Studies of childhood

by James Sully

Here we have expressive movements which are plainly brutal, which assimilate the aspect of an angry child to that of an infuriated animal. The whole outward attitude is one of fierce reckless assault. The insane, we are told, manifest a like wildness of attack in fits of anger, smashing windows, etc., and striking anybody who happens to be at hand.

Yet these are not all the manifestations. Childish anger has its wretched aspect. There is keen suffering in these early experiences of thwarted will and purpose. A little boy, rather more than a year old, used when crossed to throw himself on the floor and bang the back of his head; and his brother, when fourteen months old, would similarly throw himself on the floor, bang the back of his head, biting the carpet as before mentioned. This act of throwing oneself on the floor, which is common about this age and is apparently quite instinctive, is the expression of the utter dejection of misery. C.’s attitude when crossed, gathered into a heap on the floor, was eloquent of this infantile despair. Such suffering is the immediate outcome of thwarted purpose, and must be distinguished from the moral feeling of shame which often accompanies it.

Such stormy outbursts vary no doubt from child to child. Thus C.’s sister in her angry moments did not bite or roll on the floor, but would dance about and stamp. Some children show little if anything of this savage furiousness. Among those that do show it, it is often a temporary phenomenon only.

This anger, it is to be noted, is due to check, and would show itself to some extent even if there were no intervention of authority. Thus a child will become angry, resentful, and despairingly miserable if another child gets effective hold of something which he wants to have. Yet it is undoubtedly true, as we shall see, that these little storms are most frequently called up by the imposition of authority, and are a manifestation of what we call a defiant attitude.

This slight examination may suffice to show that with the child self, its appetites, its satisfactions, are the centre of its existence, the pivot on which its action turns. I do not forget the real and striking differences here, the specially brutal form of boys’ anger as compared with that of girls, the partial atrophy of some of these impulses, e.g., jealousy, in the more gentle and affectionate type of child. Yet there seems to be little doubt that these are among the commonest and most pronounced characteristics of the first years.

Evolution will, no doubt, help us to understand much of this. If the order of development of the individual follows and summarises that of the race, we should expect the child to show a germ at least of the passionateness, the quarrelsomeness of the brute and of the savage before he shows the moral qualities distinctive of civilised man. That he often shows so close a resemblance to the savage and to the brute suggests how little ages of civilised life with its suppression of these furious impulses have done to tone down the ancient and carefully transmitted instincts. The child at birth, and for a long while after, may then be said to be the representative of wild untamed nature, which it is for education to subdue and fashion into something higher and better.

At the same time the child is more than this. In this first clash of his will with another’s he knows more than the brute’s sensual fury. He suffers consciously, he realises himself in his antagonism to a world outside him. It is probable, as I have pointed out before, that even a physical check bringing pain, as when the child runs his head against a wall, may develop this consciousness of self in its antagonism to a not-self. This consciousness reaches a higher phase when the opposing force is distinctly apprehended as another will. Self-feeling, a germ of the feeling of ‘my worth,’ enters into this early passionateness and differentiates it from a mere animal rage. The absolute prostration of infantile anger seems to be the expression of this keen consciousness of rebuff, of injury.

While, then, these outbursts of savage instinct in children are no doubt ugly, and in their direction contra-moral, they must not hastily be pronounced wholly bad and wicked. To call them wicked in the full sense of that term is indeed to forget that they are the swift reactions of instinct which have in them nothing of reflexion or of deliberation. The angry child venting his spite in some wild act of violence is a long way from a man who knowingly and with the consent of his will retaliates and hates. The very fleeting character of the outbreak, the rapid subsidence of passion and transition to another mood, show that there is here no real malice prépense. These instincts will, no doubt, if they are not tamed, develop later on into truly wicked dispositions; yet it is by no means a small matter to recognise that they do not amount to full moral depravity.

On the other hand, we have seen that we do not render complete justice to these early manifestations of angry passion if we class them with those of the brute. The child in these first years, though not yet human in the sense of having rational insight into his wrong-doing, is human in the sense of suffering through consciousness of an injured self. This reflective element is not yet moral; the sense of injury may turn by-and-by into lasting hatred. Yet it holds within itself possibilities of something higher. But of this more when we come to envisage the child in his relation to authority.

The same predominance of self, the same kinship with the unsocial brute which shows itself in these germinal animosities, is said to reappear in the insensibility or unfeelingness of children. The commonest charge against children from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel.