Parenting - Moral Thermometers

( Originally Published 1914 )

The child who can rouse in us anger or impatience or excitement feels himself stronger than we; and a child respects strength only.--Amiel's Journal.

IT is my conviction that few of us appreciate the value of thermometers in promoting harmony in the home. There are even people with a prejudice against thermometers. Everybody knows the person who cries out impatiently : " Oh, why look at the thermometer ! Do you need quicksilver in a tube to tell whether you are cold? "

The sufficient answer is: "Well, I know how I feel, but I don't know how I am. Before I try to make conditions suit my present feeling, I'd better find out if it wouldn't be more reasonable to make my feelings suit the present conditions." When I have been sitting still, sewing or writing, and find my feet icy and the cold chills running up my back, it might be easy to conclude that the room is cold, that some-one is neglecting the stove or furnace, and that I have every right to make an aggrieved demand for more fire. But if I first consult the impartial little graduated tube and find that it registers seventy-two, there is but one thing for me to do, to get up and take some brisk exercise to stir my blood.

On the other hand, when I come in, glowing from a fine walk in frosty air, the nursery may seem more than warm enough for the baby's bath, and only a consultation of the thermometer keeps me from ex-posing the poor infant to a temperature little short of arctic. And ah ! the mutual recriminations when the person who is glowing from a walk gets into a discussion with the person who has been sitting sewing for a couple of hours. The matter simply must be referred to the little umpire on the wall.

What a blessing it would be if someone could in-vent a thermometer to set a truthful, unvarying standard of ethics ! What confusion it would clarify! What acrimonious discussions it would avert ! It would prevent mistakes (especially in the treatment of children) fully as disastrous as bathing the baby in a snowdrift would be. But alas ! a moral thermometer cannot be bought, like a material one of wood and glass, for twenty-five cents, nor indeed for a million dollars. It must be evolved with difficulty out of human intelligence and conscience.

Yet in the upbringing of children there is nothing which we need more than some method, surer than the passing sensation of the moment, for determining what is the real significance of any given act. If the state of our physical feeling can make us imagine that a cold room is warm and a warm room cold, how much more easily can the state of our nerves make us imagine a bad action a good one, and think that a good one is bad. On a Sunday morning, in the good half-hour of relaxation after a leisurely breakfast, nothing is more entertaining than to watch indulgently the noisy romps of the children " playing bear " with the rug, and imperiling every breakable object in the room. On Monday evening, after a hard day's work, in which everything has gone wrong, the very same children playing the very same game with the same degree of noise and potential destruction are told impatiently : " Do be quiet ! Don't be so naughty!" Now a moral thermometer would register that act of the children not as " naughty," but as the result of bad judgment. This rough game, suited for the barn or attic, did not become a wise one to play in a living-room merely because the parents felt good-natured on Sunday morning; neither on Monday evening does adult fatigue and irritation turn the children's failure to use good judgment into a willful crime.

But most children must learn to survive as best they can the wildly varying extremes of an ethical temperature that is determined, not by things as they are, but by things as they happen to affect their elders. They must learn to emulate the patient philosophy of the little boy who, upon being asked what wicked thing he had done that his mother should scold him so, explained briefly : " Oh, Mamma's got a nawful headache today." Under such a system what ideas of right and wrong will the children them selves learn? Will they not have the conception that a good action is something done when one's mother is feeling well and good-natured; a bad one, anything done when she has a headache?

Worst of all is the jangling when parents' nerves do not happen to agree with each other; when, for instance, the mother is feeling well and the father has a headache, or vice versa. One person is in the mood to accept childish noise as a cheerful evidence of health and good spirits ; the other flinches with a really physical sensitiveness from strident voices and toppling chairs. Then, not only are the unfortunate children judged according to an impermanent standard, but there is not even for the moment an agreement of authority as to what the standard shall be. What common ground can there be between two people in such totally contrasted moods? How can they ever agree about the amount and kind of suggestion, guidance, or reprimand to give the children? " How can they agree?" How can any human action be made more just, more equitable, if not by casting away one's petty personal "feelings" and referring oneself to eternal immutable standards?

Those standards, being august and mighty, are not to be consulted casually or carelessly. There are few rules-of-thumb to be extracted from a consideration of the eternal verities. One cannot refer to them as one does to a recipe in a cookbook, expecting that without thought on one's own part every detail will be settled, every proposition decided. Nobody, except one's own self, can set up standards of right treatment for one's children, because nobody, has ever had just such children before ; and to set up standards of right treatment is an arduous under-taking. Moral thermometers can be adjusted to register accurately only by a vigorous effort of the whole personality ; mind, heart, imagination, and insight. Even this is not enough. The conditions must be right for the mind, heart, and insight to work smoothly with no loss of power from distractions or passion.

Moreover, the constructing of a moral thermometer for registering the moral quality of childish acts needs the very best thought of father and mother combined. And right there is the first big difficulty which is apt to remain unsolved, a constantly present grain of sand in the eye, which prevents clear vision and leads to incessant, ever-repeated irritation. The father and the mother of a family, no matter how dear to each other, are two human beings, not one, and there is bound to be some difference of opinion between them about moral values. This very difficulty is one more immensely important reason for trying to decide so fundamental a question by the lucid, unhurried exercise of the reason. For if it is left to the haphazard chance of the moment of pressing necessity, every outward circumstance exerts a baleful pressure towards injustice and irritation, or at least towards a snap-judgment based on hasty, superficial thought. Every father and mother ought to go through many earnest heart searchings as to what they seriously think to be bad actions in a child of any given age, and what they consider good ones. Their difference of estimate about these great questions should be harmonized in quiet, unhurried discussions when nothing for the moment is at stake ; not heatedly thrashed out in the presence of the child at the exasperating moment when the china is broken or the clean dress mud-spattered.

And it is a great pity to " harmonize " differences of opinion by eliminating the judgment and thought of one or the other parent. American households are apt to " simplify " the problem by practically cutting out the father. It is a common saying that to the mother belongs all the moral training of the children. The father, we hear, is not with the children so much, has not had so much experience, does not give so much thought to them, does not take the care of them that the mother does, and hence should not undertake to decide questions relating to them. A good many modern American women are beginning to react with some violence from this unfortunate tradition and to see that an invaluable factor in the life of the children is taken away if we for any reason practically exclude their father. In the first place, if he is with the children so little as to be really unable to judge correctly the episodes of their lives, something is terribly wrong with the organization of the family, so wrong that it ought to be righted if the united efforts of all concerned can right it. As a character in a recent novel says : " First of all, the children need bread-and-butter yes, that is true, but after that they need bread-and-butter and father a great deal more than bread-and-butter and sugar." It is important that the father shall have opinions (and the data on which to form them soundly) about the moral problems of the children, not for his sake, but for theirs. The very fact that he is not with the children so constantly, that he comes and goes into a bigger world of adult decisions, is apt to mean that his instinctive sense of proportion remains truer than the mother's. She must be a remarkable woman indeed who does not occasionally feel her reason almost unhinged by the press of minute, personal details in life with children. In the construction and application of a moral thermometer, the father's is not infrequently the eye which sees that the nightgown carelessly left in the middle of the floor does not deserve such extremity of reprobation as the commission of a willful unkindness, and that dirty hands and a lying tongue are really not in the same category of misdeeds. It is he who, viewing the family life occasionally from a distance, is apt to see it in that truer perspective, which is just as necessary to a right adjusting of the scale of judgment as the mother's copious and intimate knowledge of details or temperament.

Let us suppose, then, even if the picture is a little fancifully overdrawn, the father and mother, sitting together in a quiet hour, taking stock of their opinions and convictions, and setting themselves soberly to the task of constructing a moral thermometer, to which they may refer in moments of stress or perplexity. Of course everybody's standard for details must be individual and above all must vary with the child treated. Yet I think that all fathers and mothers taking thought on the subject would agree as to some essentials, could unite on the broad, general divisions of their scale of moral values.

I think everyone would agree that all childish actions can be divided broadly into three classes; at one end of the scale those actions consciously directed to a wrong end (not very numerous in a normal child's life), at the other extreme those consciously directed to a good end (these also not very frequent in a healthy child's life), and in between a vast multitude of miscellaneous deeds which have no really moral color one way or the other, because in doing them the child has no very definite or conscious purpose. Since these constitute the bulk of the incidents in child-life the mother is forced to handle them and to consider them infinitely more than those at either extreme of the scale, and it is not surprising that they occupy too large a space in her judgments and estimates so that she is apt to apply to them punishments and praise really due only to quite other actions. It has been pointed out how easy it is to fall into the habit of reprobating dirty hands with such vigor and emphasis that there are no expedients left to express one's disapproval of a deceitful tongue, and the child naturally concludes that they are crimes involving equal degrees of turpitude. In the same way one's constant efforts to induce the child to adopt the conventions of polite society (or as we more often despairingly put it, "to make his manners somewhere near decent ") can very easily be so eager and insistent that the child gets the notion that to remember to pull his cap from his head when he meets a lady is as important and praiseworthy an action as to protect a younger child from danger.

Suppose the consulting parents begin with the lowest of the three kinds of actions those positively bad the ones below zero, so to speak. Lowest in the scale, I think, everyone would agree to put any form of cruelty. No matter how busy you are or how inconvenient the occasion, a child who is showing cruelty ought to have instant and thoughtful attention. Since cruelty usually comes from lack of understanding, it may be necessary only to explain to him that he is being cruel ; or at the other extreme it may be necessary to restrain him by force. Whatever is necessary should be done promptly and energetically. Nowadays cruelty is so much reprobated by all decent people that its crudest forms are seldom seen even in almost untrained individuals. For in-stance, the great uplifting campaign for kindness to animals has purified our national moral atmosphere so effectively that hardly anyone of the present generation would dare seriously to maltreat an animal. The traditional naughty child who pulls the wings off flies or torments the cat is not so noticeable as he was (or is said to have been), but when a vice is made disreputable by a reform of public opinion, it has a way of taking refuge in odd nooks and corners of the human heart, where it is detected only by a keen eye and dislodged only by a vigorous effort. Big boys may no longer actually bully and torture smaller ones as they used to, but there is a certain hateful form of amusement known as " teasing," which still abounds wherever children are gathered together and which their immature imaginations are often not subtle enough to recognize as à genuine form of cruelty. Girls who would not dream of entertaining themselves by pulling a little child's hair till he cried may be observed " teasing " a smaller child to tears by hiding her doll or demolishing her house of blocks. Big boys who would scorn physically to bully little boys take unabashed delight in reducing them. to hysteria by frightening them. But it is out of the question to give definite instances of this relic of the Stone Age among our children. " Teasing " is so damnably Protean in its manifestation, children given to this fault are so ingeniously inventive, that it is impossible to give a general definition of it. Unfortunately none is needed to make the term understood by those who have charge of children. The form taken by it usually depends upon the especial weak point of the younger child. This is soon discovered by the older one, and the " teasing " done is directed always upon the weak spot, whether fear, sensitive feelings, too lively imagination, or what not. It starts up on any pretext or on none, and is one of the hardest of childish vices to control by direct command, because, taking advantage of psychology as it does, the actual action involved is frequently not reprehensible in the least, only very distressing to the weaker of the two children. The older child alleges truthfully that it is because the younger is " so foolish " that he is pained, that nobody's hurting him." Again, it is not necessary to repeat the slippery Litany of the child, who is worming his way out of reprimands for teasing an-other. We are all only too familiar with it. There is, however, a sure test in detecting teasing, a test which can be explained even to a young child, if he has the matter set forth to him in a quiet moment. Any form of " fun," even though it may not come under any set prohibition or rule, is bad, is thoroughly reprehensible, if it is consciously directed towards causing pain to another. There is no rule in any family against holding the pages of a book partly shut, but an older child who tells a younger that there are beautiful pictures in a book and then works the younger child to frenzy by so holding it that it is just impossible to open it, is " hurting " him as effectively as though he were sticking pins into his arms, and is deriving his amusement from the other's distress and from nothing else.

In this as in other phases of child-life direct commands given at the moment, in spite of our unimaginative dependence upon them, are of little avail in really governing the child aright. Indeed, in the matter of teasing, perhaps more than in any other respect, the background of a child's life is all-important. He can only be controlled in this respect through his imagination, and that reflects the color of his surroundings. If from his babyhood up he lives in a humane atmosphere, if he is protected him-self from "teasing" at the hands of too-jocose uncles or cousins, if he sees his parents decide to cause pain only after seriously deciding that good will come of it, as in the case of administering disagreeable medicine, if every element of his young childhood suggests to him by precept, practice, and example the idea that to give pain is a dreadful act, his parents will not need to exhaust their ingenuity in his later childhood in the invention of concrete prohibitions to prevent him from finding enjoyment in inflicting suffering on others. It will be necessary only to stimulate and train his imagination to a finer discrimination in realizing what does cause pain.

Next above cruelty, but still very low in the scale, I suppose most of us would place meanness, under which come the various ways of allowing someone else to suffer for one's actions. Unspoiled human nature is so much better than its gloomy critics are willing to concede that this is not often a vice which springs up spontaneously in a young child's heart. It is apt to come either through fear of unduly severe punishment or, like so many other faults in children and adults, through lack of imagination as to the real significance of one's acts. It is best controlled by a general home atmosphere of honor and integrity, and by making a special effort to keep the child's confidence.

Of all childhood's common faults, perhaps none is more unnerving to encounter than untruthfulness. It seems to knock the very ground from under one's feet. We feel that nothing is left to be sure of, nothing to build on, nothing, as the common phrase runs, " to do with." But if you consider the matter, quite apart from the horror and panic which seize upon you when your own child has told his first untruth, you will see that there are very many aspects to the subject. It is in itself a problem for a book, for a series of books ! But in the necessity for quickly-made, rough-and-ready, everyday decisions it is well to remember that the place for " untruthfulness" on the scale of the moral thermometer depends, more than that of any other quality, on the character, age, and temperament of the individual child, and on the sort of untruthfulness to which any given instance belongs. The broadest possible line of di-vision, it seems to me, should run between untruths which are intended to deceive and to secure some advantage for the child and those which have no such intent. All young children are practically unable to perceive the difference between fact and fancy; and many others much older (who of us has not known adults with this weakness?) bave very little grasp on reality as differing from the more picturesque fabrications of their imagination. This is a troublesome defect of character, which needs wise attention and guiding, but it has really nothing in common with genuine lying, which is intended to get the child out of deserved trouble, or to get something which otherwise would not be allowed him.

Even this form of untruth, heart-sick though it makes a parent, does not always deserve the place at the very bottom of the moral thermometer which fathers and mothers are apt to give it. As the child sees it, his position, in utter dependence on the pleasure of another, entirely at the mercy of the decision of those stronger than he, without any recourse in the world against the judgment of his parents, occasionally fairly forces him into lying as a means of self-preservation. And it is true that our well-meant, anxious efforts to induce him to tell the truth often make it almost impossibly hard for him, especially if he chances to belong to the sensitive, imaginative, shrinking variety of human being. When we know a child has a tendency slightly to warp the truth, it often seems to be our perverse practice continually to put him in situations where exactitude of statement would be hard for anybody; we surround truth-telling with every possible disagreeable penalty, so that it is inevitably connected in his mind with disaster to himself. Suppose that, a Gulliver in Brobdingnag, you had yielded to temptation and abstracted one from a plateful of crisp sugary cookies. Would you not have a considerable struggle to narrate this small matter just as it happened if a giant with a club in his hand and a frown on his face approached you threateningly and said with an ominous accent : "Don't you know you're forbidden to take things without permission? Did you take one of those cookies or didn't you? Speak up, now ! " Would you not be more likely to give a veracious account if he remarked casually : " Why,, I thought I put six cookies on that plate, and now there are only five. Did they look so good you had to take one? They are good, aren't they?"

It is a pity, of course, to condone a fault like taking food without permission, but that is really less important than that the child acquire the habit of telling the truth, which is the foundation of every relation he will ever have in his life. Most people with any capacity for imaginative divination of character allow that overmastering temptation is a partial excuse for pretty bad actions even in adults. It is well, in trying to rate any given falsehood by one's moral thermometer, to take circumstances into account, to put oneself in the child's place, and to know whether or not the temptation to save himself by untruth has been exceedingly great. Here again, as so often, the healthful expedient is to call the child's attention, not to error, but to truth; not so much to watch him with an anxiously suspicious eye for slight slips from accuracy as to commend and to notice any correct statements, to multiply occasions when the natural thing is for him to give a literally truthful account of happenings (unimportant in themselves), and above all to surround him in the home with an atmosphere of crystal clearness of veracity.

Selfishness is a fault which is hard to rate properly on one's moral thermometer, because children are' so very much like adults that selfishness is apt to permeate to some degree most of their actions. I am inclined to think that its place in the scale should vary according to the deliberateness of the intention. Nearly every child is prone to yield to a sudden temptation to grab what he wants very much, even if this means taking it away from someone else; and though this ought to be checked and counteracted as much as possible, it is really almost an unconscious reflex action of a primitive personality, and need not be condemned as severely as a coldly calculating piece of egotism or self seeking, which certainly deserves a very low place on the register.

I suppose that most people would insert cowardice about at this point in the scale; but psychologists tell us that this is a weakness rather than a fault, and we all know that the normal child almost always outgrows it unless he is discouraged by too many depressing references to it by his elders. It ought to be made a crime punishable by law to " twit " a child with being afraid of anything or to try to force him quickly by external force into conquering his fear. Our own impatience with a child who is timid can usually be traced, not to a genuine fear for the manliness of his after-life, but to our own vanity. If our neighbor's phlegmatic, somewhat obtuse little girl advances boldly into the surf, we are touched on a sore place to have our own sensitive, highly-strung, imaginative little boy shrink back. It reflects some how on us we are in that position, so harrowing to unregenerate human nature, of envying others instead of exciting envy in them, and our lack of patience with the boy has little enough to do with the far-sighted affection for him which we claim as the basis of our rigorous treatment of his cowardice.

Somewhere near actual selfishness comes its near relative, the lack of consideration for others, and here we have a vice which is of constant occurrence in childish life. We might as well resign ourselves to most of it and wait till consideration grows with growing experience. Few but exceptionally thoughtful children seem to be able to remember the rights of others until actual experience has given them the material for the exercise of their imagination. For instance, it is almost impossible for a normal boy to avoid noise, even though this is extremely painful to quiet-loving elders. Noise never gives him a headache. He glories in it. How should he remember, even though he has been told repeatedly, the strange aversion of grown-ups for policeman's rattles and drums and trumpets.

We are climbing up the scale of our moral thermometer towards a neutral center where there are qualities which are really neither ethically good nor bad, but only convenient or the reverse, desirable or undesirable. Carelessness, that childish characteristic which is the bane of precise elders, has often such uncomfortable results in the household that it is punished as though it were a willful fault, and not a failing, against which the child should be fortified by well-chosen exercises and by a sound routine of life. If my little boy stumbles and breaks the glass he is carrying, instead of snapping at him I ought to resolve to direct his physical activities so as to develop steadiness of foot and eye. We are all also too much given to judging carelessness by its results rather than by its intentions. If a child smashes a vase by tossing his ball in the parlor, I ought to reflect that to toss a ball indoors was just as injudicious a proceeding before he broke the vase as afterwards. If I allowed him without protest to do it in the first place, I am unjust in giving way to angry reproaches only when mischief has been done. In this neutral zone of the " desirable " or " undesirable " I should rank good or bad " manners " so far as they are purely formal and not based on real consideration for the comfort of others.

Now, though omitting innumerable divisions, we have sketchily worked our way up to the pleasant realm of virtues. What real virtues can a child have? I think they may be summed up in the varying degree to which he successfully enters upon the battle against his own egotism. But the ways in which he may chance to manifest his first impulses to conquer self are sometimes very queer, and sometimes so unconventional as to be far from a pleasure to grown ups. Suppose your little boy has had at Sunday school a lesson on the beauty and holiness of charity. On the way home he puts his lesson into practice by giving his best new overcoat to a poor child, alleging (what is perfectly true) that he has an older coat at home and the other child has none. What would you feel like saying to him? Would your comment on his action be one that would sow the seeds of religious skepticism in his heart? Or would you look at your moral thermometer, see that its mercury stood very high, and summon the consistency to abstain from blaming him for his impulsive deed?

Having constructed the first rough draft of our moral thermometer, let us test it and ourselves on a few average cases. It is a hot summer evening, supper is over, and everybody is sitting about in cheerful, ungirdled comfort. Down on the lawn the children's pet cat has unearthed a fat toad, around which she is excitedly prancing, striking at the clumsy creature, starting back in nervous tremors over the sudden leaps, and generally making a ridiculous spectacle of herself. The children are in gales of laughter over the antics of their pet, a laughter that is echoed by their elders. In that scene of easy-going amusement it will take some courage to consult a moral thermometer, see where in the scale cruelty stands, and stop the fun because it can't, after all, be very much fun for the frightened toad. But unless that is done, have we much right the next clay to be worried because the children pull the wings off flies to laugh at their funny antics?

Take another instance, showing another side of the shield. After a day of nerve-racking preparations for " company," the house is in readiness, the tea-table is prettily decorated, and the finishing touches put to everything. The fatigued, slightly excited young hostess runs upstairs to dress, first her little girl, then herself. Then she hastily descends to cast a last glance around. Merciful heavens! What is all that dusty litter on the immaculate table cloth? Broken weed-leaves and crushed flower-heads with no stems ! And what is little Molly saying over and over in her high, shrill child's voice? "See how I helped you, Mother ! See how I helped you make the table pretty ! "

Lucky Molly, if, after her distracted mother looks down into the flushed face of honest pride, she sees hanging beside it a moral thermometer that records clearly the fact that there is no more virtuous impulse possible for a child than the impulse to help.