It is of course difficult to say how far a child’s interruptions and what look like turnings of the conversation when receiving rebuke are the result of deliberate plotting. We know it is hard to hold the young thoughts long on any subject, and the homily makes a heavy demand in this respect, and its theme is apt to seem dull to a child’s lively brain. The thoughts will be sure to wander then, and the rude interruptions and digressions may after all be but the natural play of the young mind. I fear, however, that design often has a hand here. The first digression to which the weak disciplinarian succumbed may have been the result of a spontaneous flow of childish ideas: but its success enables the observant child to try it on a second time with artful aim.
In cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the accusation, the small wits are busy discovering palliatives and exculpations. Here we have the many ruses, often crude enough, by which the little culprit tries to shake off moral responsibility, to deny the authorship of the action found fault with. The blame is put on anybody or anything. When he breaks something, say a cup, and is scolded, he saves himself by saying it was because the cup was not made strong enough, or because the maid put it too near the edge of the table. There are clear indications of fatalistic thought in these childish disclaimers. Things were so conditioned that he could not help doing what he did. This fatalism betrays itself in the childish subterfuges already referred to, by which the ego tries to screen itself shabbily by throwing responsibility on to the bodily agents. This device is sometimes hit upon very early. A wee child of two when told not to cry gasped out: "Elsie cry—not Elsie cry—tears cry—naughty tears!" This, it must be allowed, is more plausible than C.’s lame attempt to put off responsibility for some naughty action on his hands. For our tears are in a sense apart from us, and in the first years are wholly beyond control.
The fatalistic form of exculpation meets us later on under the familiar form, ‘God made me like that’. A boy of three was blamed for leaving his crusts, and his conduct contrasted with that of his model papa. Whereupon he observed with a touch of metaphysical precocity: “Yes, but, papa, you see God had made you and me different”.
These denials of authorship occur when a charge is brought home and no clear justification of the action is forthcoming. In many cases the shrewd intelligence of the child—which is never so acute as in this art of moral self-defence—discovers justificatory reasons. In such a case the attitude is a very different one. It is no longer the helpless lifting of hands of the irresponsible one, but the bold steady glance of one who is prepared to defend his action.
Sometimes these justifications are pitiful examples of quibbling. A boy had been rough with his baby brother. His mother chid him, telling him he might hurt baby. He then asked his mother, ‘Isn’t he my own brother?’ and on his mother admitting so incontestable a proposition, exclaimed triumphantly, “Well, you said I could do what I liked with my own things”. The idea of the precious baby being a boy’s own to do what he likes with is so remote from older people’s conceptions that it seems impossible to credit the boy with misunderstanding. We ought, perhaps, to set him down as a depraved little sophist and destined—but predictions happily lie outside our métier.
In some cases these justifications have a dreadful look of being after-thoughts invented for the express purpose of self-protection and knowingly put forward as fibs. Yet there is need of a wise discrimination here. Take, for example, the following from the Worcester Collection. A boy of three was told by his mother to stay and mind his baby-sister while she went downstairs. On going up again some time after she met him on the stairs. “Being asked why he had left the baby he said there was a bumble-bee in the room and he was afraid he would get stung if he stayed there. His mother asked him if he wasn’t afraid his little sister would get stung. He said, ‘Yes,’ but added that if he stayed in the room the bee might sting them both, and then she would have two to take care of.” Now with every wish to be charitable I cannot bring myself to think that the small boy had really gone through that subtle process of disinterested calculation before vacating the room in favour of the bumble-bee, if indeed there was a bumble-bee. To be caught in the act and questioned is, I suspect, a situation particularly productive of such specious fibbing.
One other illustration of this keen childish dialectic when face to face with the accuser deserves to be touched on. The sharp little wits have something of a lawyer’s quickness in detecting a flaw in the indictment. Any exaggeration into which a feeling of indignation happens to betray the accuser is instantly pounced upon. If, for example, a child is scolded for pulling kitty’s ears and making her cry it is enough for the little stickler for accuracy to be able to say: ‘I wasn’t pulling kitty’s ears, I was only pulling one of her ears’. This ability to deny the charge in its initial form gives the child a great advantage, and robs the accusation in its amended form of much of its sting. Whence, by the way, one may infer that wisdom in managing children shows itself in nothing more than in a scrupulous exactness in the use of words.
While there are these isolated attacks on various points of the daily discipline, we see now and again a bolder line of action in the shape of a general protest against its severity. Children have been known to urge that the punishments inflicted on them are ineffectual; and, although their opinion on such matters is hardly disinterested, it is sometimes pertinent enough. An American boy aged five years ten months began to cry because he was forbidden to go into the yard to play, and was threatened by his mother with a whipping. Whereupon he observed: “Well now, mamma, that will only make me cry more”.
These childish protests are, as we know, wont to be met by the commonplaces about the affection which prompts the correction. But the child finds it hard to swallow these subtleties. For him love is love, that is caressing, and doing everything for his present enjoyment; and here is the mother who says she loves him, and often acts as if she did, transforming herself into an ogre to torment him and make him miserable. He may accept her assurance that she scolds and chastises him because she is a good mother; only he is apt to wish that she were a shade less good. A boy of four had one morning to remain in bed till ten o’clock as a punishment for misbehaviour. He proceeded to address his mother in this wise: "If I had any little children I’d be a worse mother than you—I’d be quite a bad mother; I’d let the children get up directly I had done my breakfast at any rate". If, on the other hand, the mother puts forward her own comfort as the ground of the restraint she may be met by this kind of thing: “I wish you’d be a little more self-sacrificing and let me make a noise”.
Enough has been said to illustrate the ways in which the natural child kicks against the imposition of restraints on his free activity. He begins by showing himself an open foe to authority. For a long time after, while making a certain show of submission, he harbours in his breast something of the rebel’s spirit. He does his best to evade the most galling parts of the daily discipline, and displays an admirable ingenuity in devising excuses for apparent acts of insubordination. Where candour is permitted he is apt to prove himself an exceedingly acute critic of the system which is imposed on him.