Parenting - One Key For All Locks

( Originally Published 1914 )

I WATCHED a little incident the other day which, upon consideration, seemed to me a neatly-pointed satire upon the methods which I (and all parents) not infrequently use in regard to the employment of obedience. I chanced to arrive at the apartment of a friend a little early for my appointment with her, and the elevator man, showing a bunch of keys, said she was still out and had asked him to open the door for me when I came. We went up together and the man began operations on the lock, thrusting one of the keys into the hole and turning it with vigor. The door refused to open. " You haven't the right key," I suggested in perhaps an unnecessarily cocksure tone. The man looked irritated. " Yes it is," he said, still struggling to turn it. " She showed me which one. It's the right key all right." He took it out, turned it upside down, made a futile attempt to insert it into the hole, turned it back again, and stuck it in with an ugly look of obstinate determination, turning it hard with all his strength. I had the unwisdom to insist. " Oh, I'm sure you haven't the right key." I was afraid he would break it off out of sheer temper. He gave me a black look and said : " I guess I know which one she told me." To my relief the superintendent of the building chanced along and took charge of the operation. I was struck by the difference of his attack. Swiftly, deftly, he tried each key in succession, pressing it lightly to the right, and instantly desisting as he encountered the dead, unyielding resistance of metal upon metal. In a moment the door opened smoothly. He handed me the keys, nodded, and passed on, evidently dismissing the trivial and very familiar episode from his mind. But as I sat waiting for my friend it occurred to me that in my relations with children I frequently resembled the elevator man struggling, with a sour, grim determination, to unlock the door with the particular key which I had made up my mind was the right one. When any problem comes up the paternal instinct is so often to brandish authority and solve all difficulties by the use of the children's obedience. In so doing we must often force open doors and forever injure locks which might have yielded without resistance if another key had been tried. There are so many aspects to life, childish life as well as adult, there is such a richness of variety in motive and impulses, that we show a great barrenness of imagination by insisting upon treating everything by the application of one corrective. When the children arrive at the stage where it is very hard for them to restrain their purely muscular motor impulses, why not adapt our methods of necessary restraint to that particular condition and not simply stretch the children on the Procrustean bed of the necessity to obey. For instance, when they come to the phase (through which every child passes) where it is almost impossible for them to have scissors in their hands and not cut something, why attack that difficulty solely through the enforcement of obedience? Why not remove temptation from them positively by giving them plenty of paper and rags to cut when they are seen to baye scissors in their hands, and negatively by hanging the scissors out of reach? In such a short time, often only a few months, their rapid, normal growth in strength and poise will have carried them safely past this babyish weakness forever, that it seems a pity to em-bitter those months with unavailing attempts to force them to resist a temptation with which as yet they are simply physically not able to cope. In a prayer which we constantly use with a humble sense of our own weakness we entreat that we may not be led into temptation. We might do well to remember that supplication in our plans for the children's lives. In addition to exacting obedience from them we might try to make the occasions when obedience is extremely difficult as few as possible. We might in every way make more of an effort during the years of their immaturity not to lead them into temptations which try their undeveloped strength too hardly. The other day I happened to take to a big modern department-store a little country girl brought up in a remote valley among our little-visited mountain country. As I walked about shopping I was struck by the strange change in the child's demeanor. In her own home I had observed her, radiant, rosy, fairly thrilling to the eye with the joy of life. She now clung to my hand in an agitated silence, observing all the multifarious objects artfully displayed about us with quick, attentive, troubled eyes. " Don't you like it, dear?'" I asked her finally. She flung out her little hand with a passionate gesture. " It makes me want so much things ! " she cried in a broken, unhappy voice of covetousness. We ourselves must struggle with what temptations fall in our way as best we can and only pray to be spared those beyond our power to resist; but, since the ordering 9f our children's lives is to a considerable extent within our power, why should we not try to shield them from unnecessarily hard trials of their strength, rather than to call upon the principle of submission to us to make up for our lack of forethought? One of the commands which it is hardest for little children to obey is the order, "Do keep quiet ! " "Don't make so much noise! " Knowing this to be especially hard for them, why should we not endeavor to plan their lives so that they shall not encounter this great difficulty more than is really necessary during their early years, rather than having it as a constant subject of friction between us and them. And in the matter of good things to eat and drink, which exercise such an almost irresistible sway over children (still to a great extent little animals), why not avoid leading them into too frequent and too poignant temptation by dangling before their eyes the glittering bait which we may, but they must not, swallow?

We parents must frequently seem to impartial outsiders like monomaniacs with but one idea in our heads, the frantic fear that we may be disobeyed. We not only force and smash and break open all locks by using the same key, but we insist upon applying it to doors which do not need opening in the least. To have the children obey when it is necessary to obey is not enough; we become so obsessed with the idea of authority and submission that we must needs be after them every moment, wringing obedience from them on matters which are of no importance, however they are decided. Here is a dialogue which I heard with my own ears. A mother came up a park path towards a children's sand-pile, leading her little girl by the hand. The child had a doll, which she began to put to sleep on the bench on which her mother found a seat. The mother said:

Ellen, you'd better go and play in the sand-pile."

Ellen said: " No, I don't want to. I want to put my dolly to sleep."

Her mother said, more insistently: " I said for you to go and play in the sand pile."

Ellen replied, with an increase in forcible emphasis on her own part : " I don't like sandpiles. I want to put my dolly to sleep."

Her mother said: " Ellen, did you hear me say you are to go and play in the sand-pile? You mind your mother or you'll get spanked!"

The singular part about this story is that of the large crowd of mothers and nurses gathered about the sandpile, all of whom heard the dialogue, not one was surprised. Not a head was turned, not an eye-brow raised. It was simply a mother, like all the rest of us, " maintaining discipline " by multiplying as much as possible the occasions when her will and the will of the child came into collision. The precise opposite of this policy is the one advocated by all the educators of genius and by those occasional women who have a genius for arranging life sanely. My mother has told me that she was aware that she was much criticised during her children's early years for her " weakness " in dealing with them. Although she never in her life read a word of Rousseau, her method almost exactly coincided with his theory. By the exercise of ingenuity, good humor, forethought, and a wise margin of flexibility she tried, in her own phrase, to " get around " the question of obedience, and as much as possible to avoid coming to frequent issues on the matter as long as the children were too small to be reasonable. Whenever it was really necessary, the strictest obedience was enforced ; but in most matters her children's lives, like all healthfully varied lives, were not colored at all by the question of either obedience or disobedience. It is amusingly illustrative of the insistence of the human mind upon a preconceived idea that everybody thought it " strange " and "unexpected " that her children should obey her willingly. It occurred to nobody that her escape from the distressing years of friction which fall to many mothers could mean that her method had any element of sanity in it.

With the knowledge of child physiology and psychology which trained minds are more than willing to impart to us, we modern parents should have a ringful of keys to use in the various problems of child training. We show ourselves singularly medieval in clinging so obstinately to the old idea of obedience as the cure-all for every situation.

It may be that the child who insists upon spoiling his clean clothes by playing with an oily lump of putty does not need to be spanked and put to bed for disobedience so much as given an apron and a big chunk of modeling-day to handle.

It may be that the little girls who whine and speak fretfully do not so much need to " be brought up with a round turn and made to mind " as to be given more beefsteak and eggs in their diet.

It is possible that the rapidly growing boy who is slouching and awkward does not so much need to obey the spasmodic command, " Do stand up straight ! " issued whenever the parent happens to think of it, as he needs a systematic course in gymnastics.

It is conceivable that the high-school girl who is " unruly " and disobeys parental commands to come home at once after school and to " keep off the streets " needs, instead of exhortations to submission, a number of innocent outlets to her desire for gayety and fun: to be allowed to bring her friends home with her, for example; to be taken to the theater; to go on walks with her mother.