CHAPTER VI[ToC]
Training The Little Child
"Children are the home's highest product." That means at the outset that we have children because we believe in them, and that we train them, as the skilled workman shapes his wood and clay, to achieve the greatest result of which the human material is capable.
A factory's output can be standardized. An engine's power can be measured. But he who trains a child can never fully know the mind he works with nor the result he attains. We do know, however, that if it is subject to certain influences, trained by certain laws, the chances are that this mind which we cannot fully know will react in a certain way.
To attempt in a chapter to outline a system of training for children would be an attempt doomed to certain failure. Books are written on this subject, and the shelves of the child-study and child-training department in the libraries are rapidly filling. What I have in mind here is rather a single line of the child's development—that which leads toward making him a useful factor in the home life of which he forms a part. The boy or girl who fills successfully a place in the home of his childhood will be in a fair way to undertake successfully the greater task of founding a home of his own.
In the days of infancy and early childhood, training for boys and girls may be more nearly identical than in later life. A large part of the differentiation in the work and play of little boys and girls would seem to be quite artificial. We give dolls to girls and drums to boys, but only because of some preconceived notion of our own. The girls will drum as loudly and the boys care for the baby quite as tenderly, until some one ridicules them and they learn to simulate a scorn for "boys' things" and "girls' things" which they do not really feel.
Throughout this chapter, therefore, it is to be assumed that the training suggested is quite as applicable and quite as necessary for one sex as for the other.
Young mothers sometimes ask the family doctor, "When shall I begin to train the baby to eat at regular intervals, to go to sleep without rocking, in general to accept the plan of life we outline for him?" The answer seldom varies: "Before he is twenty-four hours old." It is therefore evident that all the basic principles of living, whether physical or mental, must have their foundations far back in the child's young life.
Photograph by Brown Bros.