CHAP. II.
THE AFFECTIONS.
The cultivation of the affections comes next to the development of the bodily senses; or rather they may be said to begin together, so early does the infant heart receive impressions. The uniform gentleness, to which I have before alluded, and the calm state of the mother’s own feelings, have much to do with the affections of the child.
Kindness toward animals is of great importance. Children should be encouraged in pitying their distress; and if guilty of any violent treatment toward them, they should see that you are grieved and displeased at such conduct.
Before showing any disapprobation of his conduct, however, it should be explained to a very young child when he really does hurt an animal; for young children are often cruel from the mere thoughtlessness of frolic; they strike an animal as they would strike a log of wood, without knowing that they occasion pain.
I once saw a mother laugh very heartily at the distressed face of a kitten, which a child of two years old was pulling backward by the tail. At last, the kitten, in self-defence, turned and scratched the boy. He screamed, and his mother ran to him, kissed the wound, and beat the poor kitten, saying all the time, ‘Naughty kitten, to scratch John! I’ll beat her for scratching John! There, ugly puss!’
This little incident, trifling as it seems, no doubt had important effects on the character of the child; especially as a mother, who would do such a thing once, would be very likely to do it habitually.
In the first place, the child was encouraged in cruelty, by seeing that it gave his mother amusement. Had she explained to him that he was hurting the kitten, and expressed her pity by saying, ‘Oh, don’t hurt kitty—she is a good little puss—and she loves John’—what a different impression would have been made on his infant heart!
In the next place, the kitten was struck for defending herself; this was injustice to the injured animal, and a lesson of tyranny to the boy. In the third place, striking the kitten because she had scratched him, was teaching him retaliation. For that reason, a chair or a foot-stool, against which he had accidentally hurt himself, should never be struck, or treated in an angry manner. You know, to be sure, that an inanimate object is not capable of feeling pain; but your infant does not know it; the influence upon him is, that it is right to injure when we are injured.
It is a common opinion that a spirit of revenge is natural to children. No doubt bad temper, as well as other evils, moral and physical, are often hereditary—and here is a fresh reason for being good ourselves, if we would have our children good. But allowing that evil propensities are hereditary, and therefore born with children, how are they excited, and called into action?
First, by the influences of the nursery—those early influences, which, beginning as they do with life itself, are easily mistaken for the operations of nature; and in the second place, by the temptations of the world.