Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matterSully, James
Science
Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter
Sully, James
Child development; Child psychology
Other senses, more particularly that of touch, may bring their
disturbing elements, too. Many children have a strong repugnance to cold
clammy things, such as a cold moist hand, and what seems stranger, to
the touch of something that seems altogether so likable as fur. Whether
the common dislike of children to water has anything to do with its soft
yieldingness to touch I cannot say. This whole class of early
repugnances to certain sensations seems to stand on the confines between
mere dislikes and fears, properly so called. A child may very much
dislike touching fur without being in the strict sense afraid of it,
though the dislike may readily develop into a true fear.
_The Alarmed Sentinel._
We may now pass to the disconcerting and alarming effects to which a
child is exposed through his sense of sight. This, as we know, is the
intellectual sense, the sentinel that guards the body, keeping a
look-out for what is afar as for what is anear. The uneasiness which a
child experiences at seeing things is not, like the uneasiness at
sounds, a mere effect of violent sensation; it arises much more from a
perception of something menacing.
Among the earliest alarmers of sight may be mentioned the appearance of
something new and strange, especially when it involves a sudden
abolition of customary arrangements. Although we are wont to think of
children as loving and delighting in what is new, we must not forget
that it may also trouble and alarm. This feeling of uneasiness and
apparently of insecurity in presence of changed surroundings shows
itself as soon as a child has begun to grow used or accustomed to a
particular state of things.
Among the more disconcerting effects of a rude departure from the
customary, is that of change of place. When once an infant has grown
accustomed to a certain room it is apt to find a new one strange, and
will eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. This sense of
strangeness in places sometimes appears very early. A little girl on
being taken at the age of four months into a new nursery, "looked all
round and then burst out crying". Some children retain this feeling of
uneasiness up to the age of three years and later. Here, again, clearly
marked differences among children disclose themselves. On entering an
unfamiliar room a child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused
by the odd look of things, so that the fear-impulse is kept under by
other and pleasanter ones.
What applies to places applies also to persons. A child may be said to
combine the attachment of the dog to persons with that of the cat to
localities. Any sudden change of the customary human surroundings, for
example, the arrival of a stranger on the scene, is apt to trouble him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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