The Wise Law-giver
As our illustrations have suggested, and as every thoughtful parent knows well enough, the problem of moral training in the first years is full of difficulty. Yet our study surely suggests that it is not so hopeless a problem as we are sometimes weakly disposed to think. Perhaps a word or two on this may not inappropriately close this essay.
I will readily concede that the difficulty of inculcating in children a sweet and cheerful obedience arises partly from their nature. There are trying children, just as there are trying dogs that howl and make themselves disagreeable for no discoverable reason but their inherent ‘cussedness’. There are, I doubt not, conscientious painstaking mothers who have been baffled by having to manage what appears to be the utterly unmanageable.
Yet I think that we ought to be very slow to pronounce any child unmanageable. I know full well that in the case of these small growing things there are all kinds of hidden physical commotions which breed caprices, ruffle the temper, and make them the opposite of docile. The peevish child who will do nothing, will listen to no suggestion, is assuredly a difficult subject to deal with. But such moodiness and cross-grainedness springing from bodily disturbances will be allowed for by the discerning mother, who will be too wise to bring the severer measures of discipline to bear on a child when subject to their malign influence. Waiving these disturbing factors, however, I should say that a good part, certainly more than one half, of the difficulty of training children is due to our clumsy bungling modes of going to work.
Sensible persons know that there is a good and a bad way of approaching a child. The wrong ways of trying to constrain children are, alas, numerous. I am not writing an ‘advice to parents,’ and am not called on therefore to deal with the much-disputed question of the rightness and wrongness of corporal punishment. Slaps may be needful in the early stages, even though they do lead to little tussles. A mother assures me that these battles with her several children have all fallen between the ages of sixteen months and two years. It is, however, conceivable that such fights might be avoided altogether; yet a man should be chary of dogmatising on this delicate matter.
What is beyond doubt is that the slovenly discipline—if indeed discipline it is to be called—which consists in alternations of gushing fondness with almost savage severity, or fits of government and restraint interpolated between long periods of neglect and laisser faire, is precisely what develops the rebellious and law-resisting propensities. But discipline can be bad without being a stupid pretence. Everything in the shape of inconsistency, saying one thing at one time, another thing at another, or treating one child in one fashion, another in another, tends to undermine the pillars of authority. Young eyes are quick to note these little contradictions, and they sorely resent them. It is astonishing how careless disciplinarians can show themselves before these astute little critics. It is the commonest thing to tell a child to behave like his elders, forgetting that this, if indeed a rule at all, can only be one of very limited application. Here is a suggestive example of the effect of this sort of teaching sent me by a mother. “At three and a half, when some visitors were present, she was told not to talk at dinner-time. ‘Why me no talk? Papa talks.’ ‘Yes, but papa is grown up, and you are only a little girl; you can’t do just like grown-up people.’ She was silent for some time, but when I told her ten minutes later to sit nicely with her hands in her lap like her cousins, she replied, with a very humorous smile, ‘Me tan’t (can’t) sit like grown-up people, me is only a little girl’.”
We can fail and make children disloyal instead of loyal subjects by unduly magnifying our office, by insisting too much on our authority. Children who are over-ruled, who have no taste of being left unmolested and free to do what they like, can hardly be expected to submit graciously. Another way of carrying parental control to excess is by exacting displays of virtue which are beyond the moral capabilities of the child. A lady sends me this reminiscence of her childhood. She had been promised sixpence when she could play her scales without fault, and succeeded in the exploit on her sixth birthday. The sixpence was given to her, but soon after her mother suggested that she should spend the money in fruit to give to her (the mother’s) invalid friend. This was offending the sense of justice, for if the child is jealous of anything as his very own it is surely the reward he has earned; and was, moreover, a foolish attempt to call forth generosity where generosity was wholly out of place. An even worse example is that recorded by Ruskin. When a child he was expected to come down to dessert and crack nuts for the grand older folk while peremptorily forbidden to eat any. Such refined cruelties of government deserve to be defeated in their objects. Much of our ill success in governing children would probably turn out to be attributable to unwisdom in assigning tasks, and more particularly in making exactions which wound that sensitive fibre of a child’s heart, the sense of justice.
Parents are, I fear, apt to forget that generosity and the other liberal virtues owe their worth to their spontaneity. They may be suggested and encouraged but cannot be exacted. On the other hand, a parent cannot be more foolish than to discourage a spontaneous outgoing of good impulse, as if nothing were good but what emanated from a spirit of obedience. In a pretty and touching little American work, Beckonings from Little Hands, the writer describes the remorse of a father who, after his child’s death, recalled the little fellow’s first crude endeavour to help him by bringing fuel, an endeavour which, alas! he had met with something like a rebuff.
The right method of training, which develops and strengthens by bracing exercise the instinct of obedience, cannot easily be summarised; for it is the outcome of the highest wisdom. I may, however, be permitted to indicate one or two of its main features.
Informed at the outset by a fine moral feeling and a practical tact as to what ought to be expected, the wise mother is concerned before everything to make her laws appear as much a matter of course as the daily sequences of the home life, as unquestionable axioms of behaviour; and this not by a foolish vehemence of inculcation but by a quiet skilful inweaving of them into the order of the child’s world. To expect the right thing, as though the wrong thing were an impossibility, rather than to be always pointing out the wrong thing and threatening consequences; to make all her words and all her own actions support this view of the inevitableness of law; to meet any indications of a disobedient spirit, first with misunderstanding, and later with amazement; this is surely the first and fundamental matter.
The effectiveness of this discipline depends on the simple psychological principle that difficult actions tend to realise themselves in the measure in which the ideas of them become clear and persistent. Get a child steadily to follow out in thought an act to which he is disinclined and you have more than half mastered the disinclination. The quiet daily insistence of the wise rule of the nursery proceeds by setting up and maintaining the ideas of dutiful actions, and so excluding the thought of disobedient actions.
It has recently been pointed out that in this moral control of the child through suggestion of right actions we have something closely analogous to the action of suggestion upon the hypnotised subject. The mother, the right sort of mother, has on the child’s mind something of the subduing influence of the Nancy doctor: she induces ideas of particular actions, gives them force and persistence so that the young mind is possessed by them and they work themselves out into fulfilment as occasion arises.
In order that this effect of ‘obsession,’ or a full occupation of consciousness with the right idea, may result, certain precautions are necessary. As observant parents know, a child may be led by a prohibition to do the very thing he is bidden not to do. We have seen how readily a child’s mind moves from an affirmation to a corresponding negation, and conversely. The ‘contradictoriness’ of a child, his passion for saying the opposite of what you say, shows the same odd manner of working of the young mind. Wanting to do what he is told not to do is another effect of this “contrary suggestion,” as it has been called, aided of course by the child’s dislike of all constraint.195 If we want to avoid this effect of suggestion and to secure the direct effect, we must first of all acquire the difficult secret of personal influence, of the masterfulness which does not repel but attracts; and secondly try to reduce our forbiddings with their contrary suggestions to a minimum.
The action in moral training of this influence of a quasi-hypnotic suggestion becomes more clearly marked when difficulties occur; when some outbreak of wilful resistance has to be recognised and met, or some new and relatively arduous feat of obedience has to be initiated. Here I find that intelligent mothers have found their way to methods closely resembling those of the hypnotist. “When R. is naughty and in a passion (writes a lady friend of her child aged three and a half), I need only suggest to him that he is some one else, say a friend of his, and he will take it up at once, he will pretend to be the other child, and at last go and call himself, now a good boy, back again.” This mode of suggestion, by helping the ‘higher self’ to detach itself from and control the lower might, one suspects, be much more widely employed in the moral training of children. Suggestion may work through the emotions. Merely to say, ‘Mother would like you to do this,’ is to set up an idea in the child’s consciousness by help of the sustaining force of his affection. “If (writes a lady) there was anything Lyle particularly wished not to do, his mother had only to say, ‘Dobbin (a sort of canonised toy-horse already referred to) would like you to do this,’ and it was done without a murmur.”
We have another analogue to hypnotic suggestion where a mother prepares her child some time beforehand for a difficult duty, telling him that she expects him to perform it. A mother writes that her boy, when about the age of two and a half years more particularly, was inclined to burst into loud but short fits of crying. “I have found (she says) these often checked by telling him beforehand what would be expected of him, and exacting a promise that he would do the thing cheerfully. I have seen his face flush up ready to cry when he remembered his promise and controlled himself.” This reminds one forcibly of the commands suggested by the hypnotiser to be carried into effect when the subject wakes. Much more, perhaps, might be done in this direction by choosing the right moments for setting up the persistent ideas in the child’s consciousness. I know a lady who got into the way of giving moral exhortation to her somewhat headstrong girl at night before the child fell asleep, and found this very effectual. It is possible that we may be able to apply this idea of preparatory and premunitory suggestion in new and surprising ways to difficult and refractory children.196
One other way in which the wise mother will win the child over to duty is by developing his consciousness of freedom and power. A mother, who was herself a well-known writer for children, has recorded in some notes on her children that when one of her little girls had declined to accede to her wish she used to say to her: ‘Oh, yes, I think when you have remembered how pleasant it is to oblige others you will do it’. ‘I will think about it, mamma,’ the child would reply, laughing, and then go and hide her head behind a sofa-pillow which she called her ‘thinking corner’. In half a minute she would come out and say: “Oh, yes, mamma, I have thought about it and I will do it”. This strikes me as an admirable combination of regulative suggestion with exercise of the young will in moral decision. It gave the child the consciousness of using her own will, and yet maintained the needed measure of guidance and control.
As the moral consciousness develops and new problems arise, new openings for such suggestive guidance will offer themselves. How valuable, for example, is the mother’s encouragement of the weakly child, shrinking from a difficult self-repressive action, when she says with inspiring voice: ‘You can do it if you try’. Thus pilot-like she conducts the little navigator out into the open main of duty where he will have to steer himself.
I have tried to show that the moral training of children is not beyond human powers. It has its strong supports in child-nature, and these, when there are wisdom and method on the ruler’s side, will secure success. I have not said that the trainer’s task is easy. So far from thinking this, I hold that a mother who bravely faces the problem, neither abandoning the wayward will to its own devices, nor, hardly less weakly, handing over the task of disciplining it to a paid substitute, and who by well-considered and steadfast effort succeeds in approaching the perfection I have hinted at, combining the wise ruler with the tender and companionable parent, is among the few members of our species who are entitled to its reverence.
Notes
192. My correspondent, discreetly perhaps, does not explain why the uncle was selected as fellow-outcast.
193. Cf. the excuse given by a little girl of three when her grandmother called her, “I can’t come, I am suckling baby” (the doll). P. Lombroso, op. cit., p. 126.
194. Emile, livre v., quoted by Perez, L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant, p. 127. Rousseau uses this story in order to show that girls are more artful than boys.
195. On the nature of this contrary suggestion see Mark Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race, p. 145 f.
196. The bearings of (hypnotic) suggestion on moral education have been discussed by Guyau, Education and Heredity (Engl. transl.), chap. i. Compare also Preyer, op. cit., p. 267 f., and Compayré, op. cit., p. 262.