Some problems, in this connection, are difficult, and require much tact. The most difficult is death. The child soon discovers that plants and animals die. The chances are that somebody he knows will die before he is six years old. If he has at all an active mind, it occurs to him that his parents will die, and even that he will die himself. (This is more difficult to imagine.) These thoughts will produce a crop of questions, which must be answered carefully. A person whose beliefs are orthodox will have less difficulty than a person who thinks that there is no life after death. If you hold the latter view, do not say anything contrary to it; no consideration on earth justifies a parent in telling lies to his child. It is best to explain that death is a sleep from which people do not wake. This should be said without solemnity, as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable. If the child worries about dying himself, tell him it is not likely to happen for many, many years. It would be useless, in early years, to attempt to instil a Stoic contempt for death. Do not introduce the topic, but do not avoid it when the child introduces it. Do all you can to make the child feel that there is no mystery about it. If he is a normal healthy child, these methods will suffice to keep him from brooding. At all ages, be willing to talk fully and frankly, to tell all that you believe, and to convey the impression that the subject is rather uninteresting. It is not good either for old or young to spend much time in thinking about death.
Apart from special fears, children are liable to a diffused anxiety. This is generally due to too much repression by their elders, and is therefore much less common than it used to be. Perpetual nagging, prohibition of noise, constant instruction in manners, used to make childhood a period of misery. I can remember, at the age of five, being told that childhood was the happiest period of life (a blank lie, in those days). I wept inconsolably, wished I were dead, and wondered how I should endure the boredom of the years to come. It is almost inconceivable, nowadays, that any one should say such a thing to a child. The child’s life is instinctively prospective: it is always directed towards the things that will become possible later on. This is part of the stimulus to the child’s efforts. To make the child retrospective, to represent the future as worse than the past, is to sap the life of the child at its source. Yet that is what heartless sentimentalists used to do by talking to the child about the joys of childhood. Fortunately the impression of their words did not last long. At most times, I believed the grown-ups must be perfectly happy, because they had no lessons and they could eat what they liked. This belief was healthy and stimulating.
Shyness is a distressing form of timidity, which is common in England and China, and parts of America, but rare elsewhere. It arises partly from having little to do with strangers, partly from insistence upon company manners. As far as is convenient, children should, after the first year, become accustomed to seeing strangers and being handled by them. As regards manners, they should, at first, be taught the bare minimum required for not being an intolerable nuisance. It is better to let them see strangers for a few minutes without restraint and then be taken away, than to expect them to stay in the room and be quiet. But after the first two years it is a good plan to teach them to amuse themselves quietly part of the day, with pictures or clay or Montessori apparatus or something of the kind. There should always be a reason for quiet that they can understand. Manners should not be taught in the abstract, except when it can be done as an amusing game. But as soon as the child can understand he should realize that parents also have their rights; he must accord freedom to others, and have freedom for himself to the utmost possible extent. Children easily appreciate justice, and will readily accord to others what others accord to them. This is the core of good manners.
Above all, if you wish to dispel fear in your children, be fearless yourself. If you are afraid of thunderstorms, the child will catch your fear the first time he hears thunder in your presence. If you express a dread of social revolution, the child will feel a fright all the greater for not knowing what you are talking about. If you are apprehensive about illness, so will your child be. Life is full of perils, but the wise man ignores those that are inevitable, and acts prudently but without emotion as regards those that can be avoided. You cannot avoid dying, but you can avoid dying intestate; therefore make your will, and forget that you are mortal. Rational provision against misfortune is a totally different thing from fear; it is a part of wisdom, whereas all fear is slavish. If you cannot avoid feeling fears, try to prevent your child from suspecting them. Above all, give him that wide outlook and that multiplicity of vivid interests that will prevent him, in later life, from brooding upon possibilities of personal misfortune. Only so can you make him a free citizen of the universe.
CHAPTER V
PLAY AND FANCY
Love of play is the most obvious distinguishing mark of young animals, whether human or otherwise. In human children, this is accompanied by an inexhaustible pleasure in pretence. Play and pretence are a vital need of childhood, for which opportunity must be provided if the child is to be happy and healthy, quite independently of any further utility in these activities. There are two questions which concern education in this connection: first, what should parents and schools do in the way of providing opportunity? and secondly, should they do anything more, with a view to increasing the educational usefulness of games?
Let us begin with a few words about the psychology of games. This has been exhaustively treated by Groos; a shorter discussion will be found in William Stern’s book mentioned in the preceding chapter. There are two separate questions in this matter: the first is as to the impulses which produce play, the second is as to its biological utility. The second is the easier question. There seems no reason to doubt the most widely accepted theory, that in play the young of any species rehearse and practise the activities which they will have to perform in earnest later on. The play of puppies is exactly like a dog-fight, except that they do not actually bite each other. The play of kittens resembles the behaviour of cats with mice. Children love to imitate any work they have been watching, such as building or digging; the more important the work seems to them, the more they like to play at it. And they enjoy anything that gives them new muscular facilities, such as jumping, climbing, or walking up a narrow plank—always provided the task is not too difficult. But although this accounts, in a general way, for the usefulness of the play-impulse, it does not by any means cover all its manifestations, and must not for a moment be regarded as giving a psychological analysis.
Some psycho-analysts have tried to see a sexual symbolism in children’s play. This, I am convinced, is utter moonshine. The main instinctive urge of childhood is not sex, but the desire to become adult, or, perhaps more correctly, the will to power.[11] The child is impressed by his own weakness in comparison with older people, and he wishes to become their equal. I remember my boy’s profound delight when he realized that he would one day be a man and that I had once been a child; one could see effort being stimulated by the realization that success was possible. From a very early age, the child wishes to do what older people do, as is shown by the practice of imitation. Older brothers and sisters are useful, because their purposes can be understood and their capacities are not so far out of reach as those of grown-up people. The feeling of inferiority is very strong in children; when they are normal and rightly educated, it is a stimulus to effort, but if they are repressed it may become a source of unhappiness.
In play, we have two forms of the will to power: the form which consists in learning to do things, and the form which consists in fantasy. Just as the balked adult may indulge in daydreams that have a sexual significance, so the normal child indulges in pretences that have a power-significance. He likes to be a giant, or a lion, or a train; in his make-believe, he inspires terror. When I told my boy the story of Jack the Giant Killer, I tried to make him identify himself with Jack, but he firmly chose the giant. When his mother told him the story of Bluebeard, he insisted on being Bluebeard, and regarded the wife as justly punished for insubordination. In his play, there was a sanguinary outbreak of cutting off ladies’ heads. Sadism, Freudians would say; but he enjoyed just as much being a giant who ate little boys, or an engine that could pull a heavy load. Power, not sex, was the common element in these pretences. One day, when we were returning from a walk, I told him, as an obvious joke, that perhaps we should find a certain Mr. Tiddliewinks in possession of our house, and he might refuse to let us in. After that, for a long time, he would stand on the porch being Mr. Tiddliewinks, and telling me to go to another house. His delight in this game was unbounded, and obviously the pretence of power was what he enjoyed.
It would, however, be an undue simplification to suppose that the will to power is the sole source of children’s play. They enjoy the pretence of terror—perhaps because the knowledge that it is a pretence increases their sense of safety. Sometimes I pretend to be a crocodile coming to eat my boy up. He squeals so realistically that I stop, thinking he is really frightened; but the moment I stop he says, “Daddy be a crocodile again”. A good deal of the pleasure of pretence is sheer joy in drama—the same thing that makes adults like novels and the theatre. I think curiosity has a part in all this: by playing bears, the child feels as if he were getting to know about bears. I think every strong impulse in the child’s life is reflected in play: power is only dominant in his play in proportion as it is dominant in his desires.