Not only do children thus of themselves extend the scope and empire of rule, they show a disposition to make rules for themselves. If a child that is told to do a thing on a single occasion only is found repeating the action on other occasions, this seems to show the germ of a law-making impulse. A little boy of two years one month was once told to give a lot of old toys to the children of the gardener. Some time after, on receiving some new toys, he put away his old ones as before for the less fortunate children. Every careful observer of children knows that they are apt to proceed this way, to erect particular actions and suggestions into precedents. This tendency gives something of the amusing priggishness to the ways of childhood.
There is little doubt, I think, that this respect for proper orderly behaviour, for precedent and general rule, forms a vital element in the child’s submission to parental law. In fixing our attention on occasional acts of disobedience and lawlessness we are apt to overlook the ease, the absence of friction with which normal children, if only decently trained, fall in with the larger part of our observances and ordinances.
That the instinct for order does assist moral discipline may be seen in the fact that children are apt to pay enormous deference to our rules. Nothing is more suggestive here than the talk of children among themselves, the emphasis they are wont to lay on the ‘must’ and ‘must not’. The truth is that children have a tremendous belief in law: a rule is apt to present itself to their imagination as a thing supremely sacred and awful before which it prostrates itself.
This recognition of the absolute imperativeness of a rule properly laid down by the recognised authority is seen in children’s jealous insistence on the observance of the rule in their own case and in that of others. As has been observed by Preyer a child of two years eight months will follow out the prohibitions of the mother when he falls into other hands, sternly protesting, for example, against the nurse giving him the forbidden knife at table. Very proper children rather like to instruct their aunts and other ignorant persons as to the right way of dealing with them, and will rejoice in the opportunity of setting them right even when it means a deprivation for themselves. The self-denying ordinance: ‘Mamma doesn’t let me have many sweets,’ is by no means beyond the powers of such a child. One can see here, no doubt, traces of a childish sense of self-importance, a feeling of the much-waited-on little sovereign for what befits his supreme worth. Yet, allowing for such elements, there seems to me to be in this behaviour a residue of genuine respect for parental law.
These carryings out of the parental behest when entrusted to other hands are instructive as suggesting that the child feels the constraining force of the command when its author is no longer present to enforce it. Perhaps a clearer evidence of respect for the law as such, apart from its particular enforcement by the parent, is supplied by children’s way of extending the rules laid down for their own behaviour to that of others. This point has already been illustrated in the tendency to universalise the observances of courtesy and the like. No trait is better marked in the normal child than the impulse to subject others to his own disciplinary system. In truth, children are for the most part particularly alert disciplinarians. With what amusing severity are they wont to lay down the law to their dolls, and their animal playmates, subjecting them to precisely the same prohibitions and punishments as those to which they themselves are subject! Nor do they stop here. They enforce the duties just as courageously on their human elders. A mite of eighteen months went up to her elder sister, who was crying, and with perfect mimicry of the nurse’s corrective manner, said: “Hush! Hush! papa!” pointing at the same time to the door. The little girl M. when twenty-two months old was disappointed because a certain Mr. G. did not call. In the evening she said: "Mr. D. not did tum—was very naughty, Mr. D. have to be whipped". So natural and inevitable to the intelligence of a child does it seem that the system of restraints, rebukes, punishments under which he lives should have universal validity.
This judicial bent of the child is a curious one and often develops a priggish fondness for setting others morally straight. Small boys have to endure much in this way from the hands of slightly older sisters proficient in matters of law and delighting to enforce the moralities. But sometimes the sisters lapse into naughtiness, and then the small boys have their chance. They too can on such occasions be priggish if not downright hypocritical. A little boy had been quarrelling with his sister named Muriel just before going to bed. When he was undressed he knelt down to say his prayers, Muriel sitting near and listening. He prayed (audibly) in this wise: “Please, God, make Muriel a good girl,” then looked up and said in an angry voice, “Do you hear that, Muriel?” and after this digression resumed his petition. I believe fathers when reading family prayers have been known to apply portions of Scripture in this personal manner to particular members of the family; and it is even possible that extempore prayers have been invented, as by this little prig of a boy, for the purpose of administering a sort of back-handed corrective blow to an erring neighbour.
This mania for correction shows itself too in relation to the authorities themselves. A collection of rebukes and expositions of moral precept supplied by children to their erring parents would be amusing and suggestive. As was illustrated above, a child is especially keen to spy faults in his governors when they are themselves administering authority. Here is another example: A boy of two—the moral instruction of parents by the child begins betimes—would not go to sleep when bidden to do so by his father and mother. At length the father, losing patience, addressed him with a man’s fierce emphasis. This mode of admonition so far from cowering the child simply offended his sense of propriety, for he rejoined: “You s’ouldn’t s’ouldn’t, Assum (i.e., ‘Arthur,’ the father’s name), you s’ould speak nicely”.
The lengths to which a child with the impulse of moral correction strong in him will sometimes go, are quite appalling. One evening a little girl of six had been repeating the Lord’s prayer. When she had finished, she looked up and said: ‘I don’t like that prayer, you ought not to ask for bread, and all that greediness, you ought only to ask for goodness!’ There is probably in this an imitative reproduction of something which the child had been told by her mother, or had overheard. Yet allowing for this, one cannot but recognise a quite alarming degree of precocious moral priggishness.
We may now turn to what my readers will probably regard as still clearer evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children, viz., their voluntary submission to its commands. We are apt to think of these little ones as doing right only under external compulsion. But although a child of four may be far from attaining to the state of ‘autonomy of will’ or self-legislation spoken of by the philosopher, he may show a germ of such free adoption of law. It is possible that we see the first faint traces of this in a small child’s way of giving orders to, rebuking, and praising himself. The little girl M., when only twenty months old, would, when left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself: ‘Tay dar’ (stay there). About the same time, after being naughty and squealing ‘like a railway-whistle,’ she would after each squeal say in a deep voice, ‘Be dood, Babba’ (her name). At the age of twenty-two months she had been in the garden and misbehaving by treading on the box border, so that she had to be carried away by her mother. After confessing her fault she wanted to go into the garden again, and promised, ‘Babba will not be naughty adain’. When she was out she looked at the box, saying, “If oo (you) do dat I shall have to take oo in, Babba”. Here, no doubt, we see quaint mimicries of the external control, but they seem to me to indicate a movement in the direction of self-control.
Very instructive here is the way in which children will voluntarily come and submit themselves to our discipline. The little girl M. when less than two years old, would go to her mother and confess some piece of naughtiness and suggest the punishment. A little boy aged two years and four months was deprived of a pencil from Thursday to Sunday for scribbling on the wall-paper. His punishment was, however, tempered by permission to draw when taken downstairs. On Saturday he had finished a picture downstairs which pleased him. When his nurse fetched him she wanted to look at the drawing, but the boy strongly objected, saying: “No Nana (name for nurse) look at it till Sunday”. And sure enough when Sunday came, and the pencil was restored to him, he promptly showed nurse his picture. This is an excellent observation full of suggestion as to the way in which a child’s mind works. Among other things it seems to show pretty plainly that the little fellow looked on the nursery and all its belongings, including the nurse, during those three days as a place of disgrace into which the privileges of the artist were not to enter. He was allowed the indulgence of drawing downstairs, but he had no right to exhibit his workmanship to the nurse, who was inseparably associated in his mind with the forbidden nursery drawing. Thus a process of genuine child-thought led to a self-instituted extension of the punishment.