Your boy and his training

by Edwin Seward Puller

Parental laxness in the enforcement of discipline may be due to indifference, obtuseness, or a false sense of affection which rebels at stern correctional measures. Whatever may be the motive of the parent, the effect on the child is the same. Obedience is largely a matter of habit which becomes fixed, as do other habits, by continued repetition. Dr. William Byron Forbush stated the thought in this language: “In the American home, especially where there is not sore poverty, the cause of delinquency in children is, without question, the flabbiness and slovenliness of parents in training their children to obedience and to orderly habits.”

Too often the training of the boy is shunted back and forth from father to mother like a shuttlecock which is finally knocked out of bounds. The father more frequently than the mother succeeds in evading the obligation and thereafter he rarely attempts to interfere unless we consider an occasional walloping of his son in anger the accomplishment of his duty.

The average parent is not fully equipped for his job. He is either unskilled or underskilled in boy-training. He needs education, insight, and understanding to cope with the problems of his son. If the parents default in the training of the boy—even through ignorance—need we wonder that the boy defaults in the making of the man?

Numerous boys attain the average perfection of manhood in spite of poor training—but none of them because of it. Many a father, because his son has turned out well, is wearing a self-imposed halo—when he is only lucky.

CHAPTER III
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

A SYSTEMATIC knowledge of the powers and limitations of the human mind and soul before maturity and the characteristic changes which they undergo at puberty will throw a flood of light on the boy-problem. Juvenile psychology may be divided into child psychology, covering the period from birth to puberty, and adolescent psychology, covering the period from puberty to maturity. Boyhood is the interval between birth and physical maturity, the latter being reached at the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, when the bones, muscles, and organs of the body have attained their complete development. Legal maturity, or majority, comes at the end of the twenty-first year, when the disabilities of infancy are removed and the boy is presumed by law to have acquired sufficient intelligence, judgment, and moral discernment to take his place in the community as a citizen, and is then vested with all the rights, duties, and obligations of an adult, even though mental maturity (reckoned at the time the brain cells cease to grow and judgment and reason have fully ripened) is deferred until he is approximately fifty years of age. We may roughly divide the boy’s life into four periods of psychic unfolding in accordance with the table on page 32.

PERIOD	AGE	CHARACTERISTICS
Imaginative	Birth to 8 Infancy	Imaginative faculty is dominant; acquisition of locomotion, speech and elementary knowledge; birth of moral concepts.
Individualistic	8 to 12 Early Boyhood	Individualism; selfish propensities; want of regard for rights of others; imitative faculty is ascendant.
Heroic	12 to 16 Early Adolescence	Hero-worship; gang affiliations; puberty and early adolescence; fundamental organic changes; sex-consciousness; age of experimentation; character-building period; psychic disturbances; exceptional plasticity of mind; high degree of emotionalism; susceptibility to religious influences; development of will-power.
Reflective	16 to 24 Later Adolescence	Thoughtful mental attitude; habit of introspection; evolution of sociological consciousness; development of altruism; growth of ethical concepts; perfection of will-power.

During the imaginative period covering infancy, from birth to eight years, the child lives in a land of air castles, daydreams and mental inventions, interspersed with periodic pangs of hunger which assail him at intervals of great frequency. His world is peopled with fairies, gnomes, nymphs, dryads, goblins, and hobgoblins. Elfin images are his daily playmates. Imagination runs riot and dominates his viewpoint. It is the period in which make-believe is as real as reality, and this furnishes the explanation of many of the so-called falsehoods of this age. But the development of the imagination should be guarded, not suppressed. Through imagination we visualize the future and effect world progress. All the great inventions which have advanced civilization, the political reforms which have contributed to our liberties and happiness, and the monumental works of literature, music, art, and science, would have been impossible without the exercise of the imaginative faculty.

Imagination is not only of great value in educating the intellect and morals, but it is a desirable mental attribute which promotes sympathy, discloses latent possibilities of things and situations, and broadens one’s appreciation of life. It is needed by the laborer, ditch-digger and sewer-cleaner as well as by the musician, artist, and author.

In this period the child learns more than in all his subsequent life. He learns to talk, to walk, to feed himself and to play; he learns the rudiments of written and printed language, and the names and uses of the various objects he sees about him; he comprehends form, color, perspective, and harmony; his imagination, so useful in later life, blossoms forth; his moral sense buds and the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong unfolds; the intense desire to learn and to know is born—evidenced by his rapid-fire and continuous questions; he is possessed by a voracious appetite for knowledge which must be fed by a harvest of information; and the habit of obedience and the recognition of parental authority become fixed. His horizon is bounded by physical growth and the acquisition of knowledge. All subsequent knowledge is either a variant of or a supplement to the basic knowledge acquired during infancy.