Part 4 (1/2)

One type of lying that is very irritating and very hard to meet is that known as prevarication. This consists in telling a part of a truth, or even a whole truth, in such a way as to convey a false impression, and is most common at about twelve or thirteen years.

When a child resorts to prevarication he is already old enough to know the difference between a truthful statement and a false statement. Indeed, it is when he most keenly realizes this that he is most likely to prevaricate, for this is but a device by which the childish mind attempts to achieve an indirect purpose and at the same time keep his peace with his conscience. It is when he already has a certain fear of lying, and is not yet thoroughly sincere and truth-loving, that he will come home from the truant fis.h.i.+ng party and ingeniously tell you that a ”friend of Harry's” caught the fish, instead of saying that he himself did it. His conscience is quite satisfied with the reflection that he _is_ a friend of Harry's.

In this stage of his career the child is quite capable of understanding a direct a.n.a.lysis of what is essentially a deception, and a good heart-to-heart talk that comes to a conclusion is about the best thing he can get.

I hope you will not think, from what I have said, that I have been trying to justify lying, or that I do not consider lying a serious matter; nor, on the other hand, that you will consider a single application of the remedies suggested sufficient to make any child truthful. Thoroughgoing truthfulness comes hard and generally comes late. But for the majority of children truthfulness is attainable, although it will not be attained without a struggle. The finer instincts often enough lead to violations of strict veracity; but they may be made also to strengthen the feeling of scrupulous regard for the truth.

I have tried to show that what we call a lie is _not_ always a lie; and that some of the very methods we use in training our children themselves produce lies. The inflicting of severe punishments is one of the chief of these, and the most common lie is that which is due to fear of punishment. Lies that arise from bad habits should be treated by an attempt to remedy the bad habit. Lies that arise from ignorance should be treated by attention to necessary knowledge.

Even more important than the right kind of treatment for untruthfulness is the necessity for an atmosphere in which the spirit of truthfulness is all-pervading. Some day watch yourself and notice how often you tell untruths to your child; how often he hears you tell so-called ”white lies” to your neighbors; how often he hears you prevaricate and exaggerate. If you will keep track of these things you will realize that it is a trifle absurd of you to expect your child to be a strict speaker of the truth. Part of our campaign against the lies of our children must therefore consist in our attempt to establish truthful relations among adults, and between adults and children.

V.

BEING AFRAID

The heroes of history and the heroes of fiction whom all of us like to admire are the men and women who know no fear. But most of us make use of fear as a cheap device for attaining immediate results with our children. When Johnny hesitates about going upstairs in the dark to fetch your work-basket, you remind him of Columbus, who braved the trackless sea and the unknown void in the West, and you exhort him to be a man; but when Johnny was younger you yourself warned him that the Bogeyman would get him if be did not go right to sleep. And it is not very long since the day when he tried to climb the cherry tree and you attempted to dissuade him with the alarming prophecy that he would surely fall down and break his neck.

Thus our training consists of countless contradictions: we set up n.o.ble ideals to arouse courage and self-reliance--when that suits our immediate purpose; and we frighten with threats and warn of calamity when the child has the impulse to do what we do not wish to have him do. This at once suggests the effect of fear upon character and conduct. We instinctively call upon courage when we want the child _to do_ something; we call upon fear when we want to _prevent action_. In other words, bravery stimulates, whereas fear paralyzes.

The human race is characterized by an instinct of fear. Very young infants exhibit all the symptoms of fear long before they can have any knowledge or experience of the disagreeable and the harmful effects of the things that frighten them. Thus a sudden noise will make the child start and tremble and even scream. And all through life an unexpected and loud noise is likely to startle us. An investigation has shown that thunder is feared much more than lightning. Children will laugh at the flashes of lightning, but will cower before the roaring thunder.

The feeling of fear is closely a.s.sociated with what is _unknown_. It is not noise in general that frightens the children, but an unexpected noise from an unknown source. Indeed, the children like noise itself well enough to produce it whenever they can by heating drums, or barrels, or wash-boilers. The frightful thing about thunder is that the cause remains a mystery, and it is frightful so long as the cause _does_ remain a mystery, if the child lives to be a hundred years old. During a thunder-storm children will picture to themselves a battle going on above. Some think of the sky cracking or the moon bursting, or conceive of the firmament as a dome of metal over which b.a.l.l.s are being rolled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Neither are girls afraid to climb.]

The influence of the unknown explains also why that other great source of fear, namely, darkness, has such a strange hold upon children. Fear of darkness is very common and often very intense.

There are but few children who do not suffer from it at some time and to some extent. This fear is frequently suggested by stories of robbers, ghosts, or other terrors, but even children who have been carefully guarded sometimes have these violent fears that cannot be reasoned away.

In order to discover what it is about the darkness that frightens children, a large number of women and men were asked to recall their childish experiences with fear, and from the many instances given the following may be used to ill.u.s.trate the various terrors of the dark.

One woman described her fears of ”an indistinct living something, black, possibly curly,” which she feared would enter the room in the darkness from somewhere under the bed. Another could see dark objects with eyes and teeth slowly and noiselessly descending from the ceiling toward her. One little boy, when he had finally overcome fear, said to his father that he thought the dark to be ”a large live thing the color of black.” A girl of nineteen said she remembered that on going to bed she used to see little black figures jumping about between the ceiling and the bed.

It is well known that the feeling of fear is often very intense among children; and where it is due to ignorance it is not right to laugh it away. Doing so affords no explanation. The ridicule may cause the child to _hide_ his fear, but will not drive the feeling away. Since the feeling of fear is so closely connected with the strange and unknown, the only way that it may be directly overcome is by making the child familiar with the objects that cause such feelings.

In the case of young children with whom we cannot reason it is best, wherever possible, to remove the cause or gradually to make the child familiar with the darkness, or whatever it is that makes him unhappy. One very young child became frightened when he was presented with a Teddy bear. Every time the Teddy bear was produced he would cry with terror. The mother was perplexed about what to do.

Now, as the Teddy bear is not a necessary part of the child's surroundings, there is no reason why it cannot be removed altogether and produced again upon some future occasion, when the child is old enough to be indifferent to it. Very many children are frightened by the touch of fur, or even of velvet; but this lasts only a short time, and they soon learn to like dogs and cats.

The fear of darkness is different; we cannot eliminate darkness from the child's experience, and we must patiently try to help the child to overcome his fear, since he will suffer greatly so long as it lasts. The help you give him will also const.i.tute one more bond of sympathy between you and your child, and we cannot have too many such bonds.

One mother got her boy used to going into a dark room by placing some candy on the farther window and sending him for that. Here the child fixed his attention on the goal and had no time to think of the terrors of the dark. After making such visits a few times the boy became quite indifferent to the darkness.

Another ingenious mother gave her little daughter who was afraid a tiny, flat, electric spotlight which just fitted into the pocket of her pajama jacket She took it to bed with her, slipped it under the pillow, and derived such comfort from it that the whole family was relieved. The child soon outgrew her timidity.

A child who from infancy has been accustomed to going to sleep in the dark and suddenly develops a fear of it ought to be indulged to the extent of having a light for a few minutes to show him that there is nothing there to be afraid of. It may take a few evenings and several disagreeable trips to the child's bedroom, but in the end he will be victorious and you will have helped him to win the victory.

A child that is not in good health is likely to be possessed by his fears much longer than one who is well. In the latter case there is a fund of energy to go exploring, and the child thus becomes more readily acquainted with his surroundings, and as his knowledge grows his fears vanish. Again, the sickly child has not the energy to fight his fears, as has the healthy child. Indeed, the high spirits of the healthy child often lead him to seek the frightful, just for the exhilaration he gets from the sensation.

The period of most intense fears is between the ages of five and seven, and while imaginative children naturally suffer most, they are also the ones that can call up bright fancies to cheer them.

Robert Louis Stevenson must have had a lovely time in the dark, seeing circuses and things, as he tells us in his poem which begins: