Your Child Today and Tomorrow | Page 4

same formulas for treating children's ailments as he uses with adults, simply reducing the size of the dose, we should consider his methods rather crude. If a parent should feed an infant the same materials that she supplied to the rest of the family, only in smaller quantities, we should consider her too ignorant to be entrusted with the care of the child. And for similar reasons we must learn that the behavior of the child must be judged according to standards different from those we apply to an adult. The same act represents different motives in a child and in an adult--or in the same child at different ages.
Moreover, each child is different from every other child in the whole world. The law has recognized that a given act committed by two different persons may really be two entirely different acts, from a moral point of view. How much more important is it for the parent or the teacher to recognize that each child must be treated in accordance with his own nature!
It is the duty of every mother to know the nature of her child, in order that she may assist in the development of all of his possibilities. Child Study is a new science, but old enough to give us great help through what the experts have found out about "child nature." But the experts do not know your child; they have studied the problems of childhood, and their results you can use in learning to know your child. Your problem is always an individual problem; the problem of the scientist is a general one. From the general results, however, you may get suggestions for the solution of your individual problem.
We all know the mother who complains that her boys did not turn out just the way she wanted them to--although they are very good boys. After they have grown up she suddenly realizes one day how far they are from her in spirit. She could have avoided the disillusion by recognizing early enough that the interests and instincts of her boys were healthy ones, notwithstanding they were so different from her own. She would have been more to the boys, and they more to her, if, instead of wasting her energy in trying to make them "like herself," she had tried to develop their tastes and inclinations to their full possibilities.
How much happier is the home in which the mother understands the children, and knows how to treat each according to his disposition, instead of treating all by some arbitrary rule! As a mother of three children said one day, "With Mary, just a hint of what I wish is sufficient to secure results. With John, I have to give a definite order and insist that he obey. With Robert I get the best results by explaining and appealing to his reason." How much trouble she saves herself--and the children--by having found this much out!
A mother who knows that what we commonly call the "spirit of destruction" in a child is the same as the _constructive impulse_ will not be so much grieved when her baby takes the alarm clock apart as the mother who looks upon this deed as an indication of depravity or wickedness.
[Illustration: The impulse to action early leads to "doing."]
Some of the directions in which the parents may profit from what the specialists have worked out may be suggested. There is the question of punishment, for example. How many of us have thought out a satisfactory philosophy of punishment? In our personal relations with our children we all too frequently cling to the theory of punishment that justifies us in "paying back" for the trouble we have been caused--if, indeed, we do any more than vent our temper at the annoyance. It is not viciousness on our part; it is merely ignorance. But the time is rapidly approaching when there will be no excuse for ignorance, even if it is not yet time to say that preventable ignorance is vicious.
How many mothers, for example, realize that the desire on the part of the child to touch, to do--to get into mischief--is a fundamental characteristic of childhood, and not an indication of perversity in her particular Johnny or Mary? How many know that these instincts are the most useful and the most usable traits that the child has; that the checking of these impulses may mean the destruction of individual qualities of great importance in the formation of character? How many know how wisely to direct these instincts without thwarting them?
How many mothers--good housewives--know anything at all about the imagination, that crowning glory of the human mind? They admire the poet's flights of fancy; but when, on being asked where his brother is, Harry says, "He went off in a great, great, big