CHAPTER IV.
“O Mother, I am so glad you are at home again. I had a lovely talk with father last evening, but it wasn’t you. He gave me lots to think about, though. He said that mothers need to have such a broad education; that they should even be chemists, mother, think of that!”
“Does that seem such a strange idea to you? Really they need to be much more than that. They should be good teachers, to instruct their children, wise judges, in order to know what justice is, doctors of medicine so as to understand the first symptoms of illness and how to treat it, and surgeons so as to know how to bind up wounds, treat cuts and bruises and even how to reduce a dislocated finger if necessary. They should be physiologists so as to understand the laws of bodily health, and psychologists so as to know and obey the laws of the mental development of their children.”
“O, mother! How can one girl learn all those hard things?”
Mrs. Wayne smiled indulgently as she replied, “O, she won’t have to learn all of them at once. Taken one at a time, through all the years preceding her marriage, she will find she can learn something of each without taxing herself too severely. 70 For example, you can learn now how to take care of your own health, and that will help you to care for the health of your children when they come. You have already studied First Aid to the injured in your physiology class. When you go to College you will study psychology as a part of your course of study.”
“What does that big word mean, mother?”
“Psychology means the science of mind. I said that mothers need to be psychologists; that is, students of the science of mind, so that they will understand the indications of the development of mind in their babies. A child gets the largest part of its education before it is six years old.”
“O, mamma, do you really mean that?”
“I certainly do. In the first place, it has to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, its body. You do not realize now that you had to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, every one of the muscular movements that you can now make without thinking of them. You remember what hard work it was to learn the piano and that was only learning to use a very few muscles in a certain way. As a baby you had to practice hours a day before you could learn to hold anything in your fingers. Your little hands flew about very wildly at first, but by constant practice you gained skill at last.”