Parenting - Room To Grow In

( Originally Published 1914 )

I WAS connected for some years with a very large, fine, modern school in New York City, which drew its clientèle from the most enlightened and highly educated class of the community. The parents of the children in the school were not millionaires, but they had, as a rule, plenty of money to arrange their lives and their children's lives as they saw fit. They were not educational experts, but they were all intelligent, cultivated people, who took the most earnest and conscientious interest in their children's welfare. Their children had the best food and nothing but the best, and their accomplishments were as carefully looked out for as their diet. Beside the excellent school-program, they had music-lessons, they learned to draw, they were taken to improving matinées and Shakespearean plays, they had pretty, professional, lady-story-tellers recite fine old myths and legends to them ; as soon as they were old enough they were taken to the opera after a due study of Wagnerian motifs, they acted in little historic dramas, they went to dancing-classes. Never were there children, I used to think, so favored by every improving circumstance.

One day I had occasion to ask a boy in the fifth grade, a nice little fellow of ten, to set a time when he could make an expedition with me into the woods to gather wild-flowers. It seemed this was a new experience for him: greatly delighted at the prospect, he began to plan for the trip. He could not go that afternoon after school, he told me, because it was the day when he was taken to the Natural History Museum to look at the specimens, and after that he had his French conversation, and then it would be dinner-time. The next day was no better, for he was to have a riding-lesson and be taken to the Metropolitan Museum to look at the pictures, and the day after that was his regular German walk-and-talk, and his semi-weekly lesson on the violin. To make a long story short, and to cut through a lengthy cross-examination to the conclusion very surprising to me, we discovered that he had no free time in the afternoon in view for at least a month. This was as far into the future as time allowed us to investigate. I tried the morning with no better result. Yes, he had an hour before starting to school, but that was always taken up by his daily stint of practicing on the violin. There wasn't any other time for that, and Mother never allowed anything to interfere with it. Once you began to break in on it, she said, there was no stopping. The little boy seemed to find all this quite natural (" the days are pretty short, you know," he said soberly ; " a person doesn't have time for much "), but as I looked at his diminutive stature and remembered the golden leisure of my own childhood's after-school hours, I said impulsively : " Bobby, dear, when do you ever play? " Bobby's face brightened into rapture. " At recess-time ! " he cried ardently. Recess-time, I hasten to explain, is ten minutes twice a day.

I was so startled by this revelation that I began a series of investigations into the lives of a number of the other intensively educated children in that school. I found the same conditions prevailing in them all. Down to the smallest and up to the biggest they were given everything that could conduce to their development, except time to develop. With little attention given to their powers of digestion, their little beaks were held open while one mature bird after another stuffed down their throats an endless succession of succulent worms. Some moral, mental, or esthetic pabulum was being fed them every waking moment, with no intervening time to exercise and digest what was digestible and throw off what was unsuitable, and consequently with no clear idea on the part of the guardians as to whether they were being effectively strengthened by it or not. I was not surprised to learn that in the summer they were often sent to country localities, where, under the watchful eye of expert " play-leaders," they " learned how to play." One mother, noting my interest in the phenomenon, said to me proudly : " I have the satisfaction of knowing that every moment of Eleanor's life from her babyhood on has been profitably employed. We have a splendid Frauleir for her, who teaches her the irregular verbs in German while she is having her hair brushed, and her father gives her exercises in mental arithmetic while we are at breakfast."

I was reminded of a quaint old country story about a Mrs. Purdon, who has thrown all her soul into her occupation of butter-making. Summoned to watch a superb sunset, flaming through a gap in the mountains, she said: " Yes, I always do love to watch a sunset. The sun looks to me just like a great butter-ball, and I get to thinking what a satisfaction it would be if I could jam my wooden print down on it and mark it with a nice, clear P."

They were marking their suns with nice, clear P's, those competent, carefully overseeing parents, who doled out each minute of the child's life to feed some prejudice of their caste or to sink them deep in the grooves of the customary, and who left the children in which to draw a few breaths of their very own exactly ten minutes twice a day.

Now, it may seem that this sort of intensive, organized instruction is so far out of the common run of ordinary American life that most of us plain, middle-class people need no warning against it, but it may be well to examine our hearts to see if we are not as a class weakening somewhat in the old American tradition that if the children have gone to school and done what small "chores " are set them, they are entitled to whatever remains of the day? Does not the increasing complexity of our own lives insensibly color our children's lives? Whether or not we actually do put a constricting pressure upon the children to use even the chinks and fragments of their time to acquire accomplishments which seem to us profitable, do we not feel that perhaps we ought to ? Are we not obsessed as parents as well as in other relations of life with the modern necessity to be " competent," to be " efficient " according to the latest fashions of those virtues. Our children do still escape from us into play-times of blessed spontaneity, but is this not frequently because we have not the money to live up to a mistaken ideal? If we are very " plain" people indeed, we are apt to look rather wistfully from the well-groomed, prince-like child, playing prettily with a French attendant, to our own undistinguished children, who escape from school yelling like Indians and spend every minute of the rest of the day playing and playing and playing with each other, exhibiting an energy almost alarming to witness. If we have ambitions to pass out of the ranks of " plain" people, do we not be-gin our imitations of our financial superiors by trying to make over our children according to their standards? We do not want our children to be without the " advantages " enjoyed by other people's children. That they might pay for these superficial accomplishments with the loss of the wonderful elasticity and wealth of forward-thrusting initiative which is their birthright is not apparent enough to alarm us.

The best educators of all the centuries may tell us that the hours spent on the playground are frequently the most profitable of the child's schooling, the fact remains that the child at play looks to us like an idling child. Many of our most precious recollections, which will endure and gild our old age, may be of the regal leisure and untrammeled freedom of our own vacations and out-of-school hours when we faced life like joyous conquerors, and in exploring the world discovered ourselves, but we hesitate to give our children the same heritage of freedom and space in which the simpler conditions of our own childhood allowed us to throw our limbs about and to discover their strength.

Information is good, accomplishments are good, parlor tricks have nothing wrong with them, but it is well known that there can be too much of a good thing, and that enough is not only as good as a feast, but far better. A surprising number of accomplishments (though, of course, not all) and an immense amount of information, to acquire which are expended long hours and days out of a child's life, can be acquired, if they are needed ih maturity, by a few vigorous applications of the adult mind. If they are not needed, the time spent on them might have been better employed. Any grown person who cares to do so can learn as much of the story and philosophy of the Wagnerian operas in three hours of concentration as a child in several months of in-frequent, elementary lessons. He can learn as much of a foreign language (except the accent, which is but the ornamental part of the knowledge of a language) in three months of real application as a child in several years of enforced, disconnected instruction through " conversations." The amount of time and youthful strength wasted in the usual " music-lessons " and the pitiably small amount of musical knowledge thus acquired is notorious. It is more than possible that that time would have been better employed in playing with all the childish might and main some game requiring forethought, decision, and agility, qualities not to be secured in a hurry, by any effort of the mature intellect, but only by endless practice, the free exercise of them, and the long habit of using them.

We ought to rejoice that our generally moderate means, the detested high cost of living, and the free and easy tradition of most American communities all combine to keep our children as yet nearer the ideal of the wisest educators than our own unenlightened choice would dare to have them, and we ought to try to see to it that their lives continue to be conducted with the fortifying simplicity which we have failed so notoriously to conserve in our own. We ought to clear our minds of the fallacy that if only the improving pellets are so well greased with pleasing details that they slip down almost unperceived by the swallowing child, he can therefore assimilate all we can get down him. We ought to stand guard over him, protecting him from the tendency of the times to a deadly multiplicity of impression, by seeing to it that he has time between vivid impressions to absorb them and make them part of his growth. Nothing could be more blamelessly improving than an " educational " moving-picture show, but a child who is taken to one every day ends by knowing nothing of any one of them.