Even more important than the right kind of treatment for untruthfulness is the necessity for an atmosphere in which the spirit of truthfulness is all-pervading. Some day watch yourself and notice how often you tell untruths to your child; how often he hears you tell so-called "white lies" to your neighbors; how often he hears you prevaricate and exaggerate. If you will keep track of these things you will realize that it is a trifle absurd of you to expect your child to be a strict speaker of the truth. Part of our campaign against the lies of our children must therefore consist in our attempt to establish truthful relations among adults, and between adults and children.
V.
BEING AFRAID
The heroes of history and the heroes of fiction whom all of us like to admire are the men and women who know no fear. But most of us make use of fear as a cheap device for attaining immediate results with our children. When Johnny hesitates about going upstairs in the dark to fetch your work-basket, you remind him of Columbus, who braved the trackless sea and the unknown void in the West, and you exhort him to be a man; but when Johnny was younger you yourself warned him that the Bogeyman would get him if be did not go right to sleep. And it is not very long since the day when he tried to climb the cherry tree and you attempted to dissuade him with the alarming prophecy that he would surely fall down and break his neck.
Thus our training consists of countless contradictions: we set up noble ideals to arouse courage and self-reliance—when that suits our immediate purpose; and we frighten with threats and warn of calamity when the child has the impulse to do what we do not wish to have him do. This at once suggests the effect of fear upon character and conduct. We instinctively call upon courage when we want the child to do something; we call upon fear when we want to prevent action. In other words, bravery stimulates, whereas fear paralyzes.
The human race is characterized by an instinct of fear. Very young infants exhibit all the symptoms of fear long before they can have any knowledge or experience of the disagreeable and the harmful effects of the things that frighten them. Thus a sudden noise will make the child start and tremble and even scream. And all through life an unexpected and loud noise is likely to startle us. An investigation has shown that thunder is feared much more than lightning. Children will laugh at the flashes of lightning, but will cower before the roaring thunder.
The feeling of fear is closely associated with what is unknown. It is not noise in general that frightens the children, but an unexpected noise from an unknown source. Indeed, the children like noise itself well enough to produce it whenever they can by heating drums, or barrels, or wash-boilers. The frightful thing about thunder is that the cause remains a mystery, and it is frightful so long as the cause does remain a mystery, if the child lives to be a hundred years old. During a thunder-storm children will picture to themselves a battle going on above. Some think of the sky cracking or the moon bursting, or conceive of the firmament as a dome of metal over which balls are being rolled.
[Illustration: Neither are girls afraid to climb.]
The influence of the unknown explains also why that other great source of fear, namely, darkness, has such a strange hold upon children. Fear of darkness is very common and often very intense. There are but few children who do not suffer from it at some time and to some extent. This fear is frequently suggested by stories of robbers, ghosts, or other terrors, but even children who have been carefully guarded sometimes have these violent fears that cannot be reasoned away.
In order to discover what it is about the darkness that frightens children, a large number of women and men were asked to recall their childish experiences with fear, and from the many instances given the following may be used to illustrate the various terrors of the dark.