Home Discipline Through the Dramatic Instinct
What has just been said indicates some possibilities which may be worked out in the direction of governing children through the playful use of this instinct. Sully reports this: “‘When R. is naughty and in a passion’ (writes a lady friend of her child, aged three and a half) ‘I need only suggest to him that he is some one else—say, a friend of his—and he will take it up at once. He will pretend to be the other child, and at last go and call himself, now a good boy, back again.’ This mode of suggestion, by helping the ‘higher self’ to detach itself from and control the lower might, one suspects, be much more widely employed in the moral training of children.”
One mother, when her little boy sulked upon being requested to do some little thing for her, would pretend to telephone for a messenger boy with certain characteristics which were not much in evidence in her own son at the time, explaining that her little son, who usually ran errands for her, was not at home to-day. The latter, in his interest in the “game,” would immediately forget to sulk, knock politely at the door of his mother’s room, and upon being invited to enter, present himself as the messenger boy for whom she had telephoned. When asked how long he could stay, he would reply “All day if you wish,” and in the role of messenger boy, he cheerfully performed his mother’s errands.
When her sister’s little children seemed averse to washing their hands and faces in preparation for dinner, Mrs. Chenery tells of how their mother made this duty, so disagreeable to all children, really pleasurable through the use of military commands which always appealed to them.
“Attention! Forward march! one, two, one, two. Right face—to the bathroom, march!”
Then, after their hands and faces were shining and their tangled curls combed out, “Attention! Left face! Forward march!”—downstairs, through the hall, then once more, “Left face—to the dining-room—march!”
Not only does imagination help a child cheerily to obey, but it helps an adult wisely to command. Throughout childhood and youth can there be a better maxim for government than that which is the very heart of the imaginative instinct: put yourself in the child’s place?