Aside from the fact that the attention paid the child often increases his self-importance and makes his wishes more capricious, there are factors that tend to rob him of his naïveté.
These factors are the movies, the newspapers, and the spread of luxurious habits amongst children.
The movies are marvelous agents for the spread of information and misinformation. Because of the natural settings they give to the most absurd and unnatural stories, their essential falsity and unreality is often made the more pernicious. Their possibilities for good are enormous, their actual performance is conspicuously to lower the public taste, to create a habit which discourages earnest reading or intelligent entertainment. For children they act as a stimulant of an unwholesome kind, acquainting them with realistic crime, vice, and vulgarity, giving them a distaste for childlike enjoyment. One sees nowadays altogether too often the satiated child who seeks excitement, the cynical, overwise child filled with the lore of the movies.
In similar fashion the "comic" cartoons of the newspapers have an extraordinary fascination for children. Every child wants to read the funny page, though the funny page is not for childish reading. The humor is coarse, slangy, and distinctly vulgar; very clever frequently and thoroughly enjoyable to those whom it cannot harm.
If the historians of, say, 4500 A.D. were by chance to get hold of a few copies of our newspapers of 1920 they might legitimately conclude that the denizen of this remote period expressed surprise by falling backward out of his shoes, expressed disagreement by striking the other person over the head with a brick or a club; that women were always taller than their mates and usually "beat them up"; that all husbands, especially if elderly, chased after every young and pretty girl. They might conclude that the language of the mass of the people was of such remarkable types as this: "You tell them Casket, I'm Coffin", or "the Storm and Strife is coming; beat it!"
No one I think enjoys the comic page more than the present writer,—yet it spreads a demoralizing virus amongst children. Of what use is it to teach children good English when the newspaper deliberately teaches them the cheapest slang? Of what use is it to teach them manners and kindliness when the newspaper constantly spreads boorishness and "rough house" conduct? Of what use is it to raise taste when this is injured at the very outset of life by giving bad taste a fascinating attraction?
Throughout the community there is a stir and excitement that is reflecting on the children. There are so many desirable luxuries in the world now, so many revealed by movie and symbolized by the automobile, the cabaret, the increasing vulgarity of the theater (the disappearance of the drama and the omnipresent girl and music show), a restless search for pleasure throughout the community even before the War, have not missed the child.
All these things make the lot of the housewife harder in so far as the training of her children is concerned. She is dealing with a more alert, more sophisticated, more sensuous child,—and one who knows his place and power. The press and the theater both have knowledge of this and a recent witty play dealt with the sins of the children, paraphrasing of course the classic of a bygone day, "Sins of the Fathers." And a wise old gentleman said to his grandson recently, when the lad complained about his mother, "Of course you are right. Every son has a right to be obeyed by his mother."
I am by no means a pessimist. Every forward step has its bad side, but nevertheless is a forward step. It is in the nature of things that we shall never reach a millennium, though we may considerably improve the value and dignity of human life. Democracy has a rôle in the world of great importance,—but the spread of education and opportunity to the mass may make it more difficult for the best ideals and customs to survive in the avalanche of mediocrity that becomes released by the agencies that profit by appealing to the mass. So, too, the rise of the woman and child bring us face to face with new problems, which I think are less difficult problems than those they have superseded and replaced, but which are yet of importance.
And a great problem is this: how to individualize the child and keep from spoiling him; how to give him freedom and pleasure, and keep him from sophistication.