Wholesome parenthood

Front matter

A NEW BOOK ON FAMILY LIFE BY ERNEST R.

AND GLADYS H. GROVES

The authors of ‘Wholesome Childhood’ have collaborated again in another book of sound, helpful advice for mothers and fathers. They cover such problems of childhood as Discipline, the Conditional Reflex, Habit, Fear, Anger, Sex, Money, Daydreaming, etc, and their suggestions are definite, wise, and practical.

Preface

‘WHOLESOME PARENTHOOD’ has been written in response to requests from readers of ‘Wholesome Childhood’? for a supplementary treatment that would emphasize the more important problems of childhood and present concrete suggestions helpful to mothers and fathers in their home practices. | It has appeared to the authors that the purpose of this book would be best accomplished by following three interests of the parent. First, the nature of the problem is discussed by E. R. Groves in the effort to provide the reader briefly and clearly with the understanding that the science of our period furnishes. Second, practical suggestions are made that,’although avoiding the dogmatism of rule-of-thumb methods, give the parent a basis for the tests put upon him by the actual experiences of his child. This is written by G. H. Groves. In order that the parent may further study the problem in which he is interested, a few carefully chosen references are given at the end of each chapter. Recognizing that this book will be used by those who wish

-* Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925. | vi PREFACE to pursue an extended study of some topic, perhaps for presentation at a study class, advanced references are included which will introduce the reader to the more technical literature on the subject.

Acknowledgment is made of the courtesy of ‘The Mothers’ Journal’ in generously allowing the reprinting of the treatment of habit (Chapter III), which appeared as an article in a recent number of the magazine.

The authors appreciate the generous interest that has been taken by parents and others in their former books. ‘Wholesome Marriage’ excluded any considerable discussion of sex problems because it was planned from the first to include in the series ‘Wholesome Sex Life.’ To the task of writing this book the authors now turn, realizing from their correspondence that many parents are asking for a treatment of sex problems in the spirit and manner of the other books of this series.

ERNEST R. GROVES

Contents

. WHAT Is CHILDHOOD?

. THE CONDITIONED REFLEX’ . HABIT

VSEX

. INTROVERSION AND EXTRAVERSION . ADOLESCENCE

120 138

Chapter I What Is Childhood?

OFTEN it has been said that the character of any people or period of time can be judged best by the treatment the child receives. The test the child puts upon civilization is more subtle than merely whether he is kindly treated. We get in full measure a revelation of the life and thinking of men and women when we find out the idea they have of the purpose of childhood. The question, ‘What is a child?’ opens up not only the spirit of nations and centuries; it also discloses the innermost attitudes of individuals.

If we went about asking people, ‘What is a child?’ how many different answers would we get, and what insight they would give us concerning the person speaking! ‘A child is a great responsibility that never gives you time for yourself.’ Surely we know that such an answer could come only from an overworked and unhappy parent. ‘A child? Oh! he is something so cute that one always wants to kiss him,’ reveals the sentimentalist speaking. ‘The child is raw material that has to be made over and prepared for life.’ It is the voice of the teacher. ‘The child is evil human nature, before it has been redeemed.’ Thus the medieval theologian announces himself. In our time there is one answer to the question, ‘What isa child?’ that increasingly is becoming dominant, and it is an answer that has not been made in the past. It comes from science. Science, that has accomplished so much in its study of plants, animals, and mechanical ways of doing things, has at last become busy in its effort to understand child-nature and learn how best to deal with children.

The period in which we live is often called the age of science — and rightly so, since during the last century science has accomplished more than in all previous time. The scientific answer, therefore, to the question, ‘What is a child?’ is especially representative of the spirit of our time, and it is an answer that we cannot afford to neglect or not understand.

The scientists who study child-life differ in many respects, for the investigation of child-nature has many angles of approach, but they come together in one common idea, that the child is a personality in the process of being made. A child is not a little adult — a sort of physical or mental dwarf. It is a human life in the first, and in many ways the most important, epoch of its earthly experience. Childhood represents not merely a preliminary stage that necessarily has to precede the experiences of mature life. It is actually the period when personality is formed and from various possibilities choices are made that have much to do with fixing for all time the characteristics of the individual. In childhood, personality is given more than its foundation, since the character takes the general shape it is to carry throughout life. Suppose we ask the scientist to tell us in detail just what he means when he says the child is a personality in process. Perhaps the answer can be made clear by the statement that childhood is a period of growth in which the most important things happen that influence each individual throughout his life. From this point of view, childhood is primarily the first and most significant part of the growth of personality. For the busy parent who wishes quickly to enter into the practical knowledge that science has gathered of the child, the idea of growth offers the most help. Indeed, nothing else so well gives the point of view the parent needs to take in dealing with his child.

First of all, the parent has to realize that the source of growth is from within the child himself. Just as the seed contains the germ of life which under right conditions of sun, soil, and rain turns into plant or tree, so the child develops by an unfolding of his nature. Just at present even the psychologists and biologists who have given most study to this matter do not fully understand the inner elements of growth so as to distinguish with certainty between the original rock-bottom elements that come to the child as his inheritance, and those that result from external influence. To make the picture vivid, we can think of the child responding to inner desires which force him with increasing skill and consciousness to turn his attention to the outer world through which he must find the satisfaction that he craves. The inner desire forces his attention outward and starts the unfolding process which quickly becomes complicated and intertwined with innumerable experiences until what was present at the start and what has been acquired through later experience are so tangled together that they cannot be separated.

The momentum that comes from within the child pushes him into experience which makes possible his growth by encouraging contacts with the persons and things about him in which he is interested and which, as he develops, he comes to understand more and more. As the seed responds to moisture and sunlight, so the growth of the child is not only the appearing of inner substance, but a response to experiences that provide the material for growth. It is this that the scientist means when he says the child must grow through contact. It is the things he sees, touches, hears, tastes, and does that make possible his development. He is literally a part of all with which he comes in contact. He is made by what happenstohim. It is easy to see this in the case of speech, since we soon discover that the child talks like his parents and finds in their language— whether it be Japanese, Hungarian, or English —the medium of expression which soon becomes for him, as for the parent, his native tongue, as natural to him as if it had been born and developed by inner instinct.

The power of the adult over the child, especially in his early, formative years, comes from the ability of the older person to influence the child’s inner desires by manipulating the conditions that surround him and provide him with experience. The parent can in large measure put his stamp upon the child by controlling the environment from which the child gets the experiences that feed his developing self. What the child finds around him largely determines the form his personality must take. The inner push and the outer contact join together in the development of the self which registers the characteristics of the child.

Merely to state these conditions of growth, to describe the situation in which the child is placed by the power of older people to decide his experiences, throws into bold relief the incomparable opportunity the parent has to direct the growth of his child. It is, of course, not an absolute power to do anything he pleases, since the child’s original equipment for life, furnished by his inheritance, sharply defines the limits beyond which the parent cannot go in his effort to bring about the growth he wants his child to achieve. There are limits in body, mind, and mood. The growth process furnishes the parent his opportunity to decide the direction toward which the child must force his personality as he develops, but the limits that are set mark a boundary line which cannot be changed, for the parent finds in his power toinfluence growth his exclusive chance to impress his own desires upon the make-up of the child. What the parent cannot do by influencing growth he cannot by any process whatsoever accomplish. For this reason successful parenthood requires knowledge of the meaning

WHAT IS CHILDHOOD? fi of the child’s growth, and the skill to use its opportunity.

Whoever has charge of a child in his early years largely commands his destiny. With close contact goes also a certainty of influence. It is this fact that explains the power of the parent, which is greater than that of others who come in intimate contact with the child at the beginning of his life only because there normally develops between parent and child a stronger sympathy than between the child and his other associates. No adult who has much to do with children in their formative period can escape the responsibilities of intimacy and authority. The love of the parent does not make him necessarily risky, as one would suppose from some critics of parental behavior, but it does intensify the association that so largely determines character.

Since the child cannot avoid coming under the direction of older people, who at first almost entirely decide what sort of experiences he is to have and under what emotional conditions, he is largely at the mercy of what is handed out to him, and his personality has to start to grow under the prevailing circumstances of his life. It is here undoubtedly that much of the leakage of our opportunity to go on to better ways of living takes place. Although parents for centuries have known that what they do to the child has much to do with his later career, the full force of this has only of late become known as science has been increasingly convinced that the early happenings of childhood are repeated in the later history of the adult, and even yet the majority of parents have only a slight realization of the enormous power they exercise as the child begins making his character.

Parents still explain unwanted consequences of their own mistakes by assuming that they are the product of heredity and totally unrelated to the events of childhood. It is the business of the parent who is determined to meet his responsibilities consciously to direct the child during his formative period so that the attitude toward life, the habit and the thought that the parent believes desirable for the child may get a start at the time when the growing personality of the little one responds so quickly and so decidedly to the influences that play upon him. Whether he wishes it or not, whether he realizes it or not, the parent by the very force of circumstances must assume this task of direction. In his hands, as strategist of the home, is placed the power to determine family policy to a very great extent, always with the certainty that whatever happens to the child, at least during the first ten years, will leave a permanent impression that later will make life easier or harder, richer or more dissatisfying, to the adult that emerges from the family setting.

The parent cannot avoid looking ahead; he has to ask himself what sort of child he wishes finally to produce. He has to pass judgment from his own experience upon the values of life in order to determine what he prefers that his child shall achieve and what he wishes him to avoid. Although in such an appraisal of life the parent cannot ever remove himself from the influences of his own childhood, in general we do find that he has a natural tendency to express one of two purposes as he directs the child’s growth. One of these is to make childhood happy. No one has made this motive more impressive than Rousseau, who eloquently urged the parent to take to heart the need of the child’s being happy and the possibility that the only taste of life the little one may ever have will be his childhood experiences, since the parent is given no guarantee that the child will live to grow up. The appeal of those who advocate using childhood primarily as an opportunity for happiness is strongly felt by most American parents, and especially by those whose early experiences were unhappy or who have had a child snatched from them by death intruding upon the family circle. The policy of stressing the opportunities of childhood for happiness grows more impressive as one learns from personal experience or observation of life how clearly and constantly the adult who has suffered a harsh or barren childhood reveals the consequences of his loss.

There is, however, another point of view with reference to childhood that rivals this policy of thinking of it primarily as the supreme opportunity for happiness. There are those who are led away from the thought of childhood as a time to be happy in the effort to use the opportunity of these early years to prepare for later happiness and success. When the parent takes this attitude he attempts to utilize every resource that can be made to furnish the foundation for mature achievement. Throughout childhood, the child is thought of as a candidate for adult experience. The effort is not so much to make him happy as to give him a good preparation for his adult career, even though at the time the child may find the training irksome and cannot have any sense of the value of the routine that is being forced upon him.

Although there are parents that drive hard for one of these two goals of childhood, there is no need of choosing one to the neglect of the other.

A wholesome parent will desire both to make his child happy during his childhood experience and at the same time lay a good foundation for later success and joy of living. At no time will this parent commit himself so entirely to either motive as to lose sight of the other. As he deals day by day with the child’s needs, he will keep constantly in mind the necessity of thinking both of present and of future, as he manipulates the child’s growth. He will remember that childhood is not an episode that can be left behind as the personality travels forward to greater maturity, but that what happens in the early years must forever have chief importance in the history of the individual. He will not forget, however, that if he concentrates entirely upon adult values he runs the risk of squeezing out of childhood the spontaneity and love of life that make up its distinct flavor and have so much to do with establishing that basic confidence in life which helps or hampers later behavior on the adult level. To think of childhood exclusively as either a playtime or a period for discipline involves the risk of a lopsided growth of personality.

When the parent chooses a clear and reasonable policy, he merely determines his aim. Immediately the question arises, How shall he accomplish his purpose? This question brings him to the problem of method. He knows what he wishes to accomplish. He must also learn how to bring about what he desires. Faulty tactics may produce exactly opposite results from those which he desires. He must learn to handle children, and especially his own child. His program cannot remain abstract principles, nor can he depend upon a system of set rules. Human life is not putty that can be pushed into shape. In the growth of personality we deal with an inner life that reacts to the influences that come from the outside.

Parenthood is an art, and however successful science becomes in establishing the facts of childcare, practical parenthood will always require adaptability and the specific application of the information science gathers to the particular child that is being educated. No parent can be good and at the same time mechanical. No parent can be discerning and also rigid in practice. It is this importance of application and skill in the actual doing of things that gives to parenthood its charm and forbids the parent who has eyes to see from ever getting self-satisfied or arrogant in his confidence. The good parent like a skilled gardener must tenderly handle each growing child with insight and find delight in seeing a unique personality start to grow into a life that will not exactly copy the parent or any one with whom the child has been thrown in contact. The good parent never deceives himself into thinking that he is molding the life of the little one in his charge. He is content to furnish the means of growth and always seeks to discover how the child can be best helped to be both happy and well equipped for life. 3 7 When we look closely at parenthood in practice, we find four common programs that seem to represent the various attitudes parents take toward childhood. In one the purpose of the parent is primarily to retard the development of the child. Here every effort is made to increase the feeling of dependence upon the parent, and often unconsciously the father or mother — and more often it is the mother — builds up such a strong emotional attachment that the child’s normal growth is lessened and finally perhaps comes to an end in what the scientist calls ‘ parental fixation.’ This means that the child does not show the usual independence characteristic of children. In his relation with his mother he finds such satisfaction that he is little tempted to travel outside the limited associations that were naturally his during early infancy. When he does make effort to pry himself loose from her dominance, his wholesome effort is discouraged by the mother who satisfies herself by insisting that he is not yet ready to meet the temptations and dangers of the wider world.

When we get at the bottom of this policy of retardation, we find that it is most commonly built upon the emotion of fear. The mother dares not meet rivalry lest she lose the supreme place she has had in the affection of her child. She is worried when she finds that his impulses are tending to attract him toward other people and experiences that she cannot share. She is afraid of losing his affection, afraid of the mistakes that he may make through his ignorance of life, afraid of the criticism which may come to the family because of his failures, afraid of numerous consequences that her imagination builds up as likely to result if he attempts to stand alone without the advantage of her support. It is generally true that this fear is born within the mother, a product of personality difficulties which she usually does not herself recognize. Life has been too much for her, and in her affection for her child she compensates for her inability to handle the world. Her child remains her one support in a dissatisfying life, and since she has loaded upon him all her hopes in living she is fearful lest by some accident she lose her one source of satisfactions.

Perhaps she has made some grievous mistake. To be sure, this experience often does not justify the timidity the woman feels. Even at times it is largely imaginary. But this in no degree takes from it the power of influencing the mother who overprotects her child. Most unfortunate of all, as he grows older, the mother does not in any large measure change her attitude, but continues to think of her child as an infant, requiring her assistance in every way possible, and even though the child struggles as he approaches adolescence to cut himself away from the ties that are smothering his personality, success is often impossible, since to accomplish this requires that he break away from the affection which he as well as the mother has found a source of intense pleasure.

Another program not so frequently found, but by no means uncommon, is the exact opposite of this policy. Here the father or the mother — often it is the father — overstimulates the child and handles him in such way as precociously to develop his personality. He is hurried forward as if childhood were a malady from which he must escape as quickly as he possibly can. Behind this policy we usually find in the parent the motive of vanity. The child is being made use of to show off in such a way as to give the parent the feeling that he is obtaining distinction through the precocious maturity of his offspring. Apparently such a program often starts from mere accident; the child receives commendation for some acquirement which he has developed and which may even show an awakening talent. Just as soon as this is discovered and the father senses the fact that his offspring is receiving attention, he undertakes forcefully to push him forward.

It is surprising how much can be accomplished if the child be trained like an animal to make headway along one line of activity. But it is most disheartening in the end for the parent to discover that this training, when it is the product of overstimulation and precocious development, so often disappears as the child comes close to maturity. The youth may rebel at the program which he accepted with such docility in his earlier years and may come to have an intense hatred for the very thing which to the parent appeared the promise of genius. It is an extraordinary revelation of parental weakness, when the ambitious father or mother hurries the child through his formative period in the hope of getting distinction by precociously bringing the child to maturity. This forcing process is equally deadly, whether looked at as a means of making the child happy, or as a process of preparing him for life. Parental vanity is as dangerous for the child as is parental fear.

A third program followed by parents has perhaps in the past been the favorite practice of fathers and mothers. This can best be described as a molding policy. The child is treated as if he were a substance to be entirely shaped by outside influences. The parent conceives the child as merely an extension of his own power. Sometimes he expects his offspring to carry on what he himself has failed to do or did not have opportunity to work out because of adverse circumstances. The parent has a sense of power as he looks toward the future and sees in his child the personality that can be made according to parental will and led into a life occupation which the parent regards as desirable. It is of course the parent’s love of power that explains the popularity of this policy of molding the child. It is always the temptation of adults dealing with children that they should conceive of their opportunity as a commission to shape the unformed life entirely according to their own belief as to what is desirable.

In spite of the large success that parents have in directing the growing life of their children, there is always a limit not only to what they can do, but to what they have a right to attempt to do. They are unfair to their child if they forget that the fundamental question is not what they would like the child to be or do, but what he must become or learn to do in order to obtain the largest satisfaction in life. He is never a second edition of the parent, but a unique personality, sometimes largely different in all important aspects from either father or mother. The molding process, so far as it is successful, often warps the personality and destroys the incentive which the child requires in later life if he is to do well the life work which he assumes. As a matter of fact, it is seldom that the parent finds in actual practice that his control is sufficient to shape the personality of the child in the degree that he thinks desirable. What comes about is a struggle between the child and the parent in which self-expression is pitted against the love of power — a contest which is decidedly dangerous to affection, and likely to end in the unhappiness of both parent and child.

There is another policy, and it is the only one to be defended. The parent that accepts this program tries to discover promising trends in the personality of the little one, and to furnish means of growth which will permit the life to develop according to its bent. This policy steers away from interference, but accepts the responsibilities of guidance and of bringing to the child the conditions of growth. The meaning of human personality is sacredly recognized and every effort is made to help the inner life of the child to unfold itself, so that he will be happy as he grows and successful finally in his testing by the responsibilities of maturity. The parent is especially careful not to overwhelm the life of the little one by unrestrained affection or too much authority. He is not afraid to have his child grow up and he has no disposition to force the developing life into a mold, after the manner of the vain parent.

In order to maintain a well-balanced program one must keep in mind the different kinds of achievements that one wants a child to make. Perhaps these can be most helpfully catalogued under contact as a means of growth. Curiosity, or intellectual contact, emphasizes the values of the mental life. Curiosity in the child is the hunger and thirst of the mind. Because of it he is eager to see, handle, taste, and manipulate one object after another as they come into his grasp. Soon his curiosity takes the form of question-asking in the effort to understand the various queer things that he finds taking place about him. The greater his alertness, the more eager he is to satisfy his curiosity. Curiosity stands in his life as a passageway through which the subtance goes which enters into the development of his mind. Troublesome as it often is to older people, since it leads the child into mischievous investigation, curiosity, nevertheless, furnishes the parent with considerable power over the mental development of his offspring. If he suppresses and discourages curiosity, he obstructs the intellectual growth of the child. His antagonism to the normal curious searching of the child for more experience and better knowledge hampers intellectual vigor and in time even crushes the power of being interested, so that the child is thwarted in his effort to understand the fascinating things and events of his everyday life. On the other hand, the parent who seriously enlists curiosity upon his side as an asset to be used in cultivating to their utmost the resources of the child’s mind stimulates, as perhaps nothing else can, the intellectual growth of the child. In teaching, whether carried on by the parent or by a professional pedagogue, it is most important that curiosity be utilized rather than suppressed. Just as soon as curiosity fades away, the learning process thrust upon the child yields little permanent good.

One of the certainties of life is that the happiness and success of every child is largely conditioned by the attitude he takes in his association with others. As he grows up it is bound to follow that he has an attitude regarding his social contacts which can be said to be characteristic of his personality. This he gets from his early experience. Sympathy, or personal contact, represents something of equal importance with curiosity in the development of the human personality. Whether he wills it or not, the parent by his example and by his comments, made carelessly and often with less meaning than the child reads into them, constructs in the child friendliness and fairness in his associations, or the attitudes of antipathy, prejudice and a proneness to be unjust. What the parent says and what he reveals in his personal reactions, brought out either by criticism or by recoil, deeply enters the growing life of the child and conditions him in an extraordinary degree in his social habits.