Children And Obedience

( Originally Published 1914 )

A SLIDING-SCALE FOR OBEDIENCE

I LAID down the Woman's Magazine, in which I was reading an admirably written article lamenting the decay among our modern children of the " sweet old fragrant virtue of unquestioning obedience," and greeted a neighbor, who had just come in. He brought us the latest news of an accident which had shocked our village a few days ago, and my husband and I listened with interest to the explanation of the catastrophe.

" The poor boy has recovered enough to tell how it all happened," said our neighbor. " It seems that the train came along just as he was going to drive over the crossing. He reined Topsy back on this side of the track, but as the cars kept going by so close to them, she got frightened and began to back. Harry was afraid she would back the wagon into the ditch, he gave her a cut with the whip to make her stay up in the road, and she sprang right into the moving train ! The wagon is simply kindling-wood, and there isn't enough left of Topsy !"

After he had gone out I cried impatiently : " Who would believe that a horse could be such an idiot!"

My husband looked up from his paper. " Why not? " he asked. " That's what a horse is trained to do to obey its driver, anybody who happens to hold the lines, no matter what the command may, be" He laughed a little at my face of astonishment, and went on in an amused, casual, pseudo-philosophic harangue. " Why, yes, didn't you ever think of that? It wouldn't do to let a horse use his own judgment about anything, or even to have any judgment of his own. What would happen if his opinion and yours didn't agree? A horse's business is to obey, literally, anybody who issues a command, and a good horse-trainer is one who empties out from his horse's head any desire or capacity for independent action, and puts back an absolute faith in the omniscence of humanity, and a perfect willingness to govern its life always by the dictates of that superior being, Man. Didn't you ever think of the significance of the phrase, a ' well-broken horse'? "

With which he went back to his newspaper and I to my article on the training of children. The writer was deploring the " disobedience of American children." "How many of you mothers," she asked, "could as a test-case tell your fourteen-year-old school-girl daughter to-morrow morning to wear her rubbers to school and be sure of her acquiescence? Would it not mean with nearly all of you a long ` argument' with her about the need for doing this, an impatient statement from her that she ' hates rubbers' and is ` sure it won't rain,' and a final compromise on your part that she shall not (in spite of what you have ordered) wear her rubbers, but only take them along in her school-bag in case it does rain? "

As so frequently happens in our inconsequent human life, an entirely accidental sequence of unimportant incidents somehow between them struck out a searching ray of light, which streamed importunately into a neglected corner of my brain and made me see what I had not suspected before, that it was littered with broken-down superstitions and rickety medieval ideals, festooned in dusty cobwebs of contradictory notions altogether violently in need of a house cleaning. It had honestly never occurred to me before that there might be more to the question of children's obedience than the difficulty (always so great) of getting them to obey. That had seemed to me quite enough of a problem in the life of parents !

I naturally said to myself, in answer to the writer who deplored the insubordination of the fourteen year old school girl: " Why, she wants the child to act like a horse!" Which led me, of course, into a consideration of the difference, if any, between colts and children. In fact, the main difference seems to be the ultimate destination of the two young animals. The colt is to grow up in an utter and implicit reliance on human beings into a horse who will always have human beings set in authority over him. The child begins with a similar entire reliance on adults; but with the most disconcerting rapidity he grows swiftly to be an adult himself, who must not only govern his own life, but in most cases has very soon thrust upon him the awful responsibility of being in his turn an all-wise adult for little children. Horses can without danger to themselves acquire the habit of unquestioning obedience to any human being, be-cause there will always be in their lives some human being for them unquestioningly to obey ; but children may not, without grave danger to themselves, become fixed in the habit of unquestioning obedience to adults, because in the nature of things such a habit can only be a temporary matter. A wise man once said: "Nothing is more perilous than to begin a habit which cannot be kept up forever." It is a physical impossibility for children to continue for-ever obeying their elders. When are they to stop?

In former times this ticklish question was answered in the case of boys by the universal application of a legal fiction that up to the midnight before their twenty-first birthday they are colts, and after the clock has struck twelve times they are human beings. As for girls, they formerly never attained admitted humanity. They were kept bitted and bridled by their parents until a husband was safely in the saddle, passing thus docilely and without surprise from one sovereign to another, as provinces and nations used to do. But some degree of self-government has come irrevocably into fashion during the last century and a half, not only for provinces and nations, but for individual human beings. The need for it is universally admitted. The very writer who would like to have her fourteen-year-old girl accept her mother as the exclusive fountain-head of wisdom on the subject of rubbers, would not in the least wish her, only four years later (if she were to marry young) to telephone downtown to her husband to ask if she should put on her overshoes. A wife who would be unquestioningly obedient to her husband in all details, and who would ask and accept from him constant and minute supervision of the conduct of her life, would bore and exasperate a modern American husband as much as she would puzzle and amaze him. And yet we feel passionately and sometimes tragically the need to train our children to be obedient, and this feeling comes from a sure, strong, and wise primal instinct for a disobedient child is an abomination, a danger to himself and a menace to others, quite as much as an unruly horse. If then the duty of children and of horses is identical as far as the necessity of being obedient is concerned, what is the difference between them? The point must be that they should obey different things. If it will not do to teach a child passive unquestioning obedience to adults because that is a habit which must be abandoned as soon as he is grown up, what force is there which, like the horse, he can continue to obey all his life?

When one runs the investigation into a corner in this fashion the answer is so simple as to be common-place. The child (like all the rest of us) can and should and must obey Law. Not his parents be-cause they are his parents, but because they are for him the representatives and enforcers of the Law. And the sooner he understands this intellectual distinction and begins this mental habit, the better citizen of his world he will be at every stage of his growth. The very little child, like the very ignorant immigrant, cannot grasp this abstract difference. He must, therefore, obey his mother because she tells him to and smacks him when he does not, just as the frightened Russian Jew " moves on " because somebody in a blue coat and shiny buttons waves a club at him and issues an order to that effect. A certain amount of coerced, unintelligent, horse-like obedience is necessary in both family and national life as a rough-and-ready temporary expedient for the maintenance of public order. But it should be the main business of good government and of competent parents to keep this unintelligent obedience at its irreducible minimum. With the first dawning of the ability to reason, the sliding scale for obedience should be instituted, and adjusted on a basis of quick flexibility to the capacity of each child at every stage of his development. With the passage of every day of growth the child should learn to obey more rationally than before. It is not only not reasonable to expect a girl of fourteen to obey as a child of five should she should not be allowed to sell her birthright, even if she is willing to. As soon as possible, if we are to have a healthy national life, the cowering immigrant must be taught that it is not the brass buttoned bluecoat which is the rightful object of his veneration. As soon as possible, if we are to have a healthy family life, children must be prepared fully for the responsibilities so soon to be laid on them, and to this end they must be taught that their duty is not to obey their parents' personal wishes, but the universal laws which their parents, by virtue of their position and greater experience, ex-pound to them and enforce upon them.

This means not less obedience but more, vastly more, for it is the beginning of that universal obedience which we should all practice assiduously, which should in a rightly developing personality become more and more absolute with every year, until the main business of life is to discover and understand universal laws and then to obey them with an utter abnegation of our own wishes and no thought or even wish to revolt.

Now, this is a habit which, like all other good ones, starts with small beginnings and increases very gradually, with many struggles and much backsliding from grace. Consequently the sooner it is al-lowed to begin in the life of children, the more consistently it is held before them as the way of virtue and the path of duty, the better; and the less it is confused and clouded by recourse to appeals to mere brute authority or with attempts to work upon sensitive childish emotions, the better.

But such a habit is not easily acquired, either by parent or child. " Not by sitting upon down comes a man to fame," says Dante grimly, nor, let us amend, does the laziest road lead to anything else desirable, such as the feat of being a good mother. It is much easier for us muddle-headed adults to treat our little children like colts than like human beings. It requires a constantly vigilant, self-critical, alert, and well-poised intellect to use the sliding-scale for obedience. To beat into children's heads either by physical or moral suasion the conception that they must obey because someone has told them to is a short-cut, autocratic route to a superficially tranquil family life ; but under the veneer of good order it forces the children ruled by it, according to their temperaments, into the habits either of sly, secret disobedience, of crushed passive submission, or of sullen and unavailing revolt ; and these are not very desirable mental habits for creatures who are soon to be masters of their own fates, although such children may have the other habit, so comfortable for adults, of " jumping" at the word of command.

Everyone must have experienced the fury of impatience we all naturally feel at a child who stands and " argues " when something is suggested to him. It is certainly very much more convenient for the adult to have him, like a well-oiled toy, when the string is pulled or the button pressed, perform whatever trick is required. And yet how else except by " arguing " is a child to learn the logical grounds on which wise action should be based? It is true that much childish and especially school-girlish " argument " is nothing but disingenuous special pleading, intended to con-fuse the issue and to tire out the patience of the opponent. This should, of course, receive the sharp reprobation and quick, decisive silencing which all dishonest special pleading deserves. But, more than we think, there is apt to be at least the germ on the child's part of an honest desire to see if the reasons for that particular action are sound and convincing. Such a desire, being one of the most indescribably precious of mental impulses, should be fostered and fed on the best mental food available, and not silenced for the sake of attaining a preconceived ideal of in-flexible military order.

What do we do, any of us, when we try to decide what action is best to take, but carry on with ourselves the same sort of " argument " we used to have with our parents? By what other method can we come to a wise decision? To weigh the pros and cons of a situation wisely and honestly and clear-headedly, and then to act according to his best judgment, is all that can be expected of the best of men. And to do this is a difficult intellectual feat for which we all need to be trained by well chosen, well directed, and infinitely repeated practice.

To go back to the article which is the text of my remarks, it seems to me that the mother who finally compromised and allowed her daughter to carry her rubbers on a threatening day instead of wearing them acted in the most enlightened manner. Like a good judge hearing a case and taking into consideration extenuating circumstances, she had received the testimony of the defendant that it is a great affliction to a fourteen year old girl to wear rubbers over dry pavements, and had wisely yielded that nonessential point, although holding strictly to the essential one that rubbers should be at hand when it rains.

For the fact that we are not law-makers but only law-enforcers does not mean that we may be more yielding than the type of parent who cries : " You do it because I say so!" Such a parent can with perfect ease say something else or even unsay, as the mood changes, what he has said the moment before; and the children know this, as they know every-thing about the weak points of those who are trying to lead them. Not so the expounder of an eternal law. He is as helpless before the majesty of the authority he represents as the child itself. If he is true to his trust, to his position as chief magistrate in the world of his children, he may not vary by a jot or a tittle from a well-considered verdict. His " commands " are infinitely fewer than those of the tyrant, but having issued them he does not repeal them. Not for him the whimsies, the unexpected reprieves so characteristic of the irresponsible tyrant. Take a very simple case, easily analyzed and very frequent in our everyday experience, the case of the child recovering from an attack of in-digestion who has been forbidden candy by the doctor. That child must not have candy. There is nothing more to be said about it. Here is a law of health to be obeyed by the parent, whose duty is to aid childhood to a similar intelligent obedience, but who, before capacity for self-control is fully acquired, acts as police officer to the as yet ungoverned instincts of the child under his care, and enforces obedience, not to himself, but to an abstract law, the law that it is our duty to society to avoid ill-health as much as possible. The fact that most cases are not so simple as this, and that frequently the parent must himself be the doctor who decides what the law of health is, as well as the expounder and enforcer of it, only makes the task of the parent a more difficult and complicated one. It does not in the least release him from his solemn obligation to be the most intelligent variety of parent within his capacity.

There is little danger that a child brought up in the full rigor of this law-abiding régime will be either disobedient in the course of his training or lawless when he is left, as an adult, to govern him-self. He will have had the precious experience of living the life of any citizen of an enlightened community. He will have had in all questions and disputes a fair chance to defend himself, to explain his point of view, to present his arguments, and to hear a dispassionate presentation of the other side. And then, like every citizen of a civilized community, he will have learned, the tremendously vital lesson that if the decision of the fair-minded judge in the highest court of appeals goes against him, he must abide by that irrevocable result. There is a finality about decisions made on abstract grounds which, even in the case of small children, is never present when personality or mere authority are allowed to enter into the discussion; when, for instance, one of the arguments is the unfair, overbearing one of: " Oh, do it to please me! " If there is no better reason than that, the child in yielding may be performing a pretty and graceful act, but an act into which the element of right and wrong cannot enter. And obedience, being as it is one of the most indispensable elements of civilized life, is too righteous and serious a matter to prettify or play with or, above all, to falsify. A child, the heir of humanity, should not be required, not even once, to give up his birthright of dignity and personal integrity in order to obey the whims or personal fancies of any other human being. This is too grave a matter to trifle with. He should be told truthfully that it would be a kind or generous or graceful act if he would consent of his own free will thus to please someone whom he loves ; but it should not, it cannot, be demanded of him as a right. On the other hand, nothing, not an inch of concession, even with the most specious plea, should be allowed him when it is a question of evading his obedience to a law which involves his duty to the world.

No mother has a right to command her daughter to perform the useless act of wearing rubbers over dry pavements, but every mother is held by virtue of her position to a rigid enforcement upon her children of the proposition that one of the first duties of every human being is, so far as possible, to keep in good health. Wet feet are prejudicial to good health. Therefore, the essential point at issue is, not to force the school-girl to obey her mother's chance commands literally, but to bring to her attention a situation which will recur innumerable times in the later course of her life, to secure her intelligent consideration of the general principle involved and to enforce (if necessary) her wise action. If inspired thereto by her nearness to the problem and by her vivid personal preferences, she is able to invent a course of action which will be at the same time wise and not distasteful to her (even though it be different from her mother's prescribed course), it seems to me that we can have nothing but admiration for her ingenuity and a very tranquil mind about the conduct of her life in the future. She has-taken one more step towards learning thoroughly not how to obey her mother, which she would need in a few years painfully to unlearn, but how to deal skillfully and honestly with the problems of her life.