These carryings out of the parental behest when entrusted to other hands
are instructive as suggesting that the child feels the constraining
force of the command when its author is no longer present to enforce it.
Perhaps a clearer evidence of respect for the law as such, apart from
its particular enforcement by the parent, is supplied by children’s way
of extending the rules laid down for their own behaviour to that of
others. This point has already been illustrated in the tendency to
universalise the observances of courtesy and the like. No trait is
better marked in the normal child than the impulse to subject others to
his own disciplinary system. In truth, children are for the most part
particularly alert disciplinarians. With what amusing severity are they
wont to lay down the law to their dolls, and their animal playmates,
subjecting them to precisely the same prohibitions and punishments as
those to which they themselves are subject! Nor do they stop here. They
enforce the duties just as courageously on their human elders. A mite of
eighteen months went up to her elder sister, who was crying, and with
perfect mimicry of the nurse’s corrective manner, said: “Hush! Hush!
papa!” pointing at the same time to the door. The little girl M. when
twenty-two months old was disappointed because a certain Mr. G. did not
call. In the evening she said: "Mr. D. not did tum—was very naughty, Mr.
D. have to be whipped". So natural and inevitable to the intelligence of
a child does it seem that the system of restraints, rebukes, punishments
under which he lives should have universal validity.
This judicial bent of the child is a curious one and often develops a
priggish fondness for setting others morally straight. Small boys have
to endure much in this way from the hands of slightly older sisters
proficient in matters of law and delighting to enforce the moralities.
But sometimes the sisters lapse into naughtiness, and then the small
boys have their chance. They too can on such occasions be priggish if
not downright hypocritical. A little boy had been quarrelling with his
sister named Muriel just before going to bed. When he was undressed he
knelt down to say his prayers, Muriel sitting near and listening. He
prayed (audibly) in this wise: “Please, God, make Muriel a good girl,”
then looked up and said in an angry voice, “Do you hear that, Muriel?”
and after this digression resumed his petition. I believe fathers when
reading family prayers have been known to apply portions of Scripture in
this personal manner to particular members of the family; and it is even
possible that extempore prayers have been invented, as by this little
prig of a boy, for the purpose of administering a sort of back-handed
corrective blow to an erring neighbour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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