Your Child Today and Tomorrow | Page 8

the first place, nothing that is considered desirable or beneficial should be brought into disfavor by being used as a punishment. Sleep is a blessing, and, it may be said in general, no healthy child gets too much of it. By imposing two hours of additional sleep upon the child the mother discredits sleeping. It isn't logical. It is as unreasonable as that once favorite punishment of teachers, now rapidly being discarded, of keeping children after school. On the one side they are told how grateful they should be for this great boon of education, and for being allowed to come to school, and then they are told: "You have been very bad and troublesome to-day; as a punishment you shall have an extra hour of this great privilege."
The second point is that no punishment should ever deprive a child of conditions that are necessary for his health or impose conditions that are harmful. And, finally, it is not wise to exaggerate the importance of trivial acts by treating them too seriously. The little boy tried to be "smart" when he threw that salt. With nearly every child it would be sufficient, in a case like this, to make him feel that it was really very silly and that he had made himself ridiculous in the eyes of the family.
Very often the seriousness of a child's offence is greatly exaggerated. We must not waste our ammunition on these small matters; if we use our strongest terms of disapproval for the many little everyday vexations, we shall be left quite without resource when something really serious does occur. Children are very sensitive to such exaggerations, and their attention is so much taken up with the injustice of making a big ado about such trifles that they overlook what is reprehensible in their own conduct.
Some of the greatest authorities believe that a child should be allowed to suffer the consequences of his deeds. We should borrow from nature, they say, her method of dealing with offenders. If a child touches fire he will be burnt, and each time the same effect will follow his deed. Why not let our punishments be as certain and uniform in their reaction? To a certain extent this plan can be followed. If a little girl stubbornly refuses to wear her mittens, it is all right to let her suffer the consequences, the natural consequences--and let her hands get quite cold.
But this principle cannot be consistently applied as a general method. If a child insists upon leaning far out of the window it would be foolish to let him suffer the consequences and fall, possibly to his death. Part of our function is to prevent our children from suffering all the possible consequences of their actions. We are here to guide them and to protect them.
To abandon the child to the natural consequences of his moral actions would be even more harmful, for very often we must separate the child from his fault. This is true in a double sense. In the first place, we are concerned chiefly in removing the child's faults, as a physician seeks to separate a patient from his sickness. But we must also avoid the error of identifying any fault with the fundamental nature of the child; that is, we must keep before us the character of the child as distinct from the wrong acts which the child may commit. If a child lies, that does not make of him a liar, any more than does his failure to understand what he has just been told make of him a blockhead. Yet the natural consequence of lying, for instance, is to be mistrusted in the future--to be branded a liar. This, however, is one of the worst things that can happen to a child, and one of the surest ways of making him a habitual liar. Many children pass through a stage in which they naturally come to have the feeling which is expressed in the saying: "If I have the name, I may as well have the game." We must show the child that we have unbounded confidence in him, otherwise he will lose faith in himself.
It is clear, then, that the "natural" method will not work in such cases, for the impulse to condemn the child after he has committed a wrong deed, instead of condemning the deed, may merely help to fix upon him the habit of committing similar deeds in the future.
In Nature, too, the same punishment invariably follows the same offence. If we try to imitate that method, the child soon learns what he has to reckon with. If the child knows that a certain action will produce a certain result, he often thinks it is worth the price. Then the child feels that he has had