A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A good example of this is the enlightenment which comes to most of us, after reading her statement about the relative weakness of little children’s legs. She calls our attention to the fact that the legs of the new-born baby are the most negligible members he possesses, small and weak out of all proportion to his body and arms. Then with an imposing scientific array of carefully gathered statistics, she proves that this disproportion of strength and of size continues during early childhood, up to six or seven. In other words, that a little child’s legs are weaker and tire more quickly than the rest of him, and hence he craves not only those exercises which he takes in running about in his usual active play, but others which he can take without bearing all his weight on his still rather boneless lower extremities.

This fact, although doubtless it has been common property among doctors for many years, was entirely new to me; and probably will be to many of the mothers who read this book, but an ingenious person has only to hear it to think at once of a number of exercises based on it. Dr. Montessori herself suggests a little fence on which the children can walk along sideways, supporting part of their weight with their arms. She also describes a swing with a seat so long that the child’s legs stretched out in front of him are entirely supported by it, and which is hung before a wall or board against which the child presses his feet as he swings up to it, thus keeping himself in motion. These devices are both so simple that almost any child might have the benefit of them, but even without them it is possible to profit by the above bit of physiological information, if it is only by restraining ourselves from forbidding a child the instinctive gesture we must all have seen, when he throws himself on his stomach across a chair and kicks his hanging legs. If all the chairs in the house are too good to allow this exercise, or if it shocks too much the adult ideas of propriety, a bench or kitchen-chair out under the trees will serve the same purpose.

Everyone who is familiar with the habits of natural children, or who remembers his own childish passions, knows how they are almost irresistibly fascinated by a ladder, and always greatly prefer it to a staircase. The reason is apparent. After early infancy they are not allowed to go upstairs on their hands and knees, but are taught, and rightly taught, to lift the whole weight of their bodies with their legs, the inherent weakness of which we have just learned. Of course this very exercise in moderation is just what weak legs need; but why not furnish also a length of ladder out of doors, short enough so that a fall on the pile of hay or straw at the foot will not be serious? As a matter of fact, you will be astonished to see that even with a child as young as three, the hay or straw is only needed to calm your own mind. The child has no more need of it than you, nor so much, his little hands and feet clinging prehensilely to the rounds of the ladder as he delightedly ascends and descends this substitute for the original tree-home.

The single board about six inches wide and three or four inches from the ground (a length of joist or studding serves very well) along which the child walks and runs, is an exercise for equilibrium which is elsewhere described (page 149). This can be varied, as he grows in strength and poise, by having him try some of the simpler rope-walking tricks of balance, walking on the board with one foot, or backward, or with his eyes shut. It is fairly safe to say, however, that having provided the board, you need exercise your own ingenuity no further in the matter. The variety and number of exercises of the sort which a group of active children can devise goes far beyond anything the adult brain could conceive. The exercises with water are described (page 151). These also can be varied to infinity, by the use of receptacles of different shapes, bottles with wide or narrow mouths, etc.

The folding-up exercises seem to me excellent, and the hearth-side seed-game is, in a modified form, already in use in the Casa dei Bambini. Small, low see-saws, the right size for very young children, are of great help in aiding the little one to learn the trick of balancing himself under all conditions; and let us remember that the sooner he learns this all-important secret of equilibrium, the better for him, since he will not have the heavy handicap of the bad habit of uncertain, awkward, misdirected movements, and he will never know the disheartening mental distress of lack of confidence in his own ability deftly, strongly, and automatically to manage his own body under all ordinary circumstances.

A very tiny spring-board, ending over a heap of hay, is another expedient for teaching three- and four-year-olds that they need not necessarily fall in a heap if their balance is quickly altered. If this simple device is too hard to secure, a substitute which any woman and even an older child can arrange for a little one, is a long thin board, with plenty of “give” to it, supported at each end by big stones, or by two or three bits of wood. The little child bouncing up and down on this and “jumping himself off” into soft sand, or into a pile of hay, learns unconsciously so many of the secrets of bodily poise that walking straight soon becomes a foregone conclusion.

One of the blindfold games in use in Montessori schools is played with wooden solids of different shapes, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, etc. The blindfolded child picks these, one at a time, out of the pile before him and identifies each by his sense of touch. In our family this has become an after-dinner game, played in the leisure moments before we all push away from the table and go about our own affairs, and managed with a napkin for blindfold, and with the table-furnishings for apparatus.

The identification of different stuffs, velvet, cotton, satin, woolen, etc., can be managed in any house which possesses a rag-bag. I do not see why the possession of a doll, preferably a rag-doll, should not be as valuable as the Montessori frames. Most dolls are so small that the hooks and eyes and the buttons and buttonholes on their minute garments are too difficult for little fingers to manage, whereas a doll which could wear the child’s own clothes would certainly teach him more about the geography of his raiment than any amount of precept. I can lay no claim to originality in this idea. It was suggested to my mind by the constant appearance in new costumes of the big Teddy-bear of a three-year-old child, whose impassioned struggles with the buttons of her bear’s clothes forms the most admirable of self-imposed manual gymnastics.

Lastly, it must not be forgotten that the “sets of Montessori apparatus” must be supplemented by several articles of child-furniture. There is not in it the little light table, the small low chair so necessary for children’s comfort and for their acquiring correct, agreeable habits of bodily posture. Such little chairs are easily to be secured but, alas! rarely found in even the most prosperous households. We must not forget the need for a low washstand with light and easily handled equipment; the hooks set low enough for little arms to reach up to them, so that later we shall not have to struggle with the habit fixed in the eight-year-old boy, of careless irresponsibility about those of his clothes which are not on his back; the small brooms and dust-pans so that tiny girls will take it as a matter of course that they are as much interested as their mothers in the cleanliness of a room; in short, all the devices possible to contrive to make a little child really at home in his father’s house.