Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young / Or, the Principles on Which a Firm Parental Authority May Be Established and Maintained, Without Violence or Anger, and the Right Development of the Moral and Mental Capacities Be Promoted by Methods in Harmony with the Structure and the Characteristics of the Juvenile Mind

by Jacob Abbott

Some mothers may perhaps say that they have not time thus to enter into the ideas and occupations of their children. They are engrossed with the serious cares of life, or busy with its various occupations. But it does not require time. It is not a question of time, but of manner. The farmer's wife, for example, is busy ironing, or sewing, or preparing breakfast for her husband and sons, who are expected every moment to come in hungry from their work. Her little daughter, ten years old, comes to show her a shawl she has been making from a piece of calico for her doll. The busy mother thinks she must say, "Yes; but run away now, Mary; I am very busy!"—because that is the easiest and quickest thing to say; but it is just as easy and just as quick to say, "What a pretty shawl! Play now that you are going to take Minette out for a walk in it!" The one mode sends the child away repulsed and a little disappointed; the other pleases her and makes her happy, and tends, moreover, to form a new bond of union and sympathy between her mother's heart and her own. A merchant, engrossed all day in his business, comes home to his house at dinner-time, and meets his boy of fifteen on the steps returning from his school. "Well, James," he says, as they walk together up stairs, "I hope you have been a good boy at school to-day." James, not knowing what to say, makes some inaudible or unmeaning reply. His father then goes on to say that he hopes his boy will be diligent and attentive to his studies, and improve his time well, as his future success in life will depend upon the use which he makes of his advantages while he is young; and then leaves him at the head of the stairs, each to go to his room.

All this is very well. Advice given under such circumstances and in such a way produces, undoubtedly, a certain good effect, but it does not tend at all to bring the father and son together. But if, instead of giving this common-place advice, the father asks—supposing it to be winter at the time—"Which kind of skates are the most popular among the boys nowadays, James?" Then, after hearing his reply, he asks him what his opinion is, and whether any great improvement has been made within a short time, and whether the patent inventions are any of them of much consequence. The tendency of such a conversation as this, equally brief with the other, will be to draw the father and son more together. Even in a moral point of view, the influence would be, indirectly, very salutary; for although no moral counsel or instruction was given at the time, the effect of such a participation in the thoughts with which the boy's mind is occupied is to strengthen the bond of union between the heart of the boy and that of his father, and thus to make the boy far more ready to receive and be guided by the advice or admonitions of his father on other occasions.

Let no one suppose, from these illustrations, that they are intended to inculcate the idea that a father is to lay aside the parental counsels and instructions that he has been accustomed to give to his children, and replace them by talks about skates! They are only intended to show one aspect of the difference of effect produced by the two kinds of conversation, and that the father, if he wishes to gain and retain an influence over the hearts of his boys, must descend sometimes into the world in which they live, and with which their thoughts are occupied, and must enter it, not merely as a spectator, or a fault-finder, or a counsellor, but as a sharer, to some extent, in the ideas and feelings which are appropriate to it.

Ascendency over the Minds of Children.

Sympathizing with children in their own pleasures and enjoyments, however childish they may seem to us when we do not regard them, as it were, with children's eyes, is, perhaps, the most powerful of all the means at our command for gaining a powerful ascendency over them. This will lead us not to interfere with their own plans and ideas, but to be willing that they should be happy in their own way. In respect to their duties, those connected, for example, with their studies, their serious employments, and their compliance with directions of any kind emanating from superior authority, of course their will must be under absolute subjection to that of those who are older and wiser than they. In all such things they must bring their thoughts and actions into accord with ours. In these things they must come to us, not we to them. But in every thing that relates to their child-like pleasures and joys, their modes of recreation and amusement, their playful explorations of the mysteries of things, and the various novelties around them in the strange world into which they find themselves ushered—in all these things we must not attempt to bring them to us, but must go to them. In this, their own sphere, the more perfectly they are at liberty, the better; and if we join them in it at all, we must do so by bringing our ideas and wishes into accord with theirs.

Foolish Fears.

The effect of our sympathy with children in winning their confidence and love, is all the more powerful when it is exercised in cases where they are naturally inclined not to expect sympathy—that is, in relation to feelings which they would suppose that older persons would be inclined to condemn. Perhaps the most striking example of this is in what is commonly called foolish fears. Now a fear is foolish or otherwise, not according to the absolute facts involving the supposed danger, but according to the means which the person in question has of knowing the facts. A lady, for example, in passing along the sidewalk of a great city comes to a place where workmen are raising an immense and ponderous iron safe, which, slowly rising, hangs suspended twenty feet above the walk. She is afraid to pass under it. The foreman, however, who is engaged in directing the operation, passing freely to and fro under the impending weight, as he has occasion, and without the least concern, smiles, perhaps, at the lady's "foolish fears." But the fears which might, perhaps, be foolish in him, are not so in her, since he knows the nature and the strength of the machinery and securities above, and she does not. She only knows that accidents do sometimes happen from want of due precaution in raising heavy weights, and she does not know, and has no means of knowing, whether or not the due precautions have been taken in this case. So she manifests good sense, and not folly, in going out of her way to avoid all possibility of danger.

This is really the proper explanation of a large class of what are usually termed foolish fears. Viewed in the light of the individual's knowledge of the facts in the case, they are sensible fears, and not foolish ones at all.

A girl of twelve, from the city, spending the summer in the country, wishes to go down to the river to join her brothers there, but is stopped by observing a cow in a field which she has to cross. She comes back to the house, and is there laughed at for her foolishness in being; "afraid of a cow!"

But why should she not be afraid of a cow? She has heard stories of people being gored by bulls, and sometimes by cows, and she has no means whatever of estimating the reality or the extent of the danger in any particular case. The farmer's daughters, however, who laugh at her, know the cow in question perfectly well. They have milked her, and fed her, and tied her up to her manger a hundred times; so, while it would be a very foolish thing for them to be afraid to cross a field where the cow was feeding, it is a very sensible thing for the stranger-girl from the city to be so.