The Scientific Spirit For Mothers

( Originally Published 1914 )

OBSERVATION

THERE are a number of questions in the world of thought which are everlastingly being settled by wise men in council and then bobbing up after-wards, quite as interrogatory as before. Some of these, like the Table of Elements in Chemistry and the Resistance of Materials in Engineering, concern most of us unlettered people scarcely at all. But there is one which remains perhaps more of a question than any other, the question of the relative importance of heredity and environment, and that affects us in every paternal act and judgment. The insoluble riddle of free-will and predestination which addled the brains and embittered the lives of our theological-minded forebears is rather out of fashion now, but we do lose our breath as we try to keep up with the latest news of the varying fortunes of the war of specialists as to whether people are born so or are made so by what happens to them after birth.

Of course, although there is not a class of people in existence more vitally affected by this subject than parents, it would be presumptuous for us to take a hand in the discussion. We are so busy feeding the children, bathing, dressing, and playing with them; so busy with trying somehow to bring them up, that we have no time to go off to laboratories or to spend long months in experimental psychologizing. We must stay on our job and somehow muddle through. But though we may not hope to help solve the question to the satisfaction of specialists, we may, if we will, get a great deal of help from them in unraveling that tangled end of it which practically affects our paternal efficiency. Without stirring a step from home or lifting our eyes for an instant from the urgent needs of the present clamoring younger generation, we can import into our lives an enlightening, elucidating factor which is more important to the specialist than all his array of test tubes and vacuums, a factor without which Mendel and Darwin would have made no headway. This factor is the " scientific spirit."

Learned men make such a to do about the importance of this spirit, about the revolution accomplished by it in the world of thought, and about the prostrate reverence felt towards it by the greatest scientists, that most of us have not ventured to assume that we might turn it to account in our own problems. And yet it is not really so esoteric an affair. If you can corner an honest and clear-headed scientist and get him to forego big words, you will find that the scientific spirit is nothing more or less than the habit of thoroughly examining the facts of a case before you begin to theorize about them ; and then basing your conclusions solely on the facts as they are and not on your prejudice. It is true that your scientist will be very likely to tell you that this is not so simple as it sounds, and that only the highest type of mind can learn to suspend judgment until sufficient data are gathered on which to form an intelligent opinion. There is apparently in the human brain the most deeply-rooted desire to have a theory at all costs, be the facts what they may. The whole function of the scientific spirit is to combat this tendency, whether in a bacteriologist who is longing to find confirmation of his pet notion about the nature of a germ, or in a parent who insists on believing that his son is born to be a diplomat, when any chance observer can see that the boy's chances of happiness and usefulness would be infinitely greater as a scientific farmer. Indeed, though this spirit of open-minded attention to the actual facts of a case is important to bacteriologists, it is perhaps more so to mothers and fathers. Yet there is no class which uses it less. In the first place, we are more or less obsessed, modern though we may be, by the sentimental, romantic-school notion that it is somehow not quite "nice " to try to see clearly where the affections are concerned, and that a certain amount of foggy obscurity about the objects of one's love is more decorous than clear-sighted affection. But even though we may have cast off this queer old conception, it is very hard to see the children as they are or even to make much of an effort to stand off and get a conception of their character as a whole. They are so close to us for good and ill, we love them so intensely, they exasperate us so, they make up so utterly the happiness and discomfort of our lives, that it is almost as hard to know what sort of human beings they are as to make a guess as to what sort we are ourselves ; and yet that knowledge in either case is essential to intelligent action. And the most rudimentary acquaintance with the procedure of scientists shows us that the only way to acquire knowledge about any given phenomenon is to observe it, to observe it with all one's might and main and eye and sense and capacity for logic. The plant-specialist spends a year or more observing minutely the habits of a new radish imported from China before he ventures to expect any sure results in handling it. The bacteriologist keeps his eye glued to the microscope over the culture of his particular microbe for hours on end, devoting every atom of his energy to mere devout concentration on what happens. The entomologist studies with a gravity highly entertaining to outsiders every preference, every capacity of the insect he is observing. The parent has an object of research very much livelier than a radish, more complicated than a microbe, and with a vastly greater range of capacities than any insect.

Do we parents, as a rule, make any definite efforts to see what sort of children we have before we begin to try to influence them? Do we, laying aside personal feelings and preferences, try whole heartedly to see what possibilities have been passed on to them from their very mixed ancestry? Do we face honestly the facts of the case, which are that we are presented with a brand new human being, different from every other human being who has ever lived, and that our job is somehow to guess at the treatment which will be best for him? As a rule, we do not. We have, most of us, a preconceived idea of what a " nice child should be, an ideal which we compose of all those desirable qualities which hap-pen to appeal to our personal tastes, and from which are absent all those undesirable qualities which chance to be especially disagreeable to us. If we are big, hearty, athletic people, as many parents nowadays are, our ideal is strongly colored with big, hearty, athletic qualities. " Anything," we say to Destiny, " so long as the children are fearless, healthy, and full of vigor ! We won't mind their being noisy and obstreperous, if only they are daring and strong."

If we are quiet, studious people, fond of reading and music and gardening, our ideal child sits in our imagination rapt in a book of poetry or playing on the piano or delving happily in a bed of roses. " Anything," we say to Fate, " so long as the children have a taste for the finer, eternal things of the spirit. We won't ask them to be money-makers or to be presidents of their class in college, if they will only learn the comfort and satisfaction that lie in books and music."

Both varieties of parents have naïvely announced to Destiny that they will be perfectly satisfied if she will give them exactly the sort of children they want. And Destiny is very apt to return her usual whimsical answer to ultimatums about what people want and do not want, and to reply that they can want what they have or get along without. For the human race is a very mixed affair, and, though the children of Chinese parents are always Chinese and the children of Caucasians are always Caucasians, the children of athletic, sociable, forceful people are by no means always of that variety ; and the children of studious, quiet people are as apt as not to have pronounced tastes for bright colors in dress, for high speed in automobiles, and for the lively expenditure of the money which they competently amass.

We parents may never be specialists in the study of heredity and environment, but none of us, observing the children we really have, can claim that they are ours alone. We cannot fail to see that they be-long to our grandfathers and great grandfathers as well as to us ; and though we may not be able to follow all the delicate qualifications of scientific opinions about the relative importance of environment and inherited tendencies, most of us who have had the opportunity to observe the growth and development of children have come to the practical conclusion that training, if it is to be successful, must follow the lines of deeply ingrained native tendencies. We only waste good material if we try to whittle a round peg to fit a square hole, The thing to do is to try to find a round hole which it will fit. We merely waste time when we try to induce the child by hook or by crook to produce what is not in him.

Therefore, perhaps the very most pressing of all parental duties is the endeavor to know what is in the child. There is, alas ! no very accurate way of finding this out, and we might as well resign ourselves in the beginning to making a good many mistakes in our guesses at it ; but it is certain that the only way to have any idea at all is to follow the scientist's procedure of habitual observation carried on by clear eyes and directed by lucid desire to attain the truth lying back of the facts observed.

Most of us can testify ruefully that this is not in the least the usual parental procedure. We are very apt to snatch up a few personal preferences as to the kind of children we have always liked, to shut our eyes to the material we actually have, and to go it blind with much energy, ordaining that Margery must be taught the piano because it is nice for girls to know how to play, that Harry's over-confidence must be scourged out of him because we have always detested a bumptious man, and that Polly's shyness must suffer daily direct attacks because nowadays a girl is nobody unless she is a " good mixer."

And thus we set to work on our home garden-plot with nothing but general ideas of what is desirable from a horticultural standpoint; our ideas may be sound enough as average abstractions, but still have nothing to do with the particular seedlings which chance has given us to care for. We try to pull our slow-growing little oak-trees up into the long, graceful, quickly-attained lines of the woodbine, and we try by assiduously pinching off every tendril and runner to give our woodbines the sturdy strength of young oaks. We try to graft grapes upon pine-trees and to produce pine-cones from pea-vines. Such is the astonishing persistence of Nature that in spite of us our pine-trees usually grow tall and stately and produce pinecones (perhaps not so many as if we had not tried to make them roses), our pea vines reach out desperately, cling to any chance support, and produce peas (perhaps not so succulent as if we had supplied the right support from the beginning), and our children usually grow up to be useful and happy citizens of the State, though with great frequency citizens entirely different from the type we selected for them. And we? According to our temperaments, we exclaim over the utter unaccountability of the vegetable kingdom or we take great credit to ourselves for the fine plants we have grown or we look back quizzically at the deluded self-importance of the years of our bustling here and there in the garden.

If we smile it is not, dear knows, because there was no need for the right kind of pruning and cutting and grafting; we mingle tears with our laughter over the time wasted in useless efforts to frustrate the nature of things. It is true that a pea-vine will never produce pine-cones, no matter how ingeniously the gardener labors, but neither will it produce peas to any appreciable amount unless the gardener labors wisely. What we are called upon to do is to help each plant, each child, to grow into the most perfect specimen possible of that type of creature to which he belongs, and not to try to turn him into another type. We need not let natural inclinations run wild. The shy, studious boy needs stimulation to be social and active because his health and character will suffer if he becomes too one sided ; but there is no use in trying to turn him into a bluff, hearty, hail fellow well met. It is very much better to try to make a chemist or a mathematician out of him than a soldier or a business-man who must know how to handle men. The loud, self-assertive girl needs training in gentleness and refinement because she will be insufferable if her main characteristics are not tempered by good taste; but it is a hideous waste of good material to try to chasten out of her the self-confidence which should, if properly directed, carry her through many great and fine enterprises, simply because one's personal tastes lean to the low voiced, tranquil browed, self effacing lady.

The real difficulty is always to determine the type of creature to which our children belong. And yet, if we cannot, who can? Nobody has such an opportunity to observe our children as we who have seen them hourly and daily from their birth up. Whose fault is it that we have so often a totally wrong impression of them?

The greatest specialist in the world can make a correct diagnosis only on a basis of complete information as to the facts, and in the usual case of the usual human child, the only person who is in a position to have complete information about the facts is the mother. Hence the urgent need for her to train herself to observe the facts, all of them, without prejudice, clearly, and in their entirety; in other words, to possess and be possessed by the scientific spirit.

This does not mean test-tubes in laboratories or the reading of many heavy books or long years of professional training (although, of course, the knowledge of some broad general principles of education and philosophy is a great help in interpreting facts). It means an open mind, a clear eye, sound judgment, logic, a good temper, and, most important, a full realization that we American mothers of the middle classes who care for our own children have, through this close contact with them, the most enormous advantage over even the wisest and deepest of specialists in " child-training." Every action of the child at every age (provided that it is a spontaneous action) is, to understanding eyes, a shadowing-forth of the child's character and possibilities, and as such should be scrutinized calmly and impartially by the mother. She should be ashamed that a man in a greenhouse should devote more intelligent attention to a radish plant than she to her own children.

But this process of observation is complicated and made more difficult by the fact that we mothers are very human, very fallible, very ill-trained, not very completely grown up ourselves in many cases; that we are called upon (lest we become too narrow and one-sided) to be wives and citizens and housekeepers as well as mothers ; that we are very often tired, often discouraged, and very, very often not clear headed this last is the worst of all.

Take a case that has probably happened to all of. us. Suppose that we are getting a meal and little Pete flies into a passion because the building of his house of blocks is interrupted by the setting of the table. We are very apt to respond by an involuntary reflex nervous reaction to his yells of rage, and to say to him with considerable justified exasperation: " Good gracious, Pete, you can't expect the family to wait dinner an hour just because you happen to be using the table for play ! " and to make in our own minds the bitter reflection : " Mercy, what a temper that child has ! Just like his grandfather ! "

All this means that from a given fact in the child's life we have extracted two correct conclusions about his character, that he has a hot temper and that he is unreasonable (as all children are) ; but because we happened at the moment to be very busy and preoccupied we have missed a great many other important meanings inherent in that incident which an observer with the scientific spirit would have noted.

Perhaps we are not very much to blame for not perceiving all the significance of that little incident at that precise moment. Preparing a meal is really a very absorbing and important task, and it is hard to have much attention left over from its processes for other facts. But what we could do, all of us, if we were willing, would be so to simplify our lives that we should have every night before going to bed a quiet half-hour of meditation, devoted to the cultivation of the scientific spirit as applied to our children.

The darning-bag or any other occupation which needs little attention is a good accompaniment to this period of reflection. Seated thus, with the children in bed, the house quiet, your own tired body at rest, go over in your mind (or if you are blessed with a home-keeping husband who takes his fatherhood seriously go over with him) the little events of the children's life that day, bringing to their interpretation all your good judgment, your sanity, and your woman's intuition. Try to see the facts (the only basis for your knowledge of your children) in their entirety, and not merely those sides and phases of them which affected you personally. Try to under-stand some of the complex instincts in the childish mind which prompted the actions of the day. Don't simply think them "nice" or "horrid," as the case may be; don't merely judge them by how they made the children "appear" to others, but try to make some sound, coherent sense out of them in the light of your previous observation. Look at what happened from all points of view.

Pete yelled and kicked because he was unreasonable and hot tempered. Yes, that is true, but Pete's playmate, your neighbor's little boy, who is also unreasonable and quick-tempered, showed no anger, but turned away with perfect indifference from the ruined block-house and began good-naturedly to play with the cat. At the time you thought unresignedly that some people's children were a great deal easier to get along with than yours. But is there not more than appears at first sight in that difference between Pete and his playmate? Isn't it possible that Pete has ingrained in his character a dislike to give up an undertaking until he has carried it through to success? Is this theory borne out by other things you have noticed about Pete? Now that you are calm yourself, and that his exhibition of noisy temper is no longer rasping your nerves, think over the circumstances and correlate them with other facts you have noticed, and instead of being merely annoyed by them try to make sense out of them.

no they mean, perhaps, that one of the factors in your son's character is perseverance? If so, in the quiet of that half-hour's meditation over the darning-bag you will do well to offer up a silent thanks-giving for such a lever to use in helping Pete for-ward to his life-work. And you may also very well have a vision of Pete no longer a passionate, uncontrolled four-year-old, but a forceful, strong, purposeful man, an engineer perhaps, building a great dam, who feels for the attempts of floods and wind to force him from his undertaking the same resentment as that he felt towards you today for forcing him from his house of blocks, and who benefits man-kind by turning the heat of his resentment into a great triumph over the brute forces of nature.

Yes, all of that you are entitled to foreshadow with a mother's inspired imagination out of Pete's fit of " naughtiness," and while still recognizing it for naughtiness you will no longer envy your neighbor the listless indifference of her little son. The same quality in him which now makes him yield so conveniently and good naturedly to you will probably make him yield weakly when the flood comes, and he may make no effort to prevent his half-built dam from going down.

There is one very necessary precaution you must bear in mind in the attempt to theorize about your children from observation of them. Your observation must be disinterested and genuine. You must see what is really there and not what would fit your theories to see. Your conceptions of your children's characters must be flexible enough to be modified by developments. Anything in the world is better than an idea so fixed that you look at facts in its light rather than in the light of truth. Come to your nightly séance with the scientific spirit, bringing a perfectly fresh and open mind. One of the illuminating anecdotes told about Darwin is beneficial to remember. The great scientist was observing and experimenting on some monkeys to get confirmation for his theories. His son reports that his father used to say patiently nearly every day : " Well, well, those little fellows keep doing exactly what I don't want them to!" His perfectly clear perception of what they really did do, in spite of the fact that it went against the theory he hoped to establish, and his patience in changing the theory till it conformed with the facts, made Darwin the great scientist he was. It is Dr. Montessori's perfectly clear perception of what children really are which makes her the great educator she is, and it is perfectly clear observation of what her children really are which makes a good mother.