The American Child | Page 7

the dog to bed with him for the reason that "the other boys' dogs sleep with them."
Even unto honors, if they must carry them alone, children in America would rather not be born. A little girl who lives in my neighborhood came home from school in tears one day not long ago. Her father is a celebrated writer. The school-teacher, happening to select one of his stories to read aloud to the class, mentioned the fact that the author of the story was the father of my small friend.
"But why are you crying about it, sweetheart?" her father asked. "Do you think it's such a bad story?"
"Oh, no," the little girl answered; "it is a good enough story. But none of the other children's fathers write stories! Why do you, daddy? It's so peculiar!"
It may be that all children, whatever their nationalities, are like this little girl. We, in America, have a fuller opportunity to become intimately acquainted with the minds of children than have the people of any other nation of the earth. For more completely than any other people do American fathers and mothers make friends and companions of their children, asking from them, first, love; then, trust; and, last of all, the deference due them as "elders." Any child may feel as did my small neighbor about a "peculiar" father; only a child who had been his comrade as well as his child would so freely have voiced her feeling.
We all remember the little boy in Stevenson's poem, "My Treasures," whose dearest treasure, a chisel, was dearest because "very few children possess such a thing."
Had he been an American child, that chisel would not have been a "treasure" at all, unless all of the children possessed such a thing.
Not only do the children of our Nation want what the other children of their circle have when they can use it; they want it even when they cannot use it. I have a little girl friend who, owing to an accident in her infancy, is slightly lame. Fortunately, she is not obliged to depend upon crutches; but she cannot run about, and she walks with a pathetically halting step.
One autumn this child came to her mother and said: "Mamma, I'd like to go to dancing-school."
"But, my dearest, I'm afraid--I don't believe--you could learn to dance --very well," her mother faltered.
"Oh, mamma, I couldn't learn to dance at all!" the little girl exclaimed, as if surprised that her mother did not fully realize this fact.
"Then, dearest, why do you want to go to dancing-school?" her mother asked gently.
"The other girls in my class at school are all going," the child said.
Her mother was silent; and the little girl came closer and lifted pleading eyes to her face. "Please let me go!" she begged. "The others are all going," she repeated.
"I could not bear to refuse her," the mother wrote to me later. "I let her go. I feared that it would only make her feel her lameness the more keenly and be a source of distress to her. But it isn't; she enjoys it. She cannot even try to learn to dance; but she takes pleasure in being present and watching the others, to say nothing of wearing a 'dancing- school dress,' as they do. This morning she said to her father: 'I can't dance, Papa; but I can talk about it. I learn how at dancing-school. Oh, I love dancing-school!'"
Her particular accomplishment maybe of minute value in itself; but is not her content in it a priceless good? If she can continue to enjoy learning only to talk about the pleasures her lameness will not permit her otherwise to share, her dancing-school lessons will have taught her better things than they taught "the other children," who could dance.
That mother was her little girl's confidential friend as well as her mother. The child, quite unreservedly, told her what she wanted and why she wanted it. It was no weak indulgence of a child's whim, but a genuine respect for another person's rights as an individual--even though that individual was merely a little child--that led that mother to allow her daughter to have what she wanted. May not some subtle sense of this have been the basis of the child's happiness in the fulfillment of her desire? She wanted to go to dancing-school because the other children were going; but may she not have liked going because she felt that her mother understood and sympathized with her desire to go?
A Frenchwoman to whom I once said that American parents treat their children in many ways as though they were their contemporaries remarked, "But does that not make the children old before their time?"
So far from this, it seems, on the contrary, to keep the parents young after their time. It