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

by James Sully

Other senses, more particularly that of touch, may bring their disturbing elements, too. Many children have a strong repugnance to cold clammy things, such as a cold moist hand, and what seems stranger, to the touch of something that seems altogether so likable as fur. Whether the common dislike of children to water has anything to do with its soft yieldingness to touch I cannot say. This whole class of early repugnances to certain sensations seems to stand on the confines between mere dislikes and fears, properly so called. A child may very much dislike touching fur without being in the strict sense afraid of it, though the dislike may readily develop into a true fear.

The Alarmed Sentinel.

We may now pass to the disconcerting and alarming effects to which a child is exposed through his sense of sight. This, as we know, is the intellectual sense, the sentinel that guards the body, keeping a look-out for what is afar as for what is anear. The uneasiness which a child experiences at seeing things is not, like the uneasiness at sounds, a mere effect of violent sensation; it arises much more from a perception of something menacing.

Among the earliest alarmers of sight may be mentioned the appearance of something new and strange, especially when it involves a sudden abolition of customary arrangements. Although we are wont to think of children as loving and delighting in what is new, we must not forget that it may also trouble and alarm. This feeling of uneasiness and apparently of insecurity in presence of changed surroundings shows itself as soon as a child has begun to grow used or accustomed to a particular state of things.

Among the more disconcerting effects of a rude departure from the customary, is that of change of place. When once an infant has grown accustomed to a certain room it is apt to find a new one strange, and will eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. This sense of strangeness in places sometimes appears very early. A little girl on being taken at the age of four months into a new nursery, "looked all round and then burst out crying". Some children retain this feeling of uneasiness up to the age of three years and later. Here, again, clearly marked differences among children disclose themselves. On entering an unfamiliar room a child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused by the odd look of things, so that the fear-impulse is kept under by other and pleasanter ones.

What applies to places applies also to persons. A child may be said to combine the attachment of the dog to persons with that of the cat to localities. Any sudden change of the customary human surroundings, for example, the arrival of a stranger on the scene, is apt to trouble him.

During the first three months, there is no distinct manifestation of a fear of strangers. It is only later, when recurring forms have grown familiar, that the approach of a stranger, especially if accompanied by a proposal to take the child, calls forth clear signs of displeasure and the shrinking away of fear. Professor Preyer gives between six and seven months as the date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a strange face.

Here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some children showing themselves more hospitable than others. It would be curious to compare the ages at which children begin to take kindly to new faces. Professor Preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his boy surmounted his timidity.

One strange variety of the fear of strangers is the uneasiness shown in presence of some one who is only partially recognisable. One little boy of eight months moaned in a curious way when his nurse returned home after a fortnight's holiday. Another boy of about ten months is said to have shown a marked shrinking from an uncle who strongly resembled his father. Such facts, taken with the familiar one that children are apt to be frightened at the sight of a parent partially disguised, suggest that half-stranger half-friend may be for a child's mind worse than altogether a stranger.

The uneasiness which comes from a sense of being in a new room or face to face with a stranger may perhaps be described as a feeling of what the Germans call the "unhomely". The little traveller has lost his bearings, and he begins to feel that he himself is lost. This effect of homelessness is, of course, most marked when a child finds himself in a strange place. Much of the acuter fear of children probably has in it something of this dizzy sickening sense of being lost. A little girl between the ages of seven and ten used to wake up in a fright crying loudly because she could not think where she was. Many a child when exploring a new and dark room, or still more venturesomely wandering alone out of doors, has suddenly woke up to the strange homeless look of things. I once saw a wee girl at a children's party who appeared to enjoy herself well enough up to a certain point, but was then suddenly seized by this sense of being lost in a new room among new faces, so that all her older sister's attempts to reassure her failed to stay the paroxysm of grief and terror.