Religious Education in the Family Part 23

When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take time to think what it means. _Keep your temper._ Do not break before the other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied.

From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from force and tradition to a moral plane.

Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request.

You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his life.

Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an unjust man.

Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience.

Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circ.u.mstances it would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration--as a drop of acid on a finger tip--than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in other cases.

Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not drift, is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.

-- 3. ANGER

An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so near the surface that a pin-p.r.i.c.k sets them loose. Usually a study of their cases will show either that the att.i.tude of angry opposition to everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or that it was acquired in the adolescent period.

The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person; there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school of normal social living.

Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character of the child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons, first, as furnis.h.i.+ng the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control, to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace and interfere with the well-being of others.

It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.

In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl will make a very tardy pa.s.sage through the normal experience of social aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pa.s.s quickly. A few allow this period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at this period, or to a lack of healthful friends.h.i.+ps.

-- 4. METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER

It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant will not help the case. He may feel the emotion of your anger but misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant fas.h.i.+ons, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first exercises in training character.

_Consider the future._ Each family is a social unit, a little world.

Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality, under similar circ.u.mstances, serve in the business of mature life?

Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.

Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must guide it.

When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to a.n.a.lyze the situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own temper.

Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, _train him in self-control_. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but it is the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to G.o.dlike service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and school and street.

Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the misery of the life without friends, the joy of friends.h.i.+ps.

Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of forgiveness and, if the occasion warrants, the dignity and courage of the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how great is the victory of forgiveness.[48]

I. References for Study

_The Problem of Temper._ Pamphlet. American Inst.i.tute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.

E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. v. Pilgrim Press, $0.50.

J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.

II. Further Reading

Patterson Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.75.

E.H. Abbott, _The Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.

M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each.

H.Y. Campbell, _Practical Motherhood_. Longmans, $2.50.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral crises?

2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in children?

3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?

4. What const.i.tutes the importance of early crises of the will?

5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy authority?

6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?

7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?

8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly developed life?

FOOTNOTES:

[48] See Gow, _Good Morals and Gentle Manners_, chap. viii.

CHAPTER XX

DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)

-- 1. QUARRELS

A child who never quarrels probably needs to be examined by a physician; a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some underlying cause for nervous irritability.