Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, HeredityGruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Science
Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, Heredity
Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Children
With some children lying is caused by their esthetic feelings. It is
much easier for them to describe a situation as they feel it should
have been than to describe it as it actually was. Many children
"embellish the facts" without any trace of intent to deceive.
Although we recognize that what they say is not strictly the truth,
we must further recognize that it is their love of the beautiful or
their sense of the fitness of things that leads them to these
"exaggerations." It is the same sort of instinct as shows itself in
our love of certain kinds of fiction. We know that some of the happy
endings in the plays and in the novels are often far-fetched; but we
like to have the happy endings, or the "poetic justice" endings, or
the "irony of fate" endings, just the same. When the child makes up
his endings to fit his sense of justice or beauty, we must not
condemn him, as we are often tempted to do, by calling his
fabrication a "lie," for that at once puts it in the same class as
deliberate deceit for a selfish purpose. There is really no harm in
this class of lies, unless, as the child grows older, it becomes
apparent that he lets his wishes and preferences interfere with his
vision of what is actually going on. In such cases the remedy is not
to be found in the denunciation of lying, but in giving the child
opportunity to experience realities that cannot be treated
untruthfully. To this end various kinds of hand work and scientific
study have been useful. It is impossible for the child to cheat the
tools of the workshop or his instruments of precision; it is
impossible to make a spool of thread do the work of two or three; or
one cannot make the paint go farther by applying the brush faster.
It is concrete reality that can teach the imaginative child reality;
in the things he learns from books there is no check upon the
imagined and the desired--one kind of outcome is as likely and as
true as another. But in the experience of the workaday world causes
and consequences cannot be so easily altered by a trick of words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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