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• Title: On the Training of Parents
• Author : Ernest Hamlin Abbott
• Release Date : January 16, 2019
• Genre: Parenting,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 3387 KB

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ON THE TRAINING OF PARENTS

I

SPASM AND HABIT

A voice like a knife cut the still, warm air. "Now you just go right down and get that canned salmon." I turned my head and saw a little girl, in a fluffy dress with a skirt like a parachute, standing in the midst of the long grass. She was evidently frightened and hesitating. There was a whimper and a whining protest. A young woman in a wrapper, with a menacing switch in her hand, was advancing. Her voice grew sharper: "You do what I say, quick, or I'll whip you good!" The child beat a retreat toward me; then timidly stood her ground. "It's so far!" she wailed. The enemy again approached; but the

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 little feet of the child were nimble enough to keep her at a safe distance. "If you don't hurry, I'll whip you anyway." Fear of the switch was evidently mastering the dislike of the task. The little girl burst out crying, turned down the dusty road, and disappeared in the direction of the village.

That incident was the result of government by collision. If that mother had any principle at all, it might be expressed thus: Wait till the child does wrong, then collide with her. Of course none of us would deliberately collide in just this fashion. We should not be so vulgar. When we have an altercation with a child, we choose less publicity and have some regard for refinement of phrase. Perhaps, too, we ordinarily avoid altercation entirely except concerning some grave matter. We should prefer to do without canned salmon rather than exhibit our impotence and our temper before the neighbors. When, however, we have the child in seclusion at our mercy, are we deterred from trying the collision

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 method by any considerations of principle? If not, we belong to the same school of parents as the young woman in a wrapper. The only difference is that we have not her courage of conviction—or of indolence.

Now, those who believe in government by collision need read no further; for I shall assume that such government is only just better than no government at all, and that, if we fall into its methods, we do so by accident or because of the frailty of our temper; that every altercation with a child is a confession of weakness; and that our principal task is to train ourselves so that we may be able to govern a child without colliding with him. Of course, in the training of children, as in managing a railway, it may sometimes be necessary to occasion a disaster in order to avoid a great catastrophe. If a freight car is running wild down a grade, it is better to throw it off the track than to allow it to smash a loaded passenger train. So it may sometimes be better to let a child collide with you, rather than

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 have him collide with the community. But in both cases it is better to have the collision well planned, to recognize it as a disaster, though the lesser of two possible ones, and, best of all, to prevent any occasion of resorting to destructive measures.

The only alternative I know to government by collision is government by habit. To show what I mean, may I cite an instance in contrast to the episode of the switch and the canned salmon? That same summer a small boy, six years old, was playing with his blocks. His mother in the next room suddenly realized that she had not ordered the fruit that was needed for the household. "Max!" she called. Now Max is no prig, but he had learned that he was expected to come when called; so, with an injunction to his playmates not to disturb the bridge he was building, he appeared at the doorway. "What is it?" (He ought to have said, "Yes, mamma;" but, as I have

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 remarked, Max is thoroughly human.) "I want you to do an errand for me—something you've never done before. I want you to go to the grocery and get six oranges." Max started off. "Wait a moment. You've never gone alone on such a long errand before. Do you believe you can do it quickly, and not dawdle?" Max thought he could, and in fact did the errand as promptly as could be expected. He had been accustomed to obedience; in addition, he had become accustomed to accepting some measure of responsibility. The mother controlled him, not by violence, but by habit. The occurrence was the result of a long process, and became in turn a cause of future occurrences of similar character. Reduced to its simplest terms, then, the process of training children is the process of forming habits.

The earliest habits are physical. The whole duty of man during the first few weeks of his existence consists in 

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feeding and sleeping regularly; and most of the rights of man during that period consist in being let alone. Listen to the eminent French psychologist, Th. Ribot: "The new-born infant is a spinal being, with an unformed, diffluent brain, composed largely of water. Reflex life itself is not complete in him, and the cortico-motor system only hinted at; the sensory centres are undifferentiated, the associational systems remain isolated, for a long time after birth." Doesn't it make you shudder to think of dandling such a creature as that on a hard-gaited knee? Does not that "unformed, diffluent brain, composed largely of water," plead to be let alone? Yet the impulse of most parents when they encounter their new possession is to do something to it,—to take it up, to carry it about, and, as soon as its eyes are really open, to try and show it things, to evoke from it some kind of human expression. It seems as if we were all beset by a doubt that our offspring

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 is really a creature of our own kind, and that we were bound to make it establish, by some proof, its right to a place at the top of creation. Now, the instincts of the infant are all in other directions. Yielding to these, the mite seems to be utterly indifferent to the honors of its station in animal life, and even to the attention it receives. It wants to cry occasionally, to feed periodically, and to sleep a great deal. And, in spite of our experience, we are wrong, and the diminutive thing, with a cortico-motor system only hinted at, with sensory centres undifferentiated, and with the extraordinary disadvantage of having completely isolated associational centres, is right. The first habits, therefore, which the parents have to form in the training of their child are their own; and the most important of these is the habit of non-interference, which is another name for the habit of self-restraint. Fortunately, we parents can at the outset devote our attention chiefly

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 to this for several months. If we wish to avoid, in later years, the necessity for resorting to government by spasm, and to establish instead government by habit, we do not have to begin by experimenting on a helpless child; we can begin, fortunately, by experimenting on ourselves.

It is during this period that we have the best chance of learning the difference between governing children and interfering with them; for though that midget will not thrive under interference, he will thrive under government. He does not need to be told what to do, but he does depend on us to teach him when to do it. While, therefore, we are forming in ourselves the habit of non-interference, we are also forming in him the habit of regularity. If we begin that way, we save both him and ourselves a great deal of trouble.

One mother, for instance, when she hears her baby cry, runs to him, picks him up, dances him up and down, offers

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 him food, dangles a bell in front of him, talks to him, takes him to the window, tries every imaginable device to quiet him. "It's wicked, I think," says she, "to try to stifle my maternal instincts. The poor little dear! how could I be so cruel as not to respond to his cry for me?" She is assuming several things. She assumes, first, that the baby is crying for her, whereas he is probably crying because he needs the exercise. That is the only way he can expand his lungs. When he cries because of pain, or anger, or nervous irritability, the cry will be unmistakable; and the response ought to be, not a wild series of spasms, but an intelligent treatment of the cause. She assumes, in the second place, that the impulse to rid herself of the annoyance of hearing the cry is a maternal instinct. If that were so, a lot of gruff old bachelors on railway trains are frequently moved by maternal instinct. The maternal instinct, in fact, is something quite

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 different—it is the instinct of care, watchfulness, nurture, and it does not call for spasms. In the third place, she assumes that it would be cruel not to experiment with her child—at least so it appears; for what she does is to try in quick succession a series of experiments, no one of which is continued long enough to be of any value, and all of which, as she might easily learn, have been proved to be of no permanent value in producing placid, contented babies.

The other mother, when she hears the cry, listens. If it is a cry of pain, she knows it in an instant. It is amazing how quickly a mother learns that language. It is a mystery to most men, though even to them not unsearchable. Physicians, after experience in children's wards, understand it; and even a father, if he is patient, can acquire a moderate knowledge of it. But a mother, or even a nurse, if she is moved by a genuine maternal instinct and not by a selfish

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 desire for her own comfort, is almost an adept at the start. At the cry of pain, that mother in a moment is looking for the misplaced pin, or rearranging the irritating bit of clothing, or remedying the uncomfortable position, or searching for a more hidden cause. If it is a cry of irritability, she blames herself for having rocked the child a few moments before, and steels herself against repeating the indulgence. If it is a cry of hunger, she looks at the clock to see if it is the hour for another feeding. If it is just "plain cry," she smiles, for she knows that he is doing that in lieu of playing baseball or riding horseback. When it is meal-time, she, exercising the discretion which he is not always able to exercise for himself, gently withdraws the food supply when he has had all that is good for him. And when it is time for him to go to sleep, she arranges him comfortably in his crib, darkens the room, and leaves him. If then he emits another "plain cry," she is not

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 disturbed. He has as much a right to cry as he has to sleep. If she lets him go to sleep in her arms, for the love of feeling him there, she will not complain later, when it is more inconvenient, if he remonstrates against going to sleep in any other way. She will know that in that respect, as in respect to his regular feeding, she has governed him by habit. Either she will have to pay the penalty of having established in her kingdom an inconvenient law, or else she will have to inflict upon him, as well as herself, the penalty of establishing later, and at greater cost, another and more convenient custom which might just as well have been established in the first place. This penalty may involve a collision—though possibly a mild one. Even in that case, however, in the very difficulty of supplanting an old custom by a new one, she will have evidence of the strength of her government by habit.

There is no reason why regularity once

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 established should not become for all future years a routine. We all know how hard it is to break up a bad habit. Happily, it is just as hard to break up a good one. The difference between the child who teases for every new variety of food on the table, pushes away the dishes that are set before him, whines when he is told it is bedtime, eats and goes to sleep only after much coaxing, and the child who accepts his food and his hours for sleep as a matter of course, as he accepts the house he lives in, is simply the difference between a bad habit and a good one. It is no easier to change the one habit than it is the other. After a child has learned to get his food and go to bed with whining and teasing, it is very difficult for him to learn to eat and sleep in any other fashion; it is equally difficult for a child who has learned to eat and enjoy food adapted to him, and to go to bed at a suitable hour, to understand why all sorts of strange decoctions should be offered to him, and why he should not

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 get undressed when his bedtime comes. Of course the spirit of adventure, which is strong in most normal children, will lead them sometimes to sample some things that they see their elders—or, for that matter, the animals—eating; and to race about the halls, exploring the domain of the dark, after they are supposed to be asleep; but even this spirit of adventure, which sometimes brings discouragement to the mother, is a tribute to regular life; and it is denied to those children whose whole life consists in a series of parental experiments. The little lad who at a children's party declines the sweetmeats is no angel. Nor is his companion, who grabs the dainties an imp. They are both, like the rest of us, creatures of habit. The theory of total depravity, by which our forefathers explained the unpleasant doings of youngsters, is, I have concluded, a doctrine which parents devised in order to shift the burden of their own failures to the shoulders of their offspring.

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This practice of regularity in the physical care of children[1] will lay the foundation, not only of health and contentment, but also of moral discipline. When we have eliminated the opportunities for collision with our children at meal-times and bedtime, we are well on our way toward eliminating government by collision altogether. The quiet exercise of authority involved in carrying out a simple regimen of diet and of rest will almost automatically extend to other matters. The most difficult part of this exercise of authority will be overcome when the parent learns self-restraint. Not to run to a child

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 every time he cries is the beginning of learning not to yield to a child every time he wants something. In many cases authority is thus exercised by doing nothing. The mother, for example, has left the baby creeping about alone in his nursery. She has left him a ball and two or three blocks with which he can experiment, and another ball hanging from a cord within his reach which he can swing to and fro. He is learning that the ball is soft and can roll, that the blocks are hard and cannot roll, and that the pendulum swings regularly. He is as well occupied in his work as the mother is in hers. Suddenly she hears a cry of vexation. If it continues, she steps to the door to see what has happened. He has raised himself up by the window and is trying to reach the tassel at the end of the cord on the window-shade, and finds it above his outstretched hands. She might go to the window, draw down the shade, and, holding it firm, let him play with the cord till he tires; but

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 she knows that it would be inconvenient to have him continually playing with the window-shade in the house, and she does not want him to begin. She might then take him up and distract his attention till he forgets. But she knows that if she does this once, she will be called upon to do it again. So she shakes her head and says "No," which she has taught him to understand, and, after making sure that he is in no danger of a fall, leaves him and returns to her work. By doing nothing she has done what for the time being is the hardest thing. As she closes the door she hears another wail of vexation, but she does not interfere. She has exercised her authority simply by exercising self-restraint.

It all depends on what we want our children to be whether we employ the method of spasm or the method of self-restraint. Of course those of us who think pertness in a child is a virtue, who regard a fit of teasing as "smart" or "cunning," who

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 enjoy the exhilaration of encountering a child as an adversary and breaking down his opposition, can develop in children habitual pertness, teasing, and disobedience with the utmost ease. It requires, however, no especial genius to avoid these qualities. Other traits, it may be, require something like genius—something at least beyond persistence and self-restraint—to create; but to provide children with a contented acquiescence in a regular life and an habitual disposition to obedience requires of the parents no qualities of mind which are not common to all of us mortals.

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