Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

Like the beginning of life, its ending is one of the recurring puzzles of early days. A child appears better able to imagine others dying than himself; this seems to be suggested by a story published by Stanley Hall of a little girl who from six to nine feared that all other people would die one by one, and that she would be left alone on the earth.

The first recoil from an inscrutable mystery soon begins to give place to a feeling of dread. A little girl of three and a half years asked her mother to put a great stone on her head, because she did not want to die. She was asked how a stone would prevent it, and answered with perfect childish logic: "Because I shall not grow tall if you put a great stone on my head; and people who grow tall get old and then die".

The first way of regarding death seems to be as a temporary state like sleep, which it so closely resembles. A little boy of two and a half years, on hearing from his mother of the death of a lady friend, at once asked: "Will Mrs. P. still be dead when we go back to London?"

The knowledge of burial gives a new and alarming turn to the child's thought. He now begins to speculate much about the grave. The instinctive tendency to carry over the idea of life and feeling to the buried body is illustrated in the request made by a little boy to his mother: "Don't put earth on my face when I am buried".

In the case of children who pick up something of the orthodox creed the idea of going to heaven has somehow to be grasped and put side by side with that of burial. Here comes one of the hardest puzzles for the logical child. One boy tried to reconcile the story of heaven with the fact of burial, at first by assuming that the good people who went to heaven were not buried at all; and later by supposing that the journey to heaven was somehow to be effected after burial and by way of the grave. Other devices for getting a consistent view of things are also hit upon. Some children have supposed that the head only passes into heaven, partly from taking the "body" to be the trunk only, and partly from a feeling that the head is the seat of the thinking mind.

The idea of dead people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the little brain to its logical consequences. Animals when they die are, naturally enough, supposed to go to heaven also.

The Great Maker.

Children seem disposed, apart from religious instruction, to form ideas of supernatural beings. Sometimes it is a dreadful person who exerts a malign influence on the child, sending him, for example, his pains in the stomach. In other cases it is a fairy-like being who is created into a mighty benefactor, and half-worshipped and prayed to in childish fashion.

Even when religious instruction supplies the form of the supernatural being the young thinker deals with this in his own original way. He has to understand the mysteries of God, Satan and the rest, and he can only understand them by shedding on them the light of homely terrestrial facts. Hence the undisguised materialism of the child's theology. According to Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries into the thoughts of American children, God is apt to be imaged as a big, very strong man or giant. One child thought of him as a huge being with limbs spread all over the sky; another, as so tall that he could stand with one foot on the ground, and touch the clouds. He is commonly supposed, in conformity with what is told him, to dwell just above the sky, which last, as we have seen, is thought of as a dividing floor, through the chinks of which we get glimmerings of the glory of the heaven above. But some children show more of their own thought in localising the Deity, placing him, for example, in one of the stars, or the moon, or lower down "upon the hill".

Differences in childish feeling, as well as in intelligence, reflect themselves in the first ideas about the divine dwelling-place. It seems commonly to be conceived of as a grand house or mansion. While, however, some children deck it out with all manner of lovely things, including a park, flowers, and birds, others give it a homelier character, thinking, for example, of doors and possible draughts, like a little girl who asked God "to mind and shut the door, because he (i.e., grandpapa who had just died) can't stand the draughts". Some children, too, of a less exuberant fancy are disposed to think of heaven as by no means so satisfyingly lovely, and rather to shrink from a long wearisome stay in it.