If those children deemed a dish distasteful, they were privileged to wait until they were willing to eat it. There was no undue pressure brought to bear on them. They could simply eat it, or let it alone. If they went without it that meal, the same dish, or a similar one, was before them for the next meal; and so on until hunger gave them the zest to eat it with unfeigned heartiness. By this means those children learned to eat what they ought to eat; and when they had come to years of maturity they realized the value of this training, which had made them the rulers of their appetite, instead of being its slaves. It needs no single example to illustrate the opposite course from this one. On every side we see persons who are subject to the whims and caprices of their appetite, because their appetite was never trained to be subject to them. And in one or another of these two directions the upbringing of every child is tending to-day.
Peculiarly in the use of candy and of condiments is a child’s appetite likely to be untrained, or trained amiss. Neither the one nor the other of these articles is suited to a child’s needs; but both of them are allowed to a child, regardless of what is best for him. The candy is given because the child fancies it. The condiments are given because the parents fancy them. Neither of the two is supposed to be beneficial to the child, but each is given in its turn because of the child’s wish for it, and of the parent’s weakness. There are parents who train their children not to eat candy between meals, nor to use condiments at meals. These parents are wiser than the average; and their children are both healthier and happier. There ought to be more of such parents, and more of such children. The difficulty in the way is always with the parents, instead of with the children.
It is affirmed as a fact, that some Shetland ponies which were brought to America had been accustomed to eat fish, and that for a time they refused to eat hay, but finally were trained to its eating until they seemed to enjoy it as heartily as other ponies. Children to whom cod-liver oil was most distasteful when it was first given to them as a medicine, have been trained to like cod-liver oil as well as they liked syrup. And so it has been in the use of acid drinks, or of bitter coffee, by young children under the direction of a physician. By firm and persistent training the children have been brought to like that from which for a time they recoiled. It is for the parents to decide, with the help of good medical counsel, what their children ought to like, and then to train them to like it.
It is by no means an easy matter for a parent to train a child’s appetite; but it is a very important matter, nevertheless. Nothing that is worth doing in this world is an easy matter; and whatever is really worth doing is worth all that its doing costs—and more. In spite of all its difficulties, the training of any child’s appetite can be compassed, by God’s blessing. And compassed it ought to be, whatever are its difficulties. It is for the parent to decide what the child shall eat, as it is for the parent to decide what that child shall wear. The parent who holds himself responsible for what a child shall put on, but who shirks his responsibility for what that child shall take in, would seem to have more regard for the child’s appearance than for his upbuilding from within; and that could hardly be counted a sign of parental wisdom or of parental love.
XIII.
TRAINING A CHILD AS A QUESTIONER.
A child is a born questioner. He does not have to be trained to be a questioner; but he does need to be trained as a questioner. A child has been not inaptly called “an animated interrogation-point.” Before a child can speak his questions, he looks them; and when he can speak them out, his questions crowd one another for expression, until it would seem that, if a parent were to answer all of his child’s questions, that parent would have time to do nothing else. The temptation to a parent, in view of this state of things, is to repress a child as a questioner, rather than to train him as a questioner; and just here is where a parent may lose or undervalue a golden privilege as a parent.