Studies of childhood

by James Sully

Mr. Walter Bagehot tells us that the great initial difficulty in the formation of communities was the fixing of custom. However this be in the case of primitive communities it seems to me indisputable that in the case of a child brought up in normal surroundings there is a clearly observable instinct to fall in with a common mode of behaviour.

This respect for custom is related to the imitative instincts of the child. He does what he sees others do, and so tends to fall in with their manner of life. We all know that these small people take their cue from their elders as to what is allowable. Hence one difficulty of moral training. A little boy when two years and one month old had happened to see his mother tear a piece of calico. The next day he was discovered to have taken the sheet from the bed and made a rent in it. When scolded, he replied in his childish German, ‘Mamma mach put,’ i.e., ‘macht caput’ (breaks calico). It is well when the misleading effect of ‘example’ is so little serious as it was in this case.

In addition to this effect of others’ doings in making things allowable in the child’s eyes, there is the binding influence of a repeated regular manner of proceeding. This is the might of ‘custom’ in the full sense of the term, the force which underlies all a child’s conceptions of ‘right’. In spite of the difficulties of moral training, of drilling children into orderly habits—and I do not lose sight of these—it may confidently be said that they have an inbred respect for what is customary, and wears the appearance of a rule of life. Nor is this, I believe, altogether a reflexion, by imitation, of others’ orderly ways, and of the system of rules which is imposed on him by others. I am quite ready to admit that the institution of social life, the regular procession of the daily doings of the house, aided by the system of parental discipline, has much to do with fixing the idea of orderliness and regularity in the child’s mind. Yet I believe the facts point to something more, to an innate disposition to follow precedent and rule, which precedes education, and is one of the forces to which education can appeal. This disposition has its roots in habit, which is apparently a law of all life: but it is more than the blind impulse of habit, since it is reflective and rational, and implies a recognition of the universal.

The first crude manifestation of this disposition to make rule, to rationalise life by subjecting it to a general method, is seen in those actions which seem little more than the working of habit, the insistence on the customary lines of procedure at meals and such like. A mother writes that her boy when five years old was quite a stickler for punctilious order in these matters. His cup and spoon had to be put in precisely the right place, the sequences of the day, as the lesson before the walk, the walk before bed, had to be rigorously observed. Any breach of the customary was apt to be resented as a sort of impiety. This may be an extreme instance, but my observation leads me to say that such punctiliousness is not uncommon. What is more, I have seen it developing itself where the system of parental government was by no means characterised by severe insistence on such minutiæ of order. And this would seem to show that it cannot wholly be set down to the influences of such government. It seems rather to be a spontaneous extension of the realm of rule or law.

This impulse to extend rule appears more plainly in many of the little ceremonial observances of the child. Very charmingly is this respect for rule exhibited in relation to his animals, dolls and other pets. Not only are they required to do things in a proper orderly manner, but people have to treat them with due deference.

“Every night,” writes a mother of her boy aged two years seven months, "after I have kissed and shaken hands with him, I have to kiss his ‘boy,’ that is his doll, who sleeps with him, and to shake its two hands—also to shake the four hoofs of a tiny horse which lies at the foot of his cot. When all this has been gone through, he stands up and entreats, ‘More tata, please, more tata,’ i.e., ‘kiss me again and say more good-nights’. These customs of his with regard to kissing are peculiar to himself—he kisses his ‘boy’ (doll), also pictures of horses, dogs, cocks and hens, and he puts his head against us to be kissed; but he will only shake hands and will not kiss people himself: he reserves his kisses for what he seems to feel inferior things. We kiss our boy, he kisses his; but he insists upon being shaken hands with for his part. If other children come to play he gives them toys, watches them with delight, tries to give them rides on his ‘go-go’s,’ but does not kiss them; though he will stroke their hair he does not return their kisses. It seems to me that he regards it as an action to be reserved for an inferior thing."

I have quoted at length this careful bit of maternal observation because it seems to indicate so clearly a spontaneous extension of a custom. The practice of the mother and father in kissing him was generalised into a rule of ceremony in the treatment of all inferiors.

This subject of childish ceremonial is a curious one, and deserves a more careful study. It is hardly less interesting than the origin and survival of adult ceremonial, as elucidated by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The respect for orderly procedure on all serious occasions, and especially at church, is as exacting as that of any savage tribe. Punch illustrated this some years ago by a picture of a little girl asking her mamma if Mr. So and So was not a very wicked man, because he didn’t “smell his hat” when he came into his pew.

This jealous regard for ceremony and the proprieties of behaviour is seen in the enforcement of rules of politeness by children who will extend them far beyond the scope intended by the parent. A delightful instance of this fell under my own observation, as I was walking on Hampstead Heath. It was a spring day, and the fat buds of the chestnuts were bursting into magnificent green plumes. Two well-dressed ‘misses,’ aged, I should say, about nine and eleven, were taking their correct morning walk. The elder called the attention of the younger to one of the trees, pointing to it. The younger exclaimed in a highly shocked tone: “Oh, Maud (or was it ‘Mabel’?), you know you shouldn’t point!” The notion of perpetrating a rudeness on the chestnut tree was funny enough. But the incident is instructive as illustrating the childish tendency to stretch and generalise rules to the utmost.

The domain of prayer well illustrates the same tendency. The child envisages God as a very, very grand person, and naturally, therefore, extends to him all the courtesies he knows of. Thus he must be addressed politely with the due forms ‘Please,’ ‘If you please,’ and so forth. The German child shrinks from using the familiar form ‘Du’ in his prayers. As one maiden of seven well put it in reply to a question why she used ‘Sie’ in her prayers: “Ich werde doch den lieben Gott nicht Du nennen: ich kenne ihn ja gar nicht”. Again, a child feels that he must not worry or bore God (children generally find out that some people look on them as bores), or treat him with any kind of disrespect. C. objected to his sister’s remaining so long at her prayers, apparently on the ground that, as God knew what she had to say, her much talking would be likely to bore him. An American boy of four on one occasion refused to say his prayers, explaining, “Why, they’re old. God has heard them so many times that they are old to him too. Why, he knows them as well as I do myself.” On the other hand, God must not be kept waiting. “Oh, mamma,” said a little boy of three years eight months (the same that was so insistent about the kissing and hand-shaking), “how long you have kept me awake for you; God has been wondering so whenever I was going to say my prayers.” All the words must be nicely said to him. A little boy, aged four and three-quarter years, once stopped in the middle of a prayer and asked his mother: “Oh! how do you spell that word?” The question is curious as suggesting that the child may have envisaged his silent communications to the far-off King as a letter. In any case, it showed painstaking and the wish not to offend by slovenliness of address.