A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

What I now see to be a plain statement of the ugly truth underlying my sentimental reluctance to have the babies grow up would have seemed to me the most heartless attack on mother-love. It now occurs to me that mother-love should be something infinitely more searching and subtle. Modern society with its enforced drains and vaccinations and milk inspection and pure-food laws does much of the physical protecting which used to fall to the lot of mothers. Our part should not be, like bewildered bees, to live idly on the accumulation of virtues achieved for us by the hard won battles of our ancestors against their lower physical instincts; but to catch up the standard and advance into the harder battle against the hidden, treacherous ambushes of egotism, to conceive a new, high devotion for our children, a devotion which has in it courage for them as well as care for them; which is made up of faith in their better, stronger natures, as well as love for them, and which begins by the ruthless slaughter, so far as we can reach it, of the selfishness which makes us take pleasure in their dependence on us, rather than in seeing them grow (even though it may mean away from us) in the ability wisely to regulate their own lives. We must take care that we mothers do not treat our children as we reproach men for having treated women, with patronizing, enfeebling protection. We must learn to wish, above all things, to see the babies grow up since there is no condition (for any creature not a baby) more revolting than babyishness, just as there is no state more humiliating (for any but a child) than childishness. Let us learn to be ashamed of our too imperious care, which deprives them of every chance for action, for self-reliance, for fighting down their own weaknesses, which snatches away from them every opportunity to strengthen themselves by overcoming obstacles. We must learn to see in a little child not only a much-loved little body, informed by a will more or less pliable to our own, but a valiant spirit, longing for the exercise of its own powers, powers which are different from ours, from those of every human being who has ever existed.

There is no danger that in combating this subtle vice, we will fall back into the grosser one of physical tyranny over women, children, or the poor. That step forward has been taken conclusively. That question has been settled for all time and has been crystallized in popular opinion. We may still tyrannize coarsely over the weak, but we are quite conscious that we are doing something to be ashamed of. We can therefore, without fear of reactionary setbacks, devote ourselves to creating a popular consciousness of the sin of moral and intellectual tyranny.

Now all this reasoning has been conducted by means of abstract ideas and big words. It may seem hardly applicable to the relations of an affectionate parent with his three-year-old child. How, practically, concretely, at once, to-day, can we begin to avoid paternal despotism over little children?

To begin with, by giving them the practical training necessary to physical independence of life. Anyone who knows a woman who lived in the South during the old régime must have heard stories of the pathetic, grotesque helplessness to which the rich white population was reduced by the presence and personal service of the slaves ... the grown women who could not button their own shoes, the grown men who had never in their lives assembled all the articles necessary for a complete toilet. Dr. Montessori says, “The paralytic who cannot take off his boots because of a pathological fact, and the prince who dare not take them off because of a social fact, are in reality reduced to the same condition.” How many mothers whose willing fingers linger lovingly over the buttons and strings and hooks and eyes of the little costume are putting themselves in the pernicious attitude of the slave? How many other bustling, competent, quick-stepping mothers, dressing and undressing, washing and feeding and regulating their children, as though they were little automata, because “it’s so much easier to do it for them than to bother to teach them how to do it,” are reducing the little ones to a state of practical paralysis? As if ease were the aim of a mother in her relations to her child! It would be easier, as far as that is concerned, to eat the child’s meals for it; and a study of the “competent” brand of mother almost leads one to suspect that only the physical impossibility of this substituted activity keeps it from being put into practice. The too loving mother, the one who is too competent, the one who is too wedded to the regularity of her household routine, the impatient mother, the one who is “no teacher and never can tell anybody how to do things,” all these diverse personalities, though actuated by quite differing motives, are doing the same thing, unconsciously, benevolently, overbearingly insisting upon living the child’s life for him.

But it is evident that simply keeping our hands off is not enough. To begin with the process of dressing himself, the first in order of the day’s routine, a child of three, with no training, turned loose with the usual outfit of clothes, could never dress himself in the longest day of the year. And here, with a serious problem to be solved, we are back beside the buttoning boy of the Children’s Home. The child must learn how to be independent, as he must learn how to be anything else that is worth being, and the only excuse for existence of a parent is the possibility of his furnishing the means for the child to acquire this information with all speed. Let us take a long look at the buttoning boy over there in Rome and return to our own three-year-old for a more systematic survey of his problem, which is none other than the beginning of his emancipation from the prison of babyishness. Let him learn the different ways of fastening garments together on the Montessori frames if you have them, or in any other way your ingenuity can devise. Old garments of your own, put on a cheap dress form, are not a bad substitute for that part of the Montessori apparatus, or the large doll suggested on page 115 may serve.

Then apply your mind, difficult as that process is for all of us, to the simplification of the child’s costumes, even if you are led into such an unheard-of innovation as fastening the little waists and dresses up the front. Let me wonder, parenthetically, why children’s clothes should all be fastened at the back? Men manage to protect themselves from the weather on the opposite principle.

Then, finally, give him time to learn and to practise the new process; and time is one of the necessary elements of life most often denied to little children, who always take vastly longer than we do to complete a given process. I am myself a devoted adherent of the clock, and cannot endure the formless irregularity of a daily life without fixed hours, so that I do not speak without a keen realization of the fact that time cannot be granted to little children to live their own lives, without our undergoing considerable inconvenience, no matter how ingeniously we arrange the matter. We must feel a whole-hearted willingness to forego a superfluity in life for the sake of safeguarding an essential of life. When I feel the temptation, into which my impatient temperament is constantly leading me, to perform some action for a child which he would better do for himself, because his slowness interferes with my household schedule, I bring rigorously to mind the Montessori teacher who did not tuck in the child’s napkin. And I severely scrutinize the household process, the regularity of which is being upset, to see if that regularity is really worth a check to the child’s growth in self-dependence.

Once in a while it really does seem to me, on mature consideration, that regularity is worth that sacrifice, but so seldom as to be astonishing. One of the few instances is the regularity of the three meals a day. This seems to be an excellent means of inculcating real social feeling in the child, of making him understand the necessity for occasional sacrifices of individual desires to benefit the common weal. One should take care not to neglect or pass over the few genuine opportunities in the life of a little child, when he may feel that in common with the rest of the family he is making a sacrifice which counts for the sake of the common good.

But most other situations yield very different results when analyzed. For instance, if a child must dress in a cold room it is better for an adult to stuff the little arms and legs into the clothes with all haste, rather than run the risk of chilling the child. But as a rule, if the conditions are really honestly examined, these two alternatives are seen not to be the only ones. He is set perhaps to dress in a cold room because we have a tradition that it is “messy” and “common” to have dressing and undressing going on anywhere except in a bedroom. The question I must then ask myself is no longer, “Is there not danger that the child will take cold if I give him time to dress himself?” but, “Is the ordered respectability of my warm parlor worth a check to my child’s normal growth?”

And it is to some such quite unexpected question that one is constantly led by the attempt really to analyze the various restrictions we put upon the child’s freedom to live his own life. These restrictions multiply in such a perverse ratio with the material prosperity and conventionality of our lives that it is a truism that the children of the very poor fare better than ours in the opportunities offered them for the development of self-reliance, self-control, and independence, almost the most valuable outfit for the battle of life a human being can have.