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

by James Sully

All this, moreover, seems to show that a child objects not only to the particular administration under which he happens to live, but to all law as implying restraints on free activity. Thus, from the child's point of view, so far as we have yet examined it, punishment as such is a thing which ought not to be.

So strong and deep-reaching is this antagonism to law and its restraints apt to be that the common longing to be "big" is, I believe, largely grounded on the expectation of liberty. To be big seems to the child more than anything else to be able to do what one likes without interference from others. "Do you know," asked a little fellow of four years, "what I shall do when I'm a big man? I'll go to a shop and buy a bun and pick out all the currants." One must have left in him much of the child in order to understand the fascination of that forbidden pleasure of daintily selecting the currants.

(b) On the Side of Law.

If, however, we look closer we shall find that this hostility is not the whole, perhaps not the most fundamental part, of a child's attitude towards law. It is evident that the early criticism of parental government referred to above, so far from implying rejection of all rule, plainly implies its acceptance. Some of the earliest and bitterest protests against interference are directed against what looks to the child irregular or opposed to law, as when, for example, he is allowed for some time to use a pair of scissors as a plaything, and is then suddenly deprived of it. And does not all the exercise of childish ingenuity in excuses imply in an indirect way that if he had done what is described in the indictment it would be naughty and deserving of punishment?

Other facts in early life bear out the conjecture that a child has law-abiding as well as law-resisting impulses. I think we may often discern evidence of this in his suffering when in disgrace. When he is too young perhaps to feel the shame, he will feel, and acutely too, the estrangement, the loneliness, the sudden shrinkage of his beloved world. The greater the love and the dependence, the greater will be this feeling of devastation. The same little boy who said to his mother: "I'd be a worse mother," remarked to her a few months later that if he could say what he liked to God it would be: "Love me when I'm naughty".

There is, perhaps, in this childish suffering often something more than the sense of being homeless and outcast. A child of four or five may, I conceive, when suffering disgrace have a dim consciousness of having broken with his normal orderly self, of having set at defiance that which he customarily honours and obeys.

Now this setting up of an orderly law-abiding self seems to me to imply that there are impulses which make for order. A child, as I understand the little sphinx, is at once the subject of ever-changing caprices—whence the delight in playful defiance of all rule and order—and the reverer of custom, precedent, rule. And, as I conceive, this reverence for precedent and rule is the deeper and the stronger impulse.

The Young Stickler for the Proprieties.

I believe that those who know young children will agree with me that they show an instinctive respect for what is customary and according to rule, such as a particular way of taking food, dressing, and definite times for doing this and that. Nor can we regard this as merely a reflection of our respect for law, for as we shall presently see it reaches far beyond the limits of the rules laid down by adults. It seems to be a true instinct which comes before education and makes education possible. It is related to habit, the great principle which runs through the whole of life.

The first crude manifestation of this disposition to make rule is seen in the insistence on the customary, as to the places of things, the order of procedure at meals and such like. The little boy of two, often quoted here, showed a punctilious feeling for order in the placing of things. He protested one morning in his mother's bedroom against a hair-brush being placed on the washing-stand near the tooth-brushes, saying quaintly: "That toof-brush is a brush one". Older children are apt to be sticklers for order at the meal-table: thus, the cup and the spoon have to be put in precisely the right place. Similarly, the sequences of the day, e.g., the lesson before the walk, the walk before bed, have to be rigorously observed. This feeling for order may develop itself even where the system of parental government is by no means characterised by rigorous insistence on such minutiæ of procedure.