Very often these simple types of reasoning have their humorous aspects and we do not take them seriously. One winter a little boy who had always gone to bed regularly (he was four and a half years old then) began to call for some one to come to him after he was supposed to be asleep. He wanted to sit up and play, he wanted to get dressed, and he wanted something more to eat. This continued for several evenings, and it seemed impossible to get him back into his good habits. At last he was asked, "Why do you want to get up now?" and he answered at once, "Because it is winter now."
"Yes, it is winter now, but it is time for you to be asleep," he was told.
"But it says in the book that I must get up," he insisted.
"Which book?"
"I will show you," and he took from his shelf a copy of Stevenson's "Garden of Verses," and turned to the picture opposite the poem that begins:
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle light.
To him this meant that in winter, after going to bed, at night, one must get up and dress. It is very likely many children who have had this delightful poem read to them have interpreted it in the same way, but probably very few parents have taken the pains to trace their children's unaccountable "misbehavior" at bedtime to such a source.
This same poem produced in another child quite a different train of reasoning, for "Why did the little girl get up at night and sleep in the daytime?" he asked, "Was she a trained nurse?" It then became necessary to recall that an aunt of the child's, who was a trained nurse, often slept at home during the day, after having worked with some patient at night.
There is no doubt that many of the crotchets and "perversities" of a child have their origin in chains of reasoning that are perfectly legitimate, in view of the past experiences of the young mind, although not in harmony with the reasoning of more mature minds. The parent spends much time and energy, and much heartburning, sometimes, to overcome these whims. What is needed is a patient and sympathetic attempt to discover how the child has come to his queer ideas and desires.
The annoyance that children cause us with their questionings is due very largely to the fact that we cannot answer their questions, since the reasoning that prompts them is too searching. A little boy shocked and vexed his grandmother, who was trying to teach him the elements of theology, by asking "Who made God?" It is very likely that every normal child has asked the same question in one form or another. This attempt to reach back to the very beginning of causes resembles in many ways the speculations of the mediaeval metaphysicians, and should certainly not be discouraged. We need not, on the other hand, make the effort to answer every question a child may ask, for at a certain stage in his development he will get the habit of asking questions without really caring for the answers. But the questions are worth hearing, in most cases, just to help us understand how the child does reason. Some of the questions indicate a great deal of reasoning of a very valuable kind. When the little boy asks, "Why don't I see two things with my two eyes?" or when the little girl looks up from her dolls and asks, "Am I real, or just pretend, like my doll?" they show that they have been thinking. When a child has passed through the metaphysical stage of reasoning, he will be more interested in animals and other objects of Nature; and his questions will have to do more with the operation of processes—how he grows, and how fishes breathe in the water, and how birds fly. Later, he wants to know how things work, what makes the locomotive go, how the noise goes through the telephone, how the incubator makes chickens come out of eggs. The reasoning of the child may lead to weird conclusions, but it is real reasoning, and can be improved not by being ridiculed, nor by being suppressed, but by being sympathetically understood and encouraged.