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 — John Shaqi
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
The little girl who had been frequently reproved for not using her
_right_ hand came to have a positive dislike for her other
hand, which she naturally understood to be _wrong_ hand, and
she did not wish to have anything wrong about her person. A boy was
trying to tell his sister the meaning of "homesick." "You know how
it feels to be seasick, don't you? Well, it's the same way, only
it's at home."
Children are apt to attach to a word the first meaning that they
learn in connection with it. Only with the increase of experience
can a word come to have more than one meaning. Moreover, the child
will apply what he hears with fatal exactness and literalness.
Two little girls were at a party and the older one found occasion to
slap her sister's hand. The hostess reproved her for this, whereupon
the little girl asked, "Isn't she my own sister?" The hostess had to
admit that she was. "Well, I heard papa say that he can do what he
likes with his own."
Doing what we like with our own meant to the child exactly what the
words said, without those qualifications which we naturally put in
because of our greater experience.
Children learn with wonder that mother was once a baby, and that
father was once a baby, and so on. Dr. Sully tells of the little
girl who asked her mother, "When everybody was a baby, then who
could be the nurse if they were all babies?" Thus shows real
reasoning power; it was not the child's fault that she had no
historical perspective, and so could not see the babyhoods of
different people in their proper relations in time.
A little boy who was beginning to read deciphered a sign in a
grocery store, "Families supplied." He asked his mother whether they
could not get a new baby there.
When Herbert was passing through the scissors stage he cut a hole in
his father's coat. The father scolded him for spoiling his suit;
Herbert calmly replied, "I did not cut your suit; I only cut the
coat." He resented this accusation, which in his mind was not merely
an exaggeration, but entirely false, since a suit is a suit and a
coat is a coat.
A little girl, while out with her nurse and brother, got lost by
separating herself from the nurse's side. When she was at last found
she was reprimanded for running away from the nurse. She felt that
she was being unjustly treated, for she said, "I did not run away; I
only _stood_ away," meaning, she had stepped around the corner
to look in a window. If she had been scolded for getting out of
sight of the nurse, she would have felt justly reproved; but,
accused of doing something she never did and never thought of
doing,--that is, running away,--she naturally resented this.
Those who have to deal with children in an intimate way cannot be
too scrupulous about how they use their words.
The logic of children often appears to us all wrong until we take
the trouble to see how they come to their queer conclusions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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