Methods of teaching it differ. Indeed, as to methods of teaching their children anything, American fathers and mothers have no fixed standard, no homogeneous ideal. More likely than not they follow in this important matter their custom in matters of lesser import—of employing a method directly opposed to the method of their own parents, and employing it simply because it is directly opposed. This is but too apt to be their interpretation of the phrase "modernity in child nurture." But the children learn the lesson. They learn the other great and fundamental lessons of life, too, and learn them well, from these American fathers and mothers who are so friendly and companionable and sympathetic with them.
Why should they not? There is no antagonism between love and law. Parents are in a position of authority over their children; no risk of the strength of that position is involved in a friendship between parents and children anywhere. It is not remarkable that American parents should retain their authority over their children. What is noteworthy is that their children, less than any other children of the civilized world, rebel against it or chafe under it: they perceive so soon that their parents are governing them only because they are not wise enough to govern themselves; they realize so early that government, by some person or persons, is the estate in common of us all!
One day last summer at the seashore I saw a tiny boy, starting from the bath-house of his family, laboriously drag a rather large piece of driftwood along the beach. Finally he carefully deposited it in the sand at a considerable distance from the bath-house.
"Why did you bring that big piece of wood all the way up here?" I inquired as he passed me.
"My father told me to," the child replied.
"Why?" I found myself asking.
"Because I got it here; and it is against the law of this town to take anything from this beach, except shells. Did you know that? I didn't; my father just 'splained it to me."
American fathers and mothers explain so many things to their children! And American children explain quite as great a number of things to their parents. They can; because they are not only friends, but familiar friends. We have all read Continental autobiographies, of which the chapters under the general title "Early Years" contained records of fears based upon images implanted in the mind and flourishing there— images arising from some childish misapprehension or misinterpretation of some ordinary and perfectly explainable circumstance. "I was afraid to pass a closed closet alone after dark," one of these says. "I had heard of 'skeletons in closets'; I knew there were none in our closets in the daytime, but I couldn't be sure that they did not come to sleep in them at night; and I was too shy to inquire of my parents. What terrors I suffered! I was half-grown before I understood what a 'skeleton in a closet' was."
An American child would have discovered what one was within five minutes after hearing it first mentioned, provided he had the slightest interest in knowing. No American child is too shy to inquire of his parents concerning anything he may wish to know. Shyness is a veil children wear before strangers; in the company of their intimates they lay it aside— and forget it. In the autobiographies of Americans we shall not find many accounts of childish terrors arising from any reserve in the direction of asking questions. In American homes there are no closets whose doors children are afraid to pass, or to open, even after dark.
"American children are all so different!" an Englishman complained to me not long ago; "as different as their several homes. One can make no statement about them that is conclusive."