
powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call
physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the
development of those powers, their training-field and school.
Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the
grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more
do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of
difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other,
in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a
stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be
learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and
training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right
to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him
to be born six feet tall.
A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent,
then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his
moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition
of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an
occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to
guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way
for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is
it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the
organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not.
And is it not to be the same with the child?
We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that
give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as
isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational
process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will
watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.
§ 2. THE COLLISION OF WILLS
Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with
temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The
martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the
subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the
parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of
will.
When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought
to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in
your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness
will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the
mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you
will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice
of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to
elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive,
Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new
personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle
and adjust itself with all other persons.
When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take
time to think what it means. _Keep your temper._ Do not break before the
other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied.
From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from
force and tradition to a moral plane.
Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request.
You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more
important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of
the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his
life.
Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to
consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of
justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an
unjust man.
Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic
explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of
simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by
an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It
may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience.
Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own
way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for
instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it
would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration--as a drop of
acid on a finger tip--than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One
such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in
other cases.
Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must
choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave
responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of
the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of
the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not
drift, is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of
feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.
§ 3. ANGER
An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes
justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of
your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a
spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of
protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether
unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly
angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so
near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of
their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to
everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or
that it was acquired in the adolescent period.
The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person;
there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home
is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most
directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school
of normal social living.
Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are
negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character
of the child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons,
first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control,
to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace
and interfere with the well-being of others.
It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first
instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded
to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only
route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in
terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.
In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl
will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social
aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee
from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner
alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at
thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this
period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and
soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at
this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.
§ 4. METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER
It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant
will not help the case. He may feel the emotion of your anger but
misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an
infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or
affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby
yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither
possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural
depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant
fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department
of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to
the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and
you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you
yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its
reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with
anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first
exercises in training character.
_Consider the future._ Each family is a social unit, a little world.
Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and
experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which
prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are
needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When
young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality,
under similar circumstances, serve in the business of mature life?
Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.
Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional
effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against
evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be
purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be
confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must
guide it.
When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the
feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the
situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that
not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of
conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always
help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he
may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay
with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own
temper.
Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, _train him in
self-control_. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply
our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the
largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is
the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but it is
the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of
society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a
better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the
immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike
service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not
acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson
after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and
school and street.
Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to
save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the
rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There
will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we
must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the
rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in
the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing
to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with
strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he
loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the
misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.
Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of
forgiveness and, if the occasion warrants, the dignity and courage of
the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment
involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson
of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be
habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with
suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how
great is the victory of forgiveness.[48]
I. References for Study
_The Problem of Temper._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. v. Pilgrim
Press, $0.50.
J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.
II. Further Reading
Patterson Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead
& Co., $0.75.
E.H. Abbott, _The Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
$1.00.
M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg,
$1.00 each.
H.Y. Campbell, _Practical Motherhood_. Longmans, $2.50.
III. Topics for Discussion
1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral
crises?
2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in
children?
3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?
4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?
5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy
authority?
6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?
7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?
8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly
developed life?
FOOTNOTES:
[48] See Gow, _Good Morals and Gentle Manners_, chap. viii.