Religious Education in the Family Part 24

It is perfectly natural for healthy people to differ; in childhood's realm, where the values and proportions of life are not clearly seen, where social adjustments have not been acquired, the differences in opinions, as in possessions, lead to the expression of feeling in sharp and emphatic terms. Rivalry and conflict are natural to the young animal. Children do not wilfully enter into conflicts any more than adults; they are only less diplomatic in their language, more direct, and more likely to follow the word with attempts at force.

In few things do parents need more patience than in dealing with children's quarrels. First, seek to determine quietly the merits of the cause; but do not attempt to p.r.o.nounce a verdict. It is seldom wise to act as judge unless you allow the children to act as a jury. But ascertain whether the quarrel is an expression somewhere of anger against injustice, wrong, or evil in some form. Sometimes their quarrels have as much virtue as our crusades. It is a sad mistake to quench the feeling of indignation against wrong or of hatred against evil. A boy will need that emotional backing in his fights against the base and the foes of his kind. While rejoicing in his feeling, show him how to direct it, train him to discriminate between hatred of wrong and bitterness toward the wrongdoer. Help him to see the good that comes from loving people, no matter what they do.

Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their sense of justice than all our decisions can. Be sure to get each one to state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital.

Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel is seen stripped of pa.s.sion and standing clear in its own light. Usually that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary acknowledgment of wrong. The boys--or girls--have for the first time seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we when convinced against our wishes.

When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side, in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their differences.

The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves petulant and more anxious to a.s.sert their separate opinions than to find unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own att.i.tude.

Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new, self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them.

Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not try to keep Algernon in a gla.s.s case; he needs the world in which he will have to live some day.

-- 2. FIGHTING

The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys'

fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much of a fight, every day struggling in compet.i.tion and rivalry; we have not yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good to find causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot, nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle their differences as honestly at least as do men.

Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.

Does all this mean that boys should be encouraged to fight? No; but it does mean that when Billy comes home with one eye apparently retired from business, we must not scold him as though he were the first wanderer from Eden. That fight may have been precisely the same thing as a croquet game to his sister, or any test of skill to his big brother, or a business transaction to his father; it was a mere contest of two healthy bodies at a time when the body was the outstanding fact of life.

The fight may give us our chance, however, to aid him to a sense of the greatness of life's conflict, to a sense of the qualities that make the true fighter. It may leave him open to the appeal of true heroism. We must make light of the victory of brute strength, just as we may make light of his wounds and scars, and glorify the victory of the mind and will.

The boy who fights because he lacks control of temper needs careful training. He gets a good deal of discipline on the playground and street, but it is not always effective; the beatings may only further undermine control. But the lack of self-control will manifest itself in many ways and must be remedied at all points. The discipline of daily living in the family must come into play here.

-- 3. SELF-CONTROL

The matter of self-control is not separable into special features; one cannot learn control under one set of moral circ.u.mstances without learning it for all. The boy who strikes without thinking is simply one who acts without thinking. He tends to throw away the brakes of the will. The regain of control comes only through training at every point in deliberation of action.

Probably there is no other point at which children so frequently and readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of uncontrolled action to the children. Just to learn to wait, even after the thought is formed into words, until it shall be my turn or my opportunity to speak is a fine discipline of control. To do that every day, year after year, tends to break up the hair-trigger process of action.

Control is gained also by the acquisition of the habit of thought regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over the day and its deeds.

-- 4. GOOD FIGHTS

The evident danger of undue deliberation of action must be met by another cure of the personal-conflict spirit; that is, the subst.i.tution of games of rivalry and skill for the unorganized rivalry and "game" of fighting. The transition from the b.l.o.o.d.y arena to the excitement of a game is very easy and natural. But the game is the boy's great chance to learn life as a game to be played according to the rules. All that the fight calls for--courage, endurance, skill, quickness of action, and grim persistence--comes out in a good game. Here is a suitable youthful realization of the fight that is worth waging. Our partic.i.p.ation in the youths' games, our appreciation of their points, our joy in honestly won success, is the best possible way to lead up to their taking life in terms of a good fight, a grand game, a real chance to call out the heroic qualities. Turn every fighting instinct into the good fight that will clarify and elevate them all.

I. References for Study

W.L. Sheldon, _Ethics in the Home_, chaps. xi, xii, xiii. Welch & Co., $1.25.

E.A. Abbott, _Training of Parents_, chap. v. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.

II. Further Reading

Ella Lyman Cabot, _Every Day Ethics_. Holt, $1.25.

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

III. Topics for Discussion

1. Do all children quarrel? Should one punish for small quarrels?

2. What are the facts which ought to be ascertained regarding any quarrel?

3. What special opportunities do children's differences offer?

4. What are the causes of habitual petulance? What are the dangers of this habit of mind?

5. Is fighting necessarily wrong? What part does it play in the lives of men?

6. What are the dangerous elements in boys' fights?

7. What special quality of character needs development in this connection?

8. What are the valuable possibilities in the fighting tendency?

CHAPTER XXI

DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)

-- 1. LYING

Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children.

But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child appears as a wilful liar.

"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"

First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles d.i.c.kens wrote _Oliver Twist_ he described a burglary that never happened, so far as he knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No; because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying.

He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.

Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My dolly is sick," she is saying that which is not so, but instead of reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll.

Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue, should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect, jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just so."

But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguis.h.i.+ng between the world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom with ideas to pa.s.s over into habits of carelessly handling realities.

Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red, green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly their colors and forms. Daily training in exact.i.tude of statements of real facts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the essence of truth-telling.

-- 2. PROTECTIVE LYING