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Title: Your boy and his training
A practical treatise on boy-training
Author: Edwin Puller
Release Date: July 18, 2023 [eBook #71214]
Language: English
Credits: Donald Cummings, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUR BOY AND HIS
TRAINING ***
YOUR BOY AND HIS TRAINING
YOUR BOY AND
HIS TRAINING
A PRACTICAL TREATISE ON BOY-TRAINING
BY
EDWIN PULLER
FORMER PRESIDENT, SCOUTMASTERS’ ASSOCIATION OF ST. LOUIS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THE MEN OF TOMORROW, WITH
THE HOPE THAT THE THOUGHTS EXPRESSED IN THESE PAGES WILL AID THEIR
PARENTS AND TEACHERS, IN SOME DEGREE, TO A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF
BOY-NATURE AND BOY-TRAINING.
PREFACE
The average boy is not understood by the average parent. This
misunderstanding produces not only indifferent training of the boy
but also soul-stress for the parent and his son. Intelligent training
will improve the quality of the man into whom your son will develop.
To be able to give such training, the parent must first know how.
The education of the parent in the subject of boy-training is the
pretentious purpose of this volume, which I approach with full
consciousness of my own limitations.
This book is the result of my association with and study of large
numbers of boys from ten to twenty years of age, and in it have been
embodied, consciously or unconsciously, some ideas of other writers on
this subject.
I have endeavored to present in elementary form a brief, practical
study in adolescent psychology and its application to boy-training,
written in language which the average parent, guardian or teacher
can readily understand. With this end in view, there has been an
elimination of technical terms, as far as may be--even at possible risk
of scientific inaccuracy of statement. It will not be necessary for the
average reader to peruse these pages with a dictionary at hand. They
were written not for psychologists, but for parents, in the hope that a
work both readable and comprehensible will acquaint the average reader
with the laws governing boy-life and their application to his training
with greater clarity than a work abounding in abstruse phraseology and
scientific nomenclature.
The pages which follow will be devoted to a discussion of the problems
of the normal boy--the same red-blooded, harum-scarum youngster who
occupies such a large place in your life--and not especially to the
delinquent boy. I indulge the hope that this volume may aid you, in
some degree, to a better understanding of your boy, his problems and
their solution.
EDWIN PULLER.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ETERNAL BOY-PROBLEM 1
Boy-problems are as universal as boys--Boys too often regarded
as necessary evils--Necessity for training--How to study the
boy--Tendencies in present-day education of children--Character-
culture should come first--The home is the place and the parent
the agency--Boys more difficult to train than girls--The boy’s
viewpoint--Parental indifference to boy-training--Each boy is an
individual problem.
II. PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY 15
Causes of waywardness--Wrong training and bad environment--
Parental ignorance concerning boy-training--An instance--
Heredity--Accountability of the parent--Spending money--Laxity
of discipline--Average parent not fully equipped for his job.
III. CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 30
Table of psychic characteristics at several ages--Infancy and
imagination--Early boyhood and individualism--Early adolescence
and hero-worship--Later adolescence and thoughtful mental
attitude--Age when puberty occurs--Period of motor activity.
IV. ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY 52
Adolescence the period of storm and stress--Change from
childhood to manhood--Puberty--Physical indicia--Mental
indicia--Psychic disturbances--Truancy and wanderlust--Lack of
continuity of purpose and action--Proximity to the savage
state--Humor--Sex-consciousness and its manifestations--Love
affairs--Plasticity of mind--Will-power appears--Age of
discretion--Cycles of susceptibility to religious influences--
Age of experimentation--Hero-worship and its manifestations--
Object of hero-worship--Gratitude lacking--Reflective period--
Introspection--Sense of perspective is distorted--Visionary
ambitions--Dislike of older boy for younger--Will-power,
mental and moral stature attained.
V. THE BOY’S VIEWPOINT 80
Difference of viewpoint at differing psychic ages--Youth and
age contrasted--The boy’s desire for physical expression--
Inability for sustained mental or physical effort--Adult must
put himself in boy’s place to understand him--The natural adult
leader of boys--Boy lives in the present--Parent must do child’s
thinking for him--Injustice to boy from failure to consider his
standards.
VI. OBEDIENCE 92
The cornerstone of child-training--Children’s attitude toward
parents--Its causes and effects--Character is predicated on
obedience--Parental prohibitions which cause disobedience--Habit
of obedience formed most easily in early childhood--How
obedience may be cultivated--Commands must be founded on justice
and reason--Disobedience results from parental caprice or
injustice--Illustrations--The rational quality in the boy--
Importance of paternal example.
VII. THE REPRESSIVE METHOD OF TRAINING 104
Age when training should begin--Repressive method is negative--
Illustrations of repressive commands--Their effect on the boy--
The play spirit in the young--A factor in mental and moral
growth--The passive system of training--Evils of lavish supply
of money--Effects of repression are depressing--Acts should not
be prohibited without suggestion of other acts to fill the void
created--Mental inspiration of praise.
VIII. THE SUGGESTIVE METHOD OF TRAINING 117
Necessity for formulating definite plan of training--Impossible
to state a simple rule--American habit of drifting out of touch
with offspring--Duty of fathers to continue intimacy with sons
through adolescence--American children not generally well bred--
English, German, French and Japanese methods contrasted--
Suggestion is informative and inspirational--Negative commands
produce mental hostility and will combat--Illustrations of
effect of suggestion--A father’s plan--The big brother
comradeship of father and son.
IX. THE HABIT OF FALSEHOOD 132
Imagination a characteristic of childhood--Fantasy as real to
childhood as reality--The cause of lies--Illustrations--The
fisherman’s lie--Clarity of mental processes largely determines
whether a statement is a lie or an untruth--The lie of the
older boy--Desire to avoid punishment the chief cause of
falsehood--The remedy for falsehood--Moral suasion, its
definition and application.
X. CORPORAL PUNISHMENT 143
The place occupied by corporal punishment as a corrective
measure--Reasons advanced for its use--Illustration from a
banker’s experience--Average child does not rebel against
authority--But only against authority unjustly or harshly
exercised--The boy’s view of corporal punishment--Breaking
the boy’s will--Unjust or excessive punishments conduce to
lying--Effect of nagging on children--Mental _versus_ physical
punishment--Effective substitutes for corporal punishment.
XI. THE CIGARETTE HABIT 157
Effect of nicotine on human organism--A physician’s opinion--
Tobacco and the adult--Age when boys acquire the habit--Effects
of tobacco on adolescents--Opinion of Dr. Seaver based on
physical measurements of smokers and non-smokers--Cigarette
most pernicious form of tobacco--Influences which actuate boys
to acquire the habit--Poisons in the cigarette--Acrolein and
carbonic oxide--Moral effects--Juvenile criminals are generally
cigarette fiends--Methods used to dissuade boys from beginning--
Suggestion of a remedy for those who have contracted the habit.
XII. BOY GANGS 173
Gregarious instinct in boys--Craving for association with their
own kind--Two kinds of boy gangs--The supervised gang--The
unsupervised gang--Illustrations of each--The gang leader and
his qualifications--The necessity for a meeting place--Morals
of unsupervised gang always lower than morals of its individual
constituents--Motives for gang activities--Their code of
honor--Street gangs are training schools for delinquents--Gang
spirit inherent in all boy-nature--Supervised gangs and their
influence on character development--Necessity for urging boy to
join good gang.
XIII. THE BOY SCOUT INFLUENCE 183
The magic of the name Scout--The Boy Scouts of America--What the
movement is--Ranks and requirements--Good turns and
illustrations--Appeal of uniform and hikes to boy before
joining--Purpose of organization is character-building--A
former method of teaching ethics--Scout camps and hikes--The
camp-fire tale as a means of training--The qualities which
Scout associations develop--Boy Scout organization founded on
sound psychology--A denatured gang--Opinions of sociologists--
The universality of its appeal to boyhood--An efficient method
of training boys in mass--It keeps the boy busy--The busy boy is
the best boy--A field of social service for the adult.
XIV. JUVENILE READING 206
Potent influence of books on the boy--Next to environment and
companions--Two-fold value of literature--Desire of boy for
something to read--He reads for entertainment; studies because
compelled to--Reading must be suited to mental and psychological
requirements--Fairy tales--Adventure tales--Informative books--
Dime novel and nickel library--Their effect on morals and
literary taste--The bad book in the outward dress of good
fiction--The psychological requirement for thrilling adventure
tales--Comic Sunday supplements--Ideal companions for boys found
in best books--Doses of literature as remedies for diseases of
character--Stories of animal life--The juvenile magazine--A list
of books useful for outlining a course of juvenile reading.
XV. AGENCIES FOR SEX-INSTRUCTION 227
Importance of accurate sex knowledge--Misinformation acquired at
a very early age--Necessity for scientific instruction--Former
antipathy to discussion--Parent is natural teacher of sex--
Neglect of parental duty--Necessity for other agencies of
instruction--Grammar schools, high schools, colleges, etc.--
Danger of premature sex excitation--Individuals who are best
adapted to teach--Teacher, physician, biologist, special
lecturer--Opinions for and against the school as agency for
sex-instruction.
XVI. ON OUTLINE OF SEX-INSTRUCTION 238
Periods in child’s life when instruction should be given--
Instruction should be suited to his psychological requirements--
Mother should begin instruction--Method known as the biological
approach--Nature and amount of instruction necessary--Father
should assume instruction at puberty--Necessary admonitions--
Influence of theatrical productions with a sex-appeal--Musical
comedies, burlesque and vaudeville shows--Sex-hygiene
societies--A list of pamphlets published--A list of books
recommended.
XVII. CHILDREN’S COURTS 254
An instrumentality for reclaiming the wayward boy--The state
formerly regarded delinquent boy as a criminal--New attitude
toward dependent and delinquent children--Their mental and
moral concepts not matured--Infractions of law are
manifestations of moral disease which it is the state’s
business to cure--Child under sixteen cannot be a criminal--
Delinquent child is a ward of the state--The Juvenile Court--
Methods of dealing with boys--The probation officer--Laws
for control of delinquent parents.
XVIII. CONCLUSIONS 270
Every boy has inalienable right to be well trained--Basis of
boy-training is parent-training--Insight, tact and patience
necessary--Boy’s need of father’s companionship--Certain
physical abnormalities affect intellect and character--Effects
of heredity contrasted with environment--All boys possess a
common nature--Summary of rules bearing on boy-training.
YOUR BOY AND HIS TRAINING
YOUR BOY AND HIS TRAINING
CHAPTER I
THE ETERNAL BOY-PROBLEM
He who helps a child helps humanity with a distinctness, with an
immediateness, which no other help given to human creatures in any
other stage of their human life can possibly give again.
--BISHOP PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Boy-problems, like boys, are always with us. Wherever there is
a boy there are problems to be solved. The perfect boy may live
somewhere--but not in my immediate neighborhood. Even though he
possesses many of the attributes of perfection, he will be found
wanting in industry, or thrift, or orderliness, or courtesy, or
studiousness. He may even show such traits as disobedience,
untruthfulness, selfishness, truancy, thievery, or immorality. The
complete boy does not just grow--he is builded and the parent is both
architect and builder.
All parents at some time, and some parents at all times, regard boys
as necessary evils, to be endured with varying degrees of patience. We
formerly believed that boys should be seldom seen and less frequently
heard. The young barbarian was and is now tolerated for the time being
because of our hope that he will outgrow his rowdyism. We are disposed
to let nature take its course with the juvenile savage instead of
bothering our heads with the effort to understand him or to solve
his problems. But to train the boy intelligently we must first train
ourselves so that we can understand him and guide him through the
various stages of his development.
Intelligent training is the birthright of every child. If he has
not received it, he has been cheated. The training of the child
up to perfect maturity is the highest duty as well as the most
difficult task which devolves upon parents. The performance of this
duty is, fortunately, lightened by the pleasure of association with
the joyousness of childhood, but the real reward of the parent for
years of patient, watchful, intelligent supervision is not only the
consciousness of duty well done but the profound joy experienced in
aiding the unfoldment of an immortal soul.
The study of childhood possesses a fascination for the student
commensurate with its importance to humanity. It is both easier and
pleasanter to study the child in the concrete than children in the
abstract. But it is obvious that no comprehensive conclusions on
the subject of child-training can be deduced from the study of a
single child. The varying manifestations of different natures and
temperaments require wide observation, covering many subjects, before
correct conclusions as to cause and effect can be drawn or a systematic
philosophy can be evolved. We must study the concrete boy in large
numbers to be able to formulate abstract principles of boy-training.
“The proper study of mankind is man,” may be paraphrased into “the
proper study of boykind is boy.” Today we know the boy better than ever
before. He has been studied, watched, weighed, analyzed, synthesized,
tested, classified and labeled in all his varied aspects. We have
transformed our personal knowledge of him into scientific knowledge;
and various manifestations of his activities which were formerly called
“pure cussedness” are now recognized as ebullitions of superabundant
vitality which have been denied a natural outlet and therefore find
expression in prohibited forms.
The present-day tendency in the education of American children is to
emphasize the importance of knowledge, health, and character in the
order in which they are here set down. To confine the term “education”
solely or chiefly to the acquisition of knowledge is to limit its
meaning to its usual synonym of instruction or teaching. In its
truer and broader sense it implies the discipline and development of
the moral, physical, and spiritual faculties, as well as the purely
intellectual faculty, for it is only through such comprehensive
development that ideal maturity can be approached. Sheer intellectual
power, resulting from the systematic acquisition of knowledge and
training of the mind, produces a one-sided individual who lacks the
restraints and guidance imposed by moral and ethical concepts. He is
like an ocean liner of tremendous speed and power but without chart,
compass, or rudder. It is obvious that the intellectually brilliant
crook, devoting his mental gifts to the accomplishment of his criminal
purposes, is a less worthy and less useful citizen than the laborer of
high character but limited knowledge.
The entire trend of our present system of education is to overemphasize
the importance of the acquisition of knowledge and to underemphasize
the necessity for the building of character. And this is the chief
fault with our otherwise excellent public-school system of education,
which, circumscribed by public prejudices grounded in widely differing
religious beliefs, steers clear of comprehensive moral training because
of its intimate coherence with religious and spiritual training. The
meager moral training which the public school affords is merely
incidental to its primary function of imparting knowledge. This
deficiency must be supplied primarily by the home, and secondarily
by the Sunday school and the church in laying the foundations of
character strong and deep before the child reaches the school age and
by continuing the work on the moral and spiritual super-structure until
maturity beholds the building completed on all sides. When we come to
realize that the true function of education is first of all to build
strong character, second to develop a virile physique, and last of
all to impart knowledge and discipline the mental faculties, we then
will have evolved an educational system which will be effective in
accomplishing its real purpose--the evolution of the child into the
symmetrically equipped adult. This is the eternal boy-problem.
The home is the place and the parent is the agency for
character-culture. Every father of boys ought to be a boy-expert. And
he can be, by devoting to this most important of all subjects a tithe
of the study which he devotes to his business or to his profession.
Many parents rely entirely upon instinct or natural inclinations--which
are influenced largely by mental and temperamental conditions--as their
guide in boy-training. An inactive liver too frequently determines our
attitude toward our offspring. Is it fair to the son that the parent
blindly and blunderingly pursues his natural inclinations in training
his son, instead of availing himself of the results of the research and
the thought which have already been given to this subject?
More boys go wrong than girls, of which fact the records of juvenile
courts, reformatories, and houses of detention bear ample evidence;
and they are more difficult to train, develop, and discipline than
girls. This is due to the differences in their psychological processes.
Girlhood finds ample opportunity for its development in the seclusion
of the home. The future function of the woman child is to be the
home-maker and the bearer of children, and her training for this divine
responsibility can be accomplished best amid the refining influences
and protecting care which the home affords. The future of the man
child is to be the breadwinner of the family and the burden-bearer of
civilization. The training necessary to produce such diverse results
must be as different as the respective life-works of man and woman.
Boyhood requires, among other things, adventure, rough sports and
out-of-door activities for its development. Boys are less obedient,
less tractable, and less amenable to discipline than girls, therefore
their training is correspondingly difficult and involved. We should not
expect to understand the heart and soul of the boy more easily than his
anatomy and physiology.
The boy sees things from a point of view different from that of the
adult, based on psychological differences. The mature individual cannot
obtain the boy’s viewpoint unless he is able to put himself in his
place. To do this he must know the child’s changing mental processes
and the evolution of his moral perceptions which are manifested in
the four periods of his development, in each of which he exhibits
a personality as far apart as those of four individuals of widely
differing natures. The boy at six, ten, fourteen, and eighteen years
of age is four different personalities, and he requires four different
methods of treatment. These psychological prescriptions are as
dissimilar as the medical prescriptions for boils, measles, influenza,
and typhoid. The methods and plans suited for one period are unsuited
for another. The realization of this basic truth is the first step
toward the solution of your boy’s problems.
No parent who stops with provision for the physical and intellectual
demands of his child has done his full duty. It may appear trite to
say that he should go further and train the character and the soul;
but failure in this essential is a standing indictment against many
Christian homes today. Parental indifference to and ignorance of
boy-psychology are the causes which have produced untold thousands of
delinquent or semi-delinquent boys. Your boy may, and thousands of boys
do, weather the storm of adolescence, guided only by the blundering but
loving heart which has neither accurate knowledge nor understanding of
his nature; but such results are fortuitous rather than certain.
More parents have mastered the rules of bridge than have mastered the
principles of child-culture. The training of the boy, despite its
tremendous personal significance to him and to our homes, is less
frequently and less seriously discussed than politics, the weather, or
the latest style of dress. Too many boys are reared like their colored
sister, Topsy, who “jest growed.”
Deep down in our hearts we feel that we know much more than our
neighbors about the upbringing of a son, because of our superior
intuition and better judgment, even though we have never qualified
for the job by study, research, or thought. Too many of us believe we
are “natural-born” boy trainers. When our boy goes wrong, it is our
profound conviction that it is due wholly to the influence of the bad
boys with whom he associates. As a matter of fact, it is just as likely
that our Johnny has corrupted his associates as that they are the cause
of his moral infractions. Never, under any circumstances, do we blame
ourselves either for the poor quality of his training or for permitting
his evil associations. His delinquencies reflect on us and hurt our
pride, but we palliate the hurt by attributing them to causes which do
not involve us. We are too ready to prove an alibi when called to the
court of conscience and charged with responsibility.
The average parent bitterly resents personal advice relating to the
upbringing of his children, but this resentment probably has less
relevancy to reading a book on boy-training because it is impersonal
in its application and affords the reader the election of taking as
much or as little of it to himself as his reason, judgment, vanity, or
egotism may dictate.
All boys have a common nature whose development proceeds according to
fixed laws; but diversities of temperament and character differentiate
individuals and thus make each boy an individual problem. The solution
of that problem is your job.
CHAPTER II
PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
The wayward boy is often the son of a wayward parent.
Waywardness results not so much from the effects of heredity as
from lack of training. Wrong training, lack of training, and bad
environment are the great, compelling influences toward delinquency,
which overshadow all other causes of juvenile waywardness; and for such
causes parents are directly and primarily responsible.
This is a severe indictment of parents, but not more severe than the
consequences of their neglect of duty warrant. Many parents act on
the presumption that their obligation is fulfilled by supplying the
child with food, clothing, shelter, and school, forgetting the equally
important duty of developing his moral and spiritual nature. Such
conditions are usually the result of indifference, a sin of omission,
and only rarely do they result from bad precept and example.
In the larger number of cases, the wayward parent is such because
of ignorance of the scope of his duty, or because of his delegation
of moral and religious training to the school or some other agency
not fully equipped for the task. It is seldom that a parent does not
earnestly desire high moral character in his offspring. He hopes
in a blind, inchoate way that his son will become a well-rounded
man--physically, mentally, morally, socially, spiritually. By what
means that hope is to fructify he does not know. He is groping in the
dark, hoping against hope that the miracle of evolution will result in
perfection, without the employment of the methods and agencies at his
command which will assist to that end.
The first step, then, in the training of the boy is the training of
the parent. And what applies to the father usually applies, with less
force, to the mother.
When we reclaim wayward parents, we shall reclaim wayward boys. The
first step toward reclamation is the awakening of their sense of
responsibility--the driving home of the consciousness of stewardship.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” has still stronger application to the
father and the mother of a son. Yours is the responsibility for
the child’s presence in the world; yours is the responsibility for
supplying the conventional comforts on which physical life depends;
but still more emphatically yours is the responsibility of furnishing
the guiding hand which will pilot the frail bark of youth through the
storm and stress of adolescence. During infancy he is anchored in the
harbor of home, surrounded by love and physical comfort; during early
boyhood his bark is drifting on the current toward the sea; while the
dawn of adolescence plunges him into an unknown and uncharted ocean,
without rudder or compass by which to avoid the sunken reefs of danger
and the rocks which wreck the development of character. The morally
obligatory duty of child-culture must be encouraged, revived, trained,
and put into operation.
Eugene ----, age 13, was reared by an indulgent father, after his
mother’s death. A stepmother entered the home when the lad was nine. He
was a robust boy, athletic and active, handsome, lovable, but mentally
lazy, backward in school, without continuity of purpose or action,
inclined to falsehood and evasion, willful, disobedient, extravagant
and spoiled. He remarked one day to a companion, in my hearing, “Dad’s
a stingy guy. He only gives me five dollars a week spending money.”
This boy’s problem was a serious one, but not hopeless by any means.
The delinquent parent was responsible for the delinquency of his son.
Engrossed in the cares of manifold business interests, he “had no time”
for the training of his boy. He failed to realize that making a son
is more important than making money. If he had given his business no
more thought and judgment than he gave his son, he would be a financial
bankrupt. As it is, the son probably will be a character bankrupt.
At the present time his moral liabilities exceed his assets--a poor
beginning for the business of building a human life. His affairs should
be in the hands of a receiver--a boy-expert who will rehabilitate the
boy--or, better still, who will arouse the parent to recognize his
duty and do it. The intelligent parent is the natural and best teacher
of his own child.
Up-to-date horticulturists and agriculturists avail themselves of
the sum total of scientific knowledge concerning their respective
professions. Unscientific, misdirected, and indifferent methods
produce failure; inferior fruits and grains of limited yield do
not pay. The importance of many things is measured by a financial
standard. When reduced to a monetary basis, production is of sufficient
importance to call forth the best research, skill, and thought of
the individual. Child-culture is more important than horticulture,
even though its benefits cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
The Department of Agriculture spends millions of dollars every year,
largely in the perfection of cattle and hogs. The improvement of the
breed of hogs is not more important than the improvement of the
breed of boys. Personally, I prefer the boy to the hog. He is just as
great a necessity in the human economy and, besides, he is much more
companionable. The best crop we raise is children. Why not improve
their breed? The vanity of the parent may answer that they already
are splendidly endowed by heredity with all the virtues of mind,
morals, and body possessed by their progenitors. But heredity is no
such miracle worker. If heredity has equipped the child with a perfect
physical machine it still remains necessary to teach him not only how
to run it, but how to keep it in good condition. The perfect body will
not, unaided, stay perfect, nor will it develop the strong mind and
character. All of these--and more--are required to make the perfect man.
“Better boys” should be our slogan. The accountability of the
parent for his sacred trust cannot be evaded. It is the one great,
upstanding, overshadowing duty concurrent with parenthood. The failure
to appreciate its importance is due to many causes. Among them may
be mentioned the complexity of our present-day civilization with its
incessant demands upon the time and strength of parents. In some
instances the stress and struggle incident to earning a living leave
little time for the development of the child. This is especially true
in those homes where squalid poverty abides. The husband, exhausted
by the grinding toil which he has exchanged for a scant wage, returns
home at night and finds a wife worn in mind and body by her task of
maintaining a home on less than is requisite for livable conditions.
Neither is fit to perform the larger duties of parenthood. Add to this,
sickness, accident, unemployment, intemperance, and child labor, and
the cup is full. The toll of toil is wretched childhood. The children
are neglected in everything except a bare physical existence. The son
of such a home naturally takes to the street where he pursues his
play, unguided and untaught. The result is a street gamin with all his
inherent potentialities for good submerged beneath the delinquency and
vice which are bred in the street. A continuous procession of such
children passes through our juvenile courts every day. Such pitiable
cases--and they are many--are partly grounded in the maladjustment of
economic conditions. The remedy lies in a change of environment in
which society as a whole must take part; in vocational training; a more
equitable adjustment of wage to labor; workmen’s compensation laws;
health and accident insurance; inculcation of ideas of temperance;
training along moral, domestic, sanitary, and hygienic lines; and
general education, including a knowledge of child-training.
Conditions are different, however, in the better homes of our citizens.
There the debasing consequences of sordid poverty are absent. But still
the two homes are, in many instances, identical in their lack of moral
training, although the causes are different. In the one home, knowledge
and capacity are wanting. In the other, knowledge and capacity are
present but neglected. It is these latter cases of parental neglect
of duty which warrant the appellation, “wayward parent.” It sometimes
requires the alarm clock of filial delinquency to awaken the parent
from his somnolence of indifference. The damage has then been done.
They hasten to lock the stable after the horse is stolen, instead of
taking precautionary measures at the needful time. “The difficult
cases to deal with,” remarks Judge Julius N. Mayer of the Court of
Special Sessions (Children’s Court) of New York City, “are the cases
of children whose parents are industrious and reputable, but who seem
to have no conception at all of their duties toward their children.
They fail to make a study of the child. They fail to understand
him. Frequently the father, who could well afford to give his child
recreation, or a little spending money, will hold his son by so tight
a rein that the child is bound to break away. It may seem a little
thing, but I firmly believe that many a child would be saved from his
initial wrong step if the parent would make him a small allowance. In
the cases where such a course is pursued the child usually becomes a
sort of a little business man, husbanding his resources and willing
to spend no more than his allowance; but where the child has nothing
it is not strange that he should fall into temptation.” The state of
Colorado, in an important addition to the juvenile law, recognizes
the existence of the wayward parent by declaring that all parents,
guardians, and other persons, who in any manner cause or contribute to
the delinquency of any child, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. Judge
Lindsey of the Juvenile Court of Denver has this excoriation for such
parents: “Careless and incompetent parents are by no means confined
to the poor. In fact, in my experience, the most blameworthy of such
parents are among the so-called business men and prominent citizens.
They seem to think their duty is ended when they have debauched the
boy with luxury and the free use of money. They permit him to fill his
life with a round of pleasure, and let him satiate his appetite without
knowing what he is doing or whither he is drifting. They are too busy
to become his chum or companion, and so he soon develops a secret and
private life, which is often filled with corruption, and because of his
standing or influence and money he may be kept out of the courts or
the jails, but nevertheless is eventually added to society as a more
dangerous citizen than many men who have been subjected to both. A
financially well-to-do father once said to me that he was too busy to
look after his boys, to be companionable, or take an interest in them.
We have no more dangerous citizens than such men. In the end, I believe
such a man would profit more by less business and better boys.”
Parental laxness in the enforcement of discipline may be due to
indifference, obtuseness, or a false sense of affection which rebels
at stern correctional measures. Whatever may be the motive of the
parent, the effect on the child is the same. Obedience is largely a
matter of habit which becomes fixed, as do other habits, by continued
repetition. Dr. William Byron Forbush stated the thought in this
language: “In the American home, especially where there is not sore
poverty, the cause of delinquency in children is, without question, the
flabbiness and slovenliness of parents in training their children to
obedience and to orderly habits.”
Too often the training of the boy is shunted back and forth from father
to mother like a shuttlecock which is finally knocked out of bounds.
The father more frequently than the mother succeeds in evading the
obligation and thereafter he rarely attempts to interfere unless we
consider an occasional walloping of his son in anger the accomplishment
of his duty.
The average parent is not fully equipped for his job. He is either
unskilled or underskilled in boy-training. He needs education,
insight, and understanding to cope with the problems of his son.
If the parents default in the training of the boy--even through
ignorance--need we wonder that the boy defaults in the making of the
man?
Numerous boys attain the average perfection of manhood in spite of poor
training--but none of them because of it. Many a father, because his
son has turned out well, is wearing a self-imposed halo--when he is
only lucky.
CHAPTER III
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
A systematic knowledge of the powers and limitations of the human mind
and soul before maturity and the characteristic changes which they
undergo at puberty will throw a flood of light on the boy-problem.
Juvenile psychology may be divided into child psychology, covering
the period from birth to puberty, and adolescent psychology, covering
the period from puberty to maturity. Boyhood is the interval between
birth and physical maturity, the latter being reached at the age of
twenty-four or twenty-five, when the bones, muscles, and organs of
the body have attained their complete development. Legal maturity,
or majority, comes at the end of the twenty-first year, when the
disabilities of infancy are removed and the boy is presumed by law to
have acquired sufficient intelligence, judgment, and moral discernment
to take his place in the community as a citizen, and is then vested
with all the rights, duties, and obligations of an adult, even though
mental maturity (reckoned at the time the brain cells cease to grow
and judgment and reason have fully ripened) is deferred until he is
approximately fifty years of age. We may roughly divide the boy’s life
into four periods of psychic unfolding in accordance with the table on
page 32.
+----------------+-------------+-------------------------------------+
| PERIOD | AGE | CHARACTERISTICS |
+----------------+-------------+-------------------------------------+
| | | Imaginative faculty is |
| IMAGINATIVE | Birth to 8 | dominant; acquisition of |
| | Infancy | locomotion, speech and elementary |
| | | knowledge; birth |
| | | of moral concepts. |
+----------------+-------------+-------------------------------------+
| | | Individualism; selfish |
|INDIVIDUALISTIC | 8 to 12 | propensities; want of regard |
| | Early | for rights of others; imitative |
| | Boyhood | faculty is ascendant. |
+----------------+-------------+-------------------------------------+
| | | Hero-worship; gang affiliations; |
| HEROIC | 12 to 16 | puberty and early |
| | Early | adolescence; fundamental |
| | Adolescence | organic changes; sex-consciousness; |
| | | age of experimentation; |
| | | character-building period; psychic |
| | | disturbances; exceptional |
| | | plasticity of mind; high |
| | | degree of emotionalism; |
| | | susceptibility to religious |
| | | influences; development of |
| | | will-power. |
+----------------+-------------+-------------------------------------+
| | | Thoughtful mental |
| REFLECTIVE | 16 to 24 | attitude; habit of introspection; |
| | Later | evolution of |
| | Adolescence | sociological consciousness; |
| | | development of altruism; |
| | | growth of ethical concepts; |
| | | perfection of will-power. |
+----------------+-------------+-------------------------------------+
During the imaginative period covering infancy, from birth to eight
years, the child lives in a land of air castles, daydreams and mental
inventions, interspersed with periodic pangs of hunger which assail him
at intervals of great frequency. His world is peopled with fairies,
gnomes, nymphs, dryads, goblins, and hobgoblins. Elfin images are his
daily playmates. Imagination runs riot and dominates his viewpoint.
It is the period in which make-believe is as real as reality, and
this furnishes the explanation of many of the so-called falsehoods of
this age. But the development of the imagination should be guarded,
not suppressed. Through imagination we visualize the future and
effect world progress. All the great inventions which have advanced
civilization, the political reforms which have contributed to our
liberties and happiness, and the monumental works of literature, music,
art, and science, would have been impossible without the exercise of
the imaginative faculty.
Imagination is not only of great value in educating the intellect and
morals, but it is a desirable mental attribute which promotes sympathy,
discloses latent possibilities of things and situations, and broadens
one’s appreciation of life. It is needed by the laborer, ditch-digger
and sewer-cleaner as well as by the musician, artist, and author.
In this period the child learns more than in all his subsequent life.
He learns to talk, to walk, to feed himself and to play; he learns
the rudiments of written and printed language, and the names and uses
of the various objects he sees about him; he comprehends form, color,
perspective, and harmony; his imagination, so useful in later life,
blossoms forth; his moral sense buds and the capacity to distinguish
between right and wrong unfolds; the intense desire to learn and to
know is born--evidenced by his rapid-fire and continuous questions;
he is possessed by a voracious appetite for knowledge which must be
fed by a harvest of information; and the habit of obedience and the
recognition of parental authority become fixed. His horizon is bounded
by physical growth and the acquisition of knowledge. All subsequent
knowledge is either a variant of or a supplement to the basic
knowledge acquired during infancy.
The ascendant trait of the imaginative period is the faculty of
make-believe. It is the ability of the mind to create mental images
of objects previously perceived by the senses. It involves the power
to reconstruct and recombine materials, already known, into others
of like symbolic purport. It is exhibited when Johnny mounts a
broomstick, shouting, “Get up, horsie!” and “Whoa!” The imagination
builds up a mental image of a real horse, which he has seen, out of the
stick-and-string substitute. Through fancy, he endows the counterfeit
with all the attributes of the original and for the time being the
broomstick is a real, living, bucking horse. Such make-believe is an
important factor in the development and coördination of ideas and the
acquisition of knowledge. And so in the innumerable instances of
make-believe plays, whether he pretends in fancy to be papa, a ravenous
bear, a soldier, a policeman, or what not, he temporarily lives
the part he is playing and merges his personality into the assumed
character with an abandon which should excite the envy of an actor.
Witness also the imagination displayed by Mary when she builds a house
with a line of chairs, and peoples it with imaginary friends with whom
she carries on extended conversations, and takes the several parts
in the dialogue when the absence of playmates renders such expedient
necessary. Impersonation is grounded in imagination. Every little
girl impersonates her mother, with a doll as her make-believe self,
and spends many hours in pretending to care for its physical needs,
teaching it mentally, and even correcting its morals with some form of
punishment with which she herself is acquainted, whether corporal or
otherwise.
The stolid, dull child exhibits less of fancy and imagination than
his keen bright companion and therefore is less frequently engaged
in the numberless activities prompted by imagination, which require
supervision. His very stolidity keeps him out of many acts termed
“mischief” and therefore he is more easily “managed” in the sense
that he does not require such continuous oversight and direction. The
stolid one must be set going by being told how, what, and when to play,
while the imaginative one, without aid, conjures up many fanciful
dramas in which he plays the leading rôle and thus occupies the years
of infancy. These figments of the brain give rise to stories and
fanciful tales which are called “lies” by adults who fail to understand
their psychology. These are of sufficient importance to warrant their
discussion in a separate chapter of this volume.
It is during this period that the mother, with her Heaven-sent gift of
love, sympathy, tenderness, and insight into the soul of childhood, is
the effective teacher. Coming home one evening, I found a neighbor’s
son of six years sitting on his front steps awaiting his mother’s
return. He was sobbing to himself. I approached him and inquired,
“Well, Robbie! What’s the matter?”
He replied, through a mist of tears, “I fell down and bumped my head.”
“Does it hurt you?” I continued, in my helpless way, unable to fathom
the soul-depths of his disaster. “No,” was the response, “it don’t
hurt, but I want muvver so I can cry in her arms, an’ it will be well.”
He needed first aid to his feelings--not to his body--and only mother
with her infinite love, sympathy, and understanding could apply it.
With a deep consciousness of the limitations of his sex, the author
withdrew to await the balm of mother-love--that unfailing remedy for
the physical and mental hurts of childhood.
Blest hour of childhood! then, and then alone,
Dance we the revels close round pleasure’s throne,
Quaff the bright nectar from her fountain-springs,
And laugh beneath the rainbow of her wings.
Oh! time of promise, hope and innocence,
Of trust, and love, and happy ignorance!
Whose every dream is heaven, in whose fair joy,
Experience has thrown no black alloy.
--THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE.
At the age of eight or nine, when the child emerges from infancy into
early boyhood, he begins gradually and imperfectly to leave behind the
characteristics of childhood and, with the development of his mental
and physical processes, he acquires the distinguishing traits of the
individualistic period.
It should be borne in mind that the characteristic changes from one
period to another are not abrupt transitions, but easy gradations; a
gradual dropping of the distinctive features of the period left behind
for the essentials of the period just attained. The progression is by
easy, continuous stages, effected unconsciously and unobtrusively.
This growth may be compared to the four periods of the development
of a plant; first, the bursting of the seed into life and the tender
stalk forcing its way upward into the light--the infantile period;
then the formation of branches and leaves and the growth of stalk--the
early boyhood period; then the putting forth of the bud which is the
precursor of the flower, and the formation and development of petals,
stamen, pistils, and pollen--the adolescent period; and finally the
blossoming forth of the full-blown flower, the fertilization of the
pistil by the pollen of the anther, the whole marvelous process of
reproduction culminating in the formation of the embryonic plant
contained in the seed--the period of maturity. All of these stages are
characterized by an evolution which is as gradual as it is silent.
In like manner it should be understood that the ages delimiting the
four periods of boyhood are somewhat arbitrary and are subject to
the controlling factors of race, climate, health, and individual
temperament. The Latin races mature earlier than the Anglo-Saxon;
the boy in the tropics reaches puberty more quickly than one in a
colder zone; certain abnormalities of physical condition, as well as
environment and heredity, conduce to early maturity; and temperamental
characteristics contribute, in some degree, to a difference in the time
required to traverse the various periods of boyhood. I have known
boys of ten who were still infants, and I have in mind a boy friend
of sixteen years, with the normal mental development of one of that
age, in whom adolescence has not begun. Physically and psychologically
he is eleven years old, although chronologically he is sixteen. He
is, therefore, in the individualistic period of his existence and,
in a large degree, he should be judged, governed, and trained by the
rules applicable to that period. In so far as his moral concepts are
influenced by mentality, his responsibility for deflection is that of
one of his chronological age; but in that class of cases in which his
moral viewpoint is controlled by his undeveloped physical or psychic
state, his responsibility belongs to the individualistic period to
which these qualities are attributable.
The individualistic period between eight and twelve is the era in which
the boy regards himself as an individual not correlated to other
individuals of society. He is essentially selfish, and individualism is
his dominant characteristic. He has an excessive and exclusive regard
for his personal interests. The great world of men forming society
is beyond his perceptions. His thoughts chiefly concern himself and
seldom embrace others, except when they cause him pleasure, annoyance,
or pain. He recognizes them only as they contribute to his emotions.
This tendency manifests itself in the selfishness exhibited in play
and his unwillingness to perform the trifling services required of
him by his elders, if they in any way interfere with his present
enjoyment. Sociological consciousness, with its recognition of the
duties and obligations of the individual toward the mass of individuals
termed society, is still dormant. Its first awakening is seen in his
recognition of duty toward his family, and later toward his playmates
and friends, and last of all toward society--which is reached in the
reflective period. His mental horizon is bounded entirely by his own
activities and interests in which he is the central figure.
Carelessness, forgetfulness, and thoughtlessness of others are
incidents common to childhood which gradually wane and disappear at
the age when he enters the reflective period. As he lives in the
immediate present, he does not plan for the future--not even for the
morrow. Johnny comes home to supper from the playground, whirling
through the house with cyclonic energy and leaving a trail of gloves,
hat, overcoat, and superfluous garments in his wake, intent on the
only thing which is of absorbing interest to him at that moment--his
immediate presence at table to alleviate the excruciating pangs of
hunger which are gnawing at his vitals. Everything else is forgotten
in his efforts to satisfy the desires of the present. The next
morning, when preparations for school are begun, all remembrance of
the places where his wearing apparel was deposited is forgotten. Then
ensues the daily hunt for the missing garments, interspersed with
vociferous requests to all members of the household for assistance. The
interrogatory, “Where’s my hat?” is as common as oatmeal for breakfast.
Order and system have little place in a routine which is regulated by
present necessity.
A strong sense of proprietorship in personal possessions is now
manifest, and is closely allied to the acquisitive faculty. About the
ninth year he begins to make collections of various sorts of junk.
This is the beginning of the collection craze which lasts throughout
the individualistic period. Its initial manifestation is usually
the collection of foreign and domestic postage stamps, which lasts
from three to five years and furnishes one of the best methods for
elementary scientific training. The term science implies knowledge
systematized and reduced to an orderly and logical arrangement, with
classification as its basis. Such collections teach him to group
and classify their component parts according to some definite plan.
The intellectual training afforded by the grouping and classifying
necessary to preserve his collection possesses educational value of the
highest quality. Geography now has a new and personal meaning as “the
places where his stamps came from.” Other phases of this tendency may
be seen in collections of marbles, agates, tops, buttons, bird eggs,
leaves, minerals, monograms, crest impressions, cigarette pictures, and
cigar bands.
One boy proved his industry and trend toward personal acquisition by
collecting and classifying several hundred tin cans which were formerly
receptacles for fruit, beans, and meats, and the odors emanating from
the mass in no wise diminished his pride in the collection, which he
regarded in the same light as the connoisseur views his art treasures.
A wise provision of nature has made the acquisition of knowledge
pleasant and agreeable. It prompts the boy to fire continuous
volleys of questions and has caused him to be described as the
human interrogation mark. He looks on every adult as a wellspring
of knowledge whose stream of information can be started flowing by
tapping it with a question. The knowledge received and digested from
the answers to his questions supplies him with food by which he grows
intellectually. This inquisitiveness exhibits itself, before puberty,
in frank, naïve questions--even of the most personal nature. On one
occasion the author appeared in evening dress at a meeting of his
troop of Boy Scouts preparatory to a later attendance upon a social
function. He was immediately surrounded by that part of the troop
of preadolescent age who subjected his wearing apparel to minute
examination, during which they felt the cloth, inquired its cost, and
commented freely, frankly, and unreservedly on matters pertaining to
material, cut, style, price, and workmanship, with never a thought of
giving offense. While one who is the object of such attention would
ordinarily feel a degree of embarrassment at such familiarity, the
author recognized it as a manifestation of the curiosity inherent in
the preadolescent age, as well as evidence of a complete confidence and
_rapport_ which could be possible only toward one with whom they were
on terms of sympathetic and understandable companionship.
The sages say, Dame Truth delights to dwell,
Strange mansion! in the bottom of a well.
Questions are, then, the windlass and the rope
That pull the grave old gentlewoman up.
--Dr. Walcot’s PETER PINDAR.
During this age the imitative faculty is born, reaches its development,
and is carried over into the heroic period. He follows companions in
the kind of games and the seasons when they are played. If a playmate
is the possessor of a sled, a bicycle, or a pair of skates, he must
needs have their duplicates. He begins to follow closely the opinions,
pastimes, games, and even the style of dress affected by others of his
own class. If it is the fashion of his set, he will, with a persistency
worthy of a better cause, wear the brim of his hat turned down and
decorated with a multicolored hat band. He revels in a riot of color
because æsthetics is an unexplored and unsuspected world. His proximity
to the savage state is reflected in his love of the garish colors which
are affected by savage peoples.
His faculty for imitation renders him highly susceptible to the
influences of his environment. He imitates what he sees and hears.
Therefore the influence of companions for good or evil, as well as
the persuasive control of his parents by example, is potent. To a
somewhat lesser degree is he affected by the class of literature which
he reads. In the absence of stories suited to his psychological needs,
he acquires a taste for the dime novel, nickel library, and other
blood-and-thunder stories, the reading of which, if continued through
the heroic period, frequently results in truancy and leaving home to
“see the world.”
Concurrent with all the psychic development of this period he shows
himself to be a human dynamo of physical energy which manifests
itself in ceaseless action. This period of motor activity should find
its outlet, as well as its control, in play, athletics, and manual
training. He is a bundle of twist, squirm, and wiggle which only time
can convert into useful and productive activity.
CHAPTER IV
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY
The period of adolescence is truly one of storm and stress, caused
by the wrecking of boy-nature to rebuild it into man-nature; it is a
cataclysmic bursting of the bonds of infancy in preparation for the
larger stature of manhood. In early adolescence the boy is neither
child nor man. He is in the chrysalis stage of metamorphosis, which
is shedding the characteristics of childhood and putting on the
maturity of the adult. Neither one nor the other, he is a part of
both. Adolescence covers the period of the boy’s life between puberty
and maturity. Puberty is the earliest age at which the individual is
capable of reproducing the species and it usually begins at the age of
thirteen or fourteen, subject to the influence of the factors stated
in the preceding chapter. The growth and development of the sex organs
during adolescence produce changes which are revolutionary rather than
evolutionary in their nature. Marked physical alterations are always
attended by still more marked psychic disturbances.
The physical indicia of puberty are the lengthening of the vocal
cords, which causes the voice to change from the treble of boyhood to
the bass of manhood and manifests itself in sudden and uncontrollable
breaks in the voice in speaking and singing; the growth of the organs
of reproduction and the filling of the seminal glands; the growth of
hair on the pubes and face; the coarsening of the skin; broadening of
the shoulders, deepening of the chest, and general change from the
slenderness of childhood to the compactness of maturity.
This is the period of rapid physical growth wherein he shoots upwards
like a cornstalk under the impulse of a July sun. Elongated arms and
legs are now as conspicuous as they are unwieldy, and efforts to
discipline them are futile. The demand for “long pants,” heretofore
quiescent or erupting intermittently, now becomes insistent and
finally bursts forth with a fury produced by accumulated repression
and fortified by the assertion that “Johnny Jones wears ’em and
I’m bigger’n him”--the last word in argumentative conclusiveness.
Physical awkwardness and ungainliness, illustrated in his inability
to manage his hands and feet easily or gracefully, is due both to the
extraordinary and rapid growth of the body and nervous system which
takes place at this time, and to his instability of mind, wholly apart
from his knowledge of social usages.
The psychic disturbances produced by adolescence are still more
pronounced. The adolescent is in the throes of discarding the mental
concepts of the child and adopting those of the adult. His viewpoint
is lifted until his mental and moral horizon broadens to distances
heretofore undreamed of and discloses new and strange moral and
ethical problems. Old concepts melt away in the light of a newer and
stronger vision. Sex-consciousness overwhelms him with its complexity
and unrecognized import. The mental concepts of maturity clash with
those of childhood. His barque is sailing on uncharted waters, without
compass or rudder, while a fierce storm of uncertainty and instability
beats about him as he experiences the travail of the birth of a new
soul. It is truly the age “when a feller needs a friend”--one who
can pilot him safely through the storm of adolescence to the calm of
manhood.
Truancy reaches its flood tide during adolescence. The instinct of
wanderlust appears in response to the promptings of his savage nature,
his unease of mind, and his desire to know the unknown in the world
about him, and culminates in runaways as a revolt against the exercise
of parental authority which he believes to be unnecessarily restrictive
or severe. He is now in the formative, fermenting period when he is
reaching out to find himself, with indifferent success.
There is at this time a noticeable want of continuity of purpose
or action. He jumps from one interest to another, evincing little
stability of mind. There is want of psychophysical coördination. The
transmission between mind and body is faulty; and the imperfect gear
of intellect and will frequently fails to engage the cogwheels of
morals. The machine works poorly because it is neither complete nor
fully equipped. Workmen are still engaged on the unfinished job.
William now evinces a disposition to find fault with his home, his
clothing, his food, and restrictions on his conduct and routine.
He betrays a mental uneasiness unknown to prepubertal days, and a
willingness to argue with his parents in a self-assertive or combative
mood quite unlike his former self. Incongruities of character are
shown in petulance, irritability, disobedience, stubbornness, and
rebellion, sometimes even taking the form of cruelty to persons or
animals. This latter manifestation has been ascribed to atavism which
manifests itself in the recurrence of the savage traits of his primeval
ancestors. Dr. G. Stanley Hall thus comments on this tendency in his
exhaustive work on adolescence: “Assuming the bionomic law, infant
growth means being loaded with paleoatavistic qualities in a manner
more conformable to Weismannism, embryonic growth being yet purer,
while the pubescent increment is relatively neoatavistic.”
His proximity to the savage state is shown in his appreciation of
primitive humor. The unexpected which causes discomfiture or pain is
excruciatingly ludicrous. It is the crude, slap-stick comedy which
excites his disposition to risibility. The knockabout comedian who
falls down stairs or beats his partner over the head with an inflated
bladder produces the same degree of laughter in a boy as the felling of
one savage by another with a war club produces in the onlooking members
of their tribe. The rapier wit of keen intellectuality and the subtle
humor of fine distinctions observed in a play on words all pass over
his unscathed head.
He is a living paradox who displays at times the gallantry, courtesy
and chivalry of the knight-errant with the thoughtlessness, rudeness,
and boisterousness of the harum-scarum rowdy.
Sex-consciousness now asserts itself in an increased but diffident
interest in the opposite sex, accompanied by blushes, embarrassment,
and self-consciousness when in their presence. The desire to appear
attractive in the eyes of his girl friends prompts minute and
painstaking attention to dress, and the brilliant plumage of the male
bird is reflected in the bright colors of his attire. Formerly he
regarded girl playmates from the same viewpoint from which he regarded
boys and they were placed on the same plane and received the same
consideration as that accorded to those of his own sex, except where
the teaching of the sex-conscious parent required him to display a
gentleness toward them which his own lack of sex-consciousness failed
to prompt. Now, gentleness, courtesy, and gallantry are inspired by
adolescence from within. The companionship of the adolescent with pure,
high-minded girls of his own age is beneficial to both in the greatest
degree. Such associations are of educational value in that they project
high ideals of the feminine traits of gentleness, sweetness, and
purity whose influence is reflected in his improved manners, dress,
and conduct. It fosters the idealistic and spiritual phase of love and
removes it from the coarseness and baseness engendered by the purely
sexual appeal. These love affairs are numerous but transitory--their
duration being dependent upon the time required to satisfy his
idealism; and at the first suggestion that his idol has feet of clay
his affection is transferred to another pretty face and sweet nature.
Not infrequently he bestows his affection upon a girl several years
older than himself, to which he is actuated by two impulses--the
half-formed sex-impulse of the man to seek a mate, and his adolescent
need of “mothering,” both of which are measurably gratified by the
reciprocal love of an older girl.
He begins his love-making slyly and shamefacedly. George waits after
school, occupied with an ostensible engagement which will consume
the time until Mary shall appear. His meeting with her, after all
these elaborate plans, appears to be quite unexpected. A diffident
greeting is followed by an inquiry as to whether she is going home.
Her affirmative answer is seized upon as his excuse for walking in
her direction. Then follows his request to be permitted to carry her
books. They discuss matters of mutual interest in school or social
life, while he, with furtive glances, notes the beauty of her face,
the wealth of her hair, and the velvet of her cheek. Sunlight is
playing hide-and-seek in her eyes, while the roses in her cheeks blush
a deeper red, matching the ribbon which adorns her pigtails as she
feels the flood of his unexpressed admiration surging over her. Never
was there such a wondrous being in all the world! He idealizes her
every attribute until she surmounts a pedestal far removed from things
earthy. A smile of approval from this young goddess is treasured in
his heart of hearts, sacred from the misunderstandings of a profane
world. He is assailed by daydreams of knight-errantry in which he is
performing some chivalrous act of heroism to which the maiden shall be
a witness. Or better still, he imagines himself playing the part of a
cavalier rescuing her own sweet self from distress or danger and then
receiving as his reward her avowal of affection, while he protests that
his heroism is nothing and that he would do a thousand times more for
her.
Evidences of his tender regard for the girl of his choice are given
in secret, as too holy for an unappreciative world to comprehend, and
the twittings of his elders on the subject of puppy love (cruel in
their unsound psychology) are met with prompt and positive denials.
Such manifestations of incipient affection should be recognized as the
intermediary elaboration of a high and spiritual love whose ultimate
fruition will be matrimony. All the world loves a lover--provided he is
not a boy. The adult who cannot see the psychology in such incidents
must be blind indeed.
The exceptional plasticity of mind characteristic of this age renders
him highly susceptible to influences for good or evil. It is the great
character-building period of his life in which are crystallized his
moral and ethical concepts which attain their latter perfection in the
succeeding period. Your boy is putty in your hands. He is a superlative
impressionist. His impressionistic mind is molded as deeply by evil as
by good. For this reason, it is necessary that his environment--which
is the cumulative influence of the precept, example, and conditions
which surround him--should be good and wholesome. As the drip-drip-drip
of water wears away the stone, so the constant drip of environing
influences wears its way into character.
The foundations of will-power are now laid in his efforts to propel
himself into a choice between the good and the bad, between right and
wrong. Judgment and discretion appear in embryonic form and slowly
and laboriously develop into cautious discernment and the faculty of
deciding justly and wisely, which reach their approximate maturity late
in the reflective period.
It may be interesting to note that the law presumes that every person
at the age of fourteen has common discretion and understanding,
until the contrary is made out; but under that age there is no such
presumption. It therefore follows that when a child under fourteen
years of age is offered as a witness in a court of law, a preliminary
examination conducted by the judge must be made to ascertain whether
he has sufficient intelligence to relate the facts as they occurred
and sufficient moral sense to comprehend the nature and obligation
of an oath. But the law is conservative in its presumption, as such
intelligence and moral comprehension are, in most instances, developed
in the child at a much earlier age and numerous cases are cited in
the law reports in which children as young as seven or eight have
qualified, after examination, as witnesses competent to testify.
During this period occur three cycles of particular susceptibility to
religious influence. The first appears about the age of twelve under
the stimulus of witnessing the conversion or affiliation with the
church of some adult whom he looks up to, and is chiefly due to the
faculty of imitation--one of the characteristics carried over from the
individualistic period; the next occurs at age of fourteen, when his
emotionalism is dominant, under the excitement of a powerful emotional
experience; the third cycle of religious conversion appears at sixteen
when he is leaving the heroic period and entering the thoughtful or
reflective stage of his adolescence and such a conversion is grounded
in the thoughtful promptings of the intellect, rather than the emotions.
This is also the age of experimentation in which his longing to
know the unknown leads him to make short excursions into the fields
of mechanics, physics, electricity, hydraulics, magic, and others
which hide their secrets from the casual observer. This trend of
his activities may be directed by suggestion, supplemented with the
necessary equipment, toward manual training and handicraft--ideal
employments for the early adolescent.
This is the age of hero-worship and every boy in this period, without
exception, has a personal hero. He may not take the world into his
confidence by divulging his secret, but whether admitted or not, he
possesses a hero whom he looks up to, admires, and copies. I know a
thirteen-year-old lad whose hero is his eighteen-year-old cousin for
whom his admiration manifests itself to the extent of trying to imitate
his tone of voice, his walk, his gestures, and personal appearance,
including the wearing of the same kind of ties which his cousin
affects. He never ceases praising the football prowess of his relative
and continually quotes him as an authority on athletics.
The boy of this age worships a physical hero. Power, strength, and
authority make a powerful appeal. His hero may be the policeman on
his beat who is the emblem of physical strength and vested with the
authority of law to make arrests; the fireman who displays wonderful
courage in the rescue of imperiled persons from burning buildings; the
engineer who guides the locomotive dashing like a meteor through the
blackness of night; the prize fighter who has won a championship in the
squared ring; or the baseball or football athlete whose name is on
every tongue. His hero must be a mighty man of action, for he worships
at the shrine of athletic prowess. To test the truth of this statement,
ask any boy you may meet, between the ages of twelve and sixteen,
whether he would rather be the winner of the Nobel prize for scientific
achievement or Ty Cobb (with a batting average of approximately .370),
and the unanimous verdict will be in favor of the ballplayer. So
strongly is hero-worship implanted in his nature and so completely does
it dominate his viewpoint that it remains, with gradually diminishing
intensity, for many years thereafter. Happy the boy whose father is his
hero and happy the father who is a hero to his son!
The objective of hero-worship is always an older male--never a female.
No instance of normal heroine-worship has ever been noted. The wealth
of love which he may manifest toward his mother, female friend or
teacher is entirely disassociated from hero-worship. It lacks the
sex-element necessary to inspire emulation. He wants to be a man--not a
woman. For this reason, it is desirable that he should have opportunity
for association, during adolescence, with men of strong character and
personality. The differences between the psychologic processes of the
male and the female adult are too well known to require discussion
here. Widows who keenly appreciate the absence of the father’s guiding
hand frequently attempt to be both father and mother to their sons,
and in so doing the apron strings are knotted doubly hard and fast.
Then ensues a conflict between the feminine and maternal policy and
the adolescent longing and reaching out for ultimate masculinity.
The mother is the last person to recognize adolescence in her son;
she wants him to remain the infant she has always regarded him. His
beginnings to emulate masculinity clash with her desire to keep him a
child. I have in mind a mother who is rearing the most lady-like boy
in my acquaintance. Her inherent delicacy and refinement of nature
prompt her to develop these same qualities in her son as the ultimate
end to be attained. With no qualifications for boy-training except
mother-love, feminine ideals, and an ambition to rear her son to
beautiful manhood, she refuses him participation in rough and tumble
sports and games because they are “rude and ungentlemanly” and besides,
they would soil his clothes. Many mothers of the neighborhood hold him
up to their own unregenerate offspring as a model of neatness and a
paragon of propriety, but the boys call him “Sissy.” The author has
witnessed many examples of apron-string policy whose unpsychological
and repressive tendencies cannot fail to be detrimental to the ideal
development of adolescence.
Gratitude is a virtue displayed by few boys prior to the reflective
period, because they fail to appreciate the motives which inspire the
act which should call forth expressions of gratitude, especially if the
act or service is of an altruistic nature. Of course, he will thank
you for a gift of candy or a toy; but never for the time and thought
expended in giving him instruction or moral training, or taking him
in the woods for a day, or pointing out to him the constellations at
night. He is not ungrateful. He merely accepts these things as a matter
of course until he reaches the age which recognizes and appreciates the
sacrifices incurred by the giver of altruistic service.
The beginning of the reflective period witnesses the subsidence of the
fierce storms of earlier adolescence and is followed by comparative
physical and emotional calm, although attended by intellectual
agitations of lesser import. The boy now enters an era of mental
development characterized by a thoughtful, reflective attitude toward
the great problems of life. A serious viewpoint is developed which
changes the previous aspect of the world. He devotes much thought to
his life-work; to making choice of an occupation or profession and
preparing for it. His future career looms large in the foreground
of his problems, and prompts a close analysis of his inclinations,
aptitudes, and qualifications for special lines of work. The
realization that he must soon take his place among the men who are
doing the world’s work overwhelms him, at times, with the immensity
of his job. Introspection, as a part of his self-analysis, becomes a
habit which induces him to make continual comparisons between his own
natural endowments and those of others of his own age. He seeks, with
all the faculties at his command, to find that niche in the business,
professional, or industrial world which he can best fill and it is at
this time that he needs the vocational guidance of his father.
Early in this period a morbid self-consciousness frequently appears
as the result of a too minute introspection with eyes whose views
of life are not correlated. He discovers defects in his personal
appearance, faults of character and deficiencies of intellect which are
magnified out of their true proportions. His sense of perspective is
in its formative stage and this causes many molehills to loom high as
mountains. He is now his own most severe critic and imagines that his
immature conclusions as to his personality are shared by all others;
and many hours of humility and mental depression ensue from this
condition. Egotism and an exalted appreciation of his own worth are
also manifest, due to the same uncoordinated sense of values. He often
exhibits alternate states of exaltation and depression produced by a
trifling remark or a trivial incident which is given an importance it
does not deserve. As he advances through this period, his perspective
finds truer adjustment, his sense of values becomes settled, his
judgment ripens and these anomalies disappear. But he may be saved
many hours of soul-stress by the father who is able to diagnose his
condition, or who is on sufficiently intimate terms of confidence
with his son to inspire a frank avowal of his troubles. Here is the
opportunity for the father to apply his common sense, ripe judgment and
experience to the solution of these problems of the later adolescent.
Attention has already been called to his impressionability to religious
influences during the early part of this period through an appeal based
in intellectualism (as distinguished from the emotionalism of the
preceding period), to which the ethical concepts now being formed are
closely related.
Another distinguishing trait is the evolution of his sociological
consciousness through which he recognizes himself as a unit in the
social economy, with all its attendant rights and duties. He discards
the selfishness and individualism of an earlier era and adopts the
obligations of altruism. His desire to be of genuine service to his
fellow man seeks expression first in visionary plans to reform the
world, followed afterward by practical work in help for others, such
as leadership in boys’ clubs, secretarial duties or teaching in Sunday
schools, or similar employments of altruistic purport. Government
under processes of law takes on a newer, clearer and more personal
meaning. And with it comes recognition of civic responsibility.
Intellectual storms gather when vague, unassorted, inchoate, and
impossible theories of social and political reform--long since tried
and discarded--loom big on his horizon and are eagerly seized upon and
advocated as original discoveries. His opinions are expressed with
a dogmatism which characterizes the cocksureness of youth. Verbal
limitations inspired by sound judgment and broad experience, as well
as the cautious phraseology of scientific conservatism have no place
in his vocabulary. His theories are all promulgated with an arrogant
assertiveness born of the optimism of inexperience. He is now fairly
bursting with self-importance. But all these manifestations are
important only as indicating his desire to solve the great problems of
life and are the precursors of a sounder judgment which will come with
maturity of intellect and experience.
It is at or near the beginning of this period that the youth looks
down on the younger boy, whom he characterizes as a “kid.” The dislike
and even positive aversion of the older boy for companionship with
the younger has its basis not so much in their differing physical
and mental attainments as in their differing viewpoints caused by
their unequal psychological development. Illustration of this may be
observed in two boys, both of whom are sixteen years of age and of
equal mentality and physique, one of whom has and the other has not
entered the reflective period. Such boys are out of harmony with each
other in every taste, desire, and predilection which is actuated by
psychological impulse, and find a common ground of companionship only
in athletics and classroom studies.
Will power, born during the heroic period, is now stimulated to rapid
growth which culminates during the latter part of the reflective
period. No longer is he a straw borne on every passing wind of
influence, but a human being capable of exercising a moral choice
between two courses of action.
His mental and moral stature has been reached by gradual and almost
unnoticed gradations; and such growth, which had its beginning in blank
chaos, has been even greater and more marvelous than his physical
growth between birth and maturity.
Self-flattered, unexperienced, high in hope,
When young, with sanguine cheer and streamers gay,
We cut our cable, launch into the world
And fondly dream each wind and star our friend.
--Young’s NIGHT THOUGHTS.
CHAPTER V
THE BOY’S VIEWPOINT
A correct understanding of boy-nature is conditioned on one’s ability
to obtain his point of view, which differs widely from that of the
adult. It has been stated in a previous chapter that the viewpoints of
a boy at six, ten, fourteen, and eighteen years of age differ as widely
from each other as those of four adults of remotely differing natures
and temperaments. We frequently make the mistake of assuming that
the boy is a small edition of a man, possessing faculties, emotions,
desires, and understanding the same as in the adult but developed in a
lesser degree. On the contrary, his mental and psychological processes
differ fundamentally from those of maturity. Boys are not little men
and should not be judged by men’s standards.
The ignorant peasant who views the masterpieces of the Louvre sees
them through dull, uncomprehending eyes. He sees but does not
_perceive_, because his appreciation of artistic beauty is limited
by a circumscribed capacity. Just so, the boy, circumscribed by
the limitations of his mind and soul, views life and its complex
manifestations with such capacities as he possesses. If your mental
and psychological limits were those of a boy in the hero-worship
period, your tastes, desires, judgments, opinions, and actions would
conform exactly to that boy-standard. Your standards of ambition and
achievement would be purely physical and therefore you would prefer the
prize fighter to the scientist.
The physical and mental requirements for youth and age are as wide
apart as the two poles. As reminiscence characterizes old age, so
enjoyment of the present typifies young age. The Bard of Avon has thus
compared their physical and mental characteristics:
Crabbed age and youth,
Cannot live together;
Youth is full of pleasure,
Age is full of care:
Youth like summer morn,
Age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave,
Age like winter bare;
Youth is full of sport,
Age’s breath is short;
Youth is nimble, age is lame;
Youth is hot and bold,
Age is weak and cold;
Youth is wild and age is tame.
Age I do abhor thee;
O, my love, my love is young:
Age I do defy thee;
O sweet shepherd hie thee,
For methinks thou stay’st too long.
An elderly maiden sat one sunny afternoon in May engrossed with her
knitting, while a crowd of boys were engaged in the great American game
of baseball on the lot beneath her window. It would be superfluous to
say they were noisy. From her viewpoint both noise and violent physical
activity were unnecessary, disagreeable, and trying to one’s nerves.
The nuisance must be suppressed. Accordingly she poked her head out of
the window and directed a shrill scream at the disturbers of her peace,
“Go away from here, you bad boys, and stop making that noise!” In a
flash came back the retort, “G’wan away yourself!” while a boy grumbled
to his companion, “She don’t know nothin’ ’bout having fun.” Both were
right, judging from their respective points of view, and both were
wrong when considered from the other’s viewpoint. Neither understood
the other. Old age requires peace, silence, and cessation from
physical activity. Youth requires noise, bustle, and violent exercise
for its growth. Activity symbolizes success. Passivity spells failure.
The boy in athletics, like the adult laborer in his daily toil, uses
the primary muscles of his arms, legs, and torso. With the development
of his mentality, he develops and employs his secondary muscles.
Psychology is intimately related to athletics. For this reason, the
gymnastic apparatus which is suited to adults is wholly unsuited to
boys, and this is quite apart from differences due to the unequal size
and strength of the users. Witness the aversion of the boy to the use
of Indian clubs whose intricate manipulations require the employment
of the secondary muscles of the wrist and arm, while he willingly uses
dumb bells which call into play his primary muscles.
His inability for sustained mental effort is coördinated with his
disability for sustained physical effort. Hence he passes by, with a
curiosity-satisfying trial, the chest weights and rowing machines of
the adult which require the continuous expenditure of energy. So also
the competitive spirit of boyhood must be gratified by the use of such
gymnastic apparatus and games as develop competition. The boy will not
exercise for exercise’s sake. He will not even do it to achieve the
altruistic result of a strong physique. But he will exercise and play
games to excel the other fellow. The boy who is alone in a gymnasium
has as stupid a time as the boy who is compelled by necessity to play
baseball with himself.
It would be interesting to learn the boy’s opinion of certain adults
if he were able to accurately analyze and express his conclusions.
The crabbed demeanor of the pessimist out of touch with boy-life is
as offensive to the boy as the latter’s noise and giddiness are
objectionable to the former. Observe the mental rheumatics of the
misanthrope in these grouchy grumblings from Beaumont and Fletcher’s
“Wit Without Money”:
What benefit can children be but charges and disobedience? What’s the
love they render at one and twenty years? I pray die, father: when
they are young, they are like bells rung backwards, nothing but noise
and giddiness.
And from what a different vision-vantage were penned these lines,
overflowing with love and understanding of childhood, which are a model
of sympathetic comprehension of the child’s needs:
Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,
To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour fresh instruction o’er the mind,
To breathe the enlivening spirit and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast!
--Thomson’s SEASONS.
To understand the boy’s viewpoint we must be able to put ourselves
in his place. We must renew our youth. The trouble with so many of
us is that we never acquire juvenescence until second-childhood. We
should be able to assign the boy to the psychological period to which
he belongs by reason of his development, and thus knowing the mental
and moral status of an inhabitant of that period, we are able to see
things through his glasses. The mental myopia and moral astigmatism of
youth will then be recognized as a defect of immaturity which training
and years will cure. Juvenility may be reacquired in maturity if we
string-halted adults would only seek rejuvenation at the fountain
of youthful understanding where we may obtain a flood of knowledge
concerning boy-life. The journey is apparently too long and too
difficult for the lazy or indifferent grown-up. The heart of a boy is
not worn on his sleeve. He reveals it only to those who command his
perfect confidence and such confidence is given to those, and to those
only, who understand him. The aloofness of children toward certain
adults is because they have nothing in common. Each misunderstands the
other. As it is obviously impossible for the child to understand and
attune himself to adult mental processes, it becomes necessary for the
adult to comprehend child-nature and to put himself in harmony with it.
Happy the man who can make himself a boy again! He retains a thousand
joys which other adults have irretrievably lost. Such a one is a
natural leader and teacher of boys. They delight to make him their
hero. His influence with boys is commensurate with his understanding
of life in Boyville. You must go to this juvenile city and live there,
learn its laws, customs, and manners, and if possible place yourself
in a sympathetic attitude of understanding without which you can never
hope to be initiated into the mysteries of adolescence. The honor
of being admitted to the confidence and fellowship of boys is not
permitted to all men--only to those who have retained or who are able
to acquire the boy’s viewpoint. “There is a wall around the town of
Boyville,” says William Allen White, “which is impenetrable when its
gates have once shut upon youth. An adult may peer over the wall and
try to ape the games inside, but finds it all a mockery and himself
banished among purblind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old when
Nineveh was a hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rules
and idols; and only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it
have changed.”
The boy lives in the present, with little thought of the future; he
is concerned with today, not the next decade. His mental processes
do not prompt him to speculate as to the effect of present acts on
future character. He has neither the mental nor moral equipment for
such foresight or deduction; it is a task beyond his capabilities. This
burden must be shouldered by the parent who should not only do the
child’s thinking for him until the latter is able to do it for himself,
but should also drill, train, and educate the boy until he is able to
make nice distinctions between right and wrong, and should cultivate
his will-power until he can school himself into an acceptance of the
good as against the bad. Until the child’s mind, will, and moral sense
have reached this stage of growth, the parent must substitute his own
mind, will, and moral sense. In determining the degree of capability of
a child’s offense, we should ask ourselves the question: “What is the
developmental stage of his faculties which made the offense possible?”
Harsh and stern estimates of childish frailties usually result from the
application of the adult viewpoint and the adult standard. The failure
to consider the viewpoint and standards of the adolescent causes much
injustice to the boy and results in many mistakes in his training.
The brightness, joyousness, and optimism of youth suffuses life with
an iridescent glow. All the world is bathed in roseate hues when seen
through the rose-colored glasses of youth. When we get so old that we
delight in sitting by the fire, toasting our slippered feet, and prefer
to listen to our arteries harden rather than to hear the noise and
laughter of boyhood, we are out of tune with the harmonies of boy-life.
CHAPTER VI
OBEDIENCE
There hangs in the bedroom of the children of a certain devout mother
a large frame which contains, in illuminated letters, the twentieth
verse of the third chapter of Paul’s “Epistle to the Colossians”:
“Children, obey your parents in all things; for this is well pleasing
to the Lord.” In commenting on this visual injunction she said:
“Obedience is the chief cornerstone of child-training and I have thus
endeavored to fix it in the memories of my children for all time.” The
commandment--“Honor thy father and thy mother”--is just as real and
vital today as it was in the time of Moses, although present-day home
conditions are not always conducive to its observance.
Too many children of the present, especially during adolescence,
regard their parents with an attitude of tolerant sufferance--as
necessary evils to be endured by them but exhibiting little patience
in their toleration. They consider them old-fogy, behind the times,
uncomprehending and unsympathetic with their interests, plans, and
aspirations. Father is esteemed largely in proportion to his success as
a producer; while mother is valued in accordance with her contributions
to their physical comfort; and this imperfect recognition of parental
aid comprises the sum total of their gratitude; for no acknowledgment
is ever made of their obligation for the years of watchfulness of
health or solicitude for morals or cultivation of the spiritual life.
This attitude is due partly to the psychological unbalance of the
adolescent and partly to the slovenly, inconsistent, and wishy-washy
methods of government used by the parent, which inspire in the youth
not only disobedience but contempt for parental authority which is
as vacillating as a weather cock. Without obedience the child drifts
aimlessly and develops a character as unstable as the parental system
of training is fluctuating. Confirmed cases of juvenile disobedience
can be traced, almost without exception, to the jellyfish methods of
spineless parents. An increase in rigidity of parental backbone will
result in a corresponding increase in filial obedience.
Obedience is the fundamental law of child-training and upon it the
development of future character is predicated. Obedience in children
is too frequently regarded by parents as the chief end of training,
and not as the means to the end, which is character. The young child
has neither code of morals nor a standard of ethics, but is a rule
unto himself, propelled only by impulses of selfish interest. The chief
objective of child-training is the cultivation and fixation of a high
moral code which produces character. The secondary objectives are the
conservation of health and discipline of the intellectual faculties,
the latter including the communication of knowledge.
Parental prohibitions of undesirable acts, as well as suggestions of
wished-for conduct, should be so uniform, constant, and consistent that
the child will be able to deduce from them what his course of conduct
should be when confronted in the future with the desire to do or not to
do an act of similar nature. It is thus that he builds up his standard
of conduct and formulates his code of morals. Trivial objections to
acts or conduct, not grounded in reason and justice, inspire disrespect
for parents and disobedience to their authority, and befog the moral
vision of childhood. If the child is to respect parental authority, he
must have been so habituated to obedience by the parental system of
government that he will obey easily and involuntarily from force of
habit. Habit is the tendency to do naturally, easily, and with growing
certainty those things which we are accustomed by constant repetition
to do. The habit of obedience is formed most easily in early childhood
and when obedience becomes crystallized into habit, a strong foundation
has been laid for the building of strong character.
Obedience is cultivated by consistency in parental commands which
invariably must be founded on reason and justice and enforced with a
firmness of will which cannot be swayed by sentimental considerations
of leniency. Consistency is a jewel which shines nowhere so brightly
as in the crown of child-training, but it must be mounted in resolute
adherence to fixed ideals of character-culture. Obedience should be
distinguished from unwilling submission to a superior force. The former
implies subjection of the will and actions to rightful restraint and
not servile submission to authority which is exercised unjustly. The
founders of our republic were obedient to the highest promptings
of liberty and justice when they revolted against the many acts of
injustice imposed by the mother country. Likewise the obedience of a
child can be enforced only through parental commands which are founded
on justice and reason; and we should even go a step farther and
convince him that they are just and reasonable. Here is a typical case:
A boy requested permission of his mother to go swimming--as boys are
wont to do.
She replied, “No! you may not go!”
“But why not, mother?” was the natural and reasonable inquiry of her
son.
“Just because I don’t want you to go,” was the unconvincing answer.
“Ah! that’s no reason, mother. Why can’t I go?”
“Because I have said no! Now, that settles it!” And with this answer
she concluded the colloquy.
Defeated and depressed, but unconvinced, the boy shuffled sullenly
around the corner of the house and out behind the barn where he
raged and rebelled at the autocratic exercise of the authority of
which he had been the victim, until present desire overcame the fear
of future punishment and soon the old swimming hole resounded with
the splash of another lithe, young body. His disobedience was the
logical sequence of an attitude which violated both the principles
of psychology and the dictates of reason and justice. If the mother
had assigned any reasonable excuse for withholding her permission
she would have measurably satisfied her son’s sense of fairness and
justice, however reluctantly his acquiescence, prompted by the denial
of personal pleasure, may have been given. Instead, she unconsciously
chose a course which planted the seed of disobedience and evasion
whose ultimate fruition might even be rebellion against all maternal
authority, and following that--delinquency.
The boy is a rational human being, however much we may ignore his
capacity for reason, and the continued violation of his standards of
right and justice will ultimately destroy those standards and compel
him to adopt a code based on expediency instead of morals. Laws are
obeyed by adults in the proportion that they are supported by public
opinion as being just and reasonable; and, conversely, they are
disobeyed when deemed unjustly restrictive or violative of personal
rights. Witness the disregard for sumptuary laws in certain local
communities which entertain convictions against the abridgment of their
so-called personal liberties, where such laws have been imposed by the
legislative enactment of a state the majority of whose voters favor
prohibition. Some of our reputedly good citizens evade the payment of a
large part of the taxes imposed on them by law for the reason that they
believe the tax laws to be inequitable and unjust in placing too great
a burden on one class, with a corresponding exemption to another class.
From general observation, as well as from the records of our penal
courts, we may deduce the proposition that obedience to statute by
normal men rests largely on their belief in the justice of law and the
reasonableness of the exercise of the authority which is predicated
on such law. Law, in the domain of childhood, is parental command; and
even though the child’s sense of justice may not be as discriminating
as that of the parent, nevertheless it is strong enough and deep enough
to impel him to resist, by evasion, subterfuge, deceit, or other means
at hand, those parental laws which he believes to be founded on mere
caprice or positive injustice. We must promulgate reasonable commands
if we are to expect reasonable compliance with them, and we shall
suffer no loss of dignity by frankly explaining to our children the
reasons which underlie our mandates. Although the child may be unable
at all times to follow our line of reasoning, or to agree wholly with
our conclusions, he will, at any rate, be convinced that our orders do
not emanate from capricious fancy, but have a semblance of justice as
their basis.
Even paternal example is not without its influence on the keenly
observing mind of youth. The seventeen-year-old son of a neighbor was
detected smoking a cigarette the day following the direct injunction of
his father that he should not do so. When reproved by his father for
disobedience, the son retorted: “Well, dad, why don’t you obey the law?
You shot ducks out of season.”
The delinquent children who flow in a steady stream through our
juvenile courts are undisciplined, self-willed, and rebellious against
authority and are governed only by impulse which is as spasmodic as
their conduct is abnormal. Obedience has never found a place in the
poor moral equipment with which they are endowed. Practically every
moral derelict stranded on the human scrap-pile can trace his failure
in life to his disobedience in childhood; and the fault is not wholly
his own but rests largely on the shoulders of parents who failed
to compel obedience in the early years when compulsion was possible
through firm and just regulation.
The boy who is early indoctrinated in obedience becomes plastic
material ready to be shaped, through training, in the stature of a man
of fine moral quality.
CHAPTER VII
THE REPRESSIVE METHOD OF TRAINING
The training of the child should begin as soon as it is able to
comprehend spoken language. A venerable mother who had reared eleven
children and had seen them attain successful and honorable positions
in life was asked the question: “At what time should the training of a
child begin?” Her answer was: “In the cradle.” And, it is needless to
add, it should be continued to maturity. There are, broadly speaking,
two general plans of training which may be termed respectively the
repressive method and the suggestive method.
The repressive method of training is founded on the principle of
negation. It seeks to make the boy do right by constant admonition
not to do wrong. It proceeds on the theory that elimination of the bad
will, leave the good. It is indirect in its methods as well as its
results.
The negative system of training manifests itself in such commands as,
“Don’t make that noise;” “Don’t bother me, I’m busy;” “Don’t slide down
the cellar door;” “Don’t talk so loud;” “Don’t play in the house;”
“Don’t tease sister;” “Don’t eat so much;” “Don’t soil your clothes;”
“Don’t bring those boys into the house;” “Don’t scuff out your shoes;”
“Don’t get your hands dirty;” “Don’t be tardy at school;” “Don’t wear
out the seat of your pants;” and so on without end.
No boy ever thrived on an indigestible diet of don’ts.
Jacob Riis, writing in the _Outlook_, says: “Write the one word ‘Don’t’
there, and only that, and the boy if he has any spirit will take to
the jungle. Every father knows it; every teacher has learned it, if he
has learned anything.”
While this system has a modicum of worth in certain of its
applications, it lacks the comprehensiveness and directness necessary
to accomplish the best results.
The prohibition of reading dime novels, nickel libraries and other
blood-and-thunder tales, without the suggestion of adventure stories of
definite ethical and moral value to fill the vacuum thus created in his
emotional life, is another conspicuous example of the repressive method
of training--which does not repress but impels the boy to continue his
lurid reading in secret.
The error of the system lies in taking something essential away from
the boy without giving him an adequate substitute. It is damming up the
stream without providing a spillway, and is as ineffective as it is
unpsychological. The current of his activities will find a channel as
surely as water will find its level. Instead of attempting to check the
flow, we should direct it into channels for good. This repression, if
persistent, will dwarf the child’s initiative and compel him to grope
in the dark to find out what is permissible. It is as fallacious in
practice as a system of teaching, if such could be conceived, which
would give the boy a hundred guesses to learn a fact, instead of the
teacher’s direct statement of the fact. It is the maze of a labyrinth
which envelops the traveler in hopeless confusion and its effect can
only be depressing and disheartening to the child. We frequently make
the mistake of underestimating the reasoning powers of our children,
which prompts us with autocratic dogmatism to forbid their acts without
an explanation of the reasons why or the suggestion of a substitute to
fill the void caused by the prohibition.
“Stop making that noise!” is a command hurled at the playful boy with
such frequency that it no longer excites comment. It is natural for
boys to play, yell, make a noise, and wear out clothes. They are the
exuberant manifestations of his physical and emotional nature; the
expression of the atavistic tendencies of man; the safety valve which
relieves the pressure of superabundant vitality. As he is in the savage
period of his life he yells like a savage. You may as well tell a pup
not to bark as to tell a boy not to yell. It is the nature of the
animal. We should recognize this fact by conforming to nature--not
opposing it--because it is the normal condition of the normal boy. I
have a profound pity for the boy who prefers to sit by his mother’s
knee and read a book on his holiday, instead of joining the gang in
playing tag or getting up a scrub game of baseball. Such a boy is
abnormal; he is not “all boy”; he is either sick or mentally deficient
and either condition should inspire the grayest solicitude of his
parents as to his future. We do not want to rear a race of anemic runts.
The young of all mammals manifest the play spirit as a means of growth.
Colt, calf, lamb, kitten, pup, and boy all exhibit this tendency of
nature. These things are the cause of growth, not only physical, but
mental and moral as well. The educational value of play is one of the
most important factors in the boy’s evolution. It is the expression
of his being, his growth, his aspirations and his future. By play,
he trains his eye, his hand, his mind and his muscles; his moral
conceptions are formed; he learns to distinguish between right and
wrong, and the recognition of individual and property rights begins
to emerge from his nascent moral consciousness. Games with companions
develop the social instincts. Through them he first realizes that he
is a social unit--a thread in the social fabric of humanity. Action,
constant action, is the keynote to his present and the hope of his
future. He aches for action. If the boy’s play and noise disturb you,
do not squelch him, but rather provide him with a place in which he
may exercise these manifestations of his nature without causing you
annoyance. A playroom in the house or barn, a tent, the lawn, the park,
the great woods of the country are all ideal playgrounds for boys
which satisfy the savage spirit of his nature. There ought to be ample
room in this great world of ours for the growth and development of our
future men.
Objection is sometimes made that sports are a non-productive form of
energy--a waste of time and strength which might be employed in manual
training or in work of economic value capable of being measured in
terms of money. It is true that the athletics and games of boys have
no money value, nor are they designed for such purpose, but the energy
expended is not wasted. On the contrary, it is highly productive of
both physical and moral growth. It is productive of strong bodies,
clear eyes, speed, agility, strength, quick thinking, sound judgment,
a sense of fair play, self-confidence, control of temper, coördination
of brain and muscle, and respect for the rights of others. Their
value is educational and cultural--a means to an end and not the end
itself. The boy who by reason of financial necessity is required to
become a breadwinner is deprived not only of a large part of the joys
of boyhood which should be his as a matter of right, but of many
physical activities, educational in their effect, which would otherwise
train and equip him both mentally and physically for service in
adult vocations and good citizenship. The repression of play and its
attendant noise is always inspired by motives of consideration for the
convenience of the adult and never by a thought of its effect on the
boy himself.
The repressive method of training, alone, is ineffective at any age,
but if it is used sparingly in early childhood and then only when
combined with suggestions and directions for activities to replace
those prohibited it produces good results. As the child grows in years
the positive, constructive, suggestive method of training should be
employed exclusively.
Quite as pernicious as the repressive method is the passive system of
training--in effect no training at all--which permits the boy to have
his own way in everything. It is the resource of the indulgent and
lazy parent who seeks the line of least resistance. When combined with
a lavish supply of money, its effects are usually ruinous. I know a boy
now fifteen years of age, a typical spoiled son of a wealthy father.
At our first meeting, a year ago, the sartorial display on his stunted
physique was loud and elaborate and was the work, he volunteered, of
his father’s tailor. He was decorated with a gold watch and chain, an
elaborate scarf pin and two finger rings conspicuous for their size. He
immediately began to boast to the little group of boys who surrounded
him of the cost and superiority of his clothes, his rifle, his canoe
and his pony. At first, the group looked on in mingled awe and
admiration. Then their keen insight and sense of humor were betrayed
in the knowing winks and nods which they exchanged, followed by a
volley of questions designed to hold him up to ridicule, until the poor
little sham of a boy, unable to bear their raillery longer, finally
blurted out in an attempt to silence his inquisitors, “My father’s got
more money than all of your fathers put together.”
I have long held the belief that the boy is the mirror of his home.
A subsequent acquaintance with the lad’s father and his home life
confirmed my impression that the sum total of this boy’s training
consisted in gratifying his every wish. For the boy to ask was to
receive. While the father expended a wealth of money, he did not
expend a single thought concerning its effect on his son. Only pity
can be evoked at the plight of such a boy handicapped as he is by
these false ideals and standards of life. It is doubtful whether even
the unsympathetic, stern and harsh discipline of the brutalist is
more conducive to crippled character than the methods of the lavish,
coddling and cosseting parent.
Parents have the choice of two plans in correcting faults and
developing character in the boy. One consists in the prohibition of
acts and the application of censure for wrongdoing, and proceeds on the
theory that the consequences of wrongdoing will be made so unpleasant
that he will abandon the acts complained of to avoid the resulting
censure. The other plan is to suggest the desired course of conduct and
to praise the boy for his good acts and qualities to the extent that
he will continually seek to earn approval by doing the things which
call forth approbation. The boy, like the adult, is keenly susceptible
to praise. The exaltation of spirit which follows the word of approval
given as a reward for good deeds is a continued inspiration to future
goodness. The effects of blame are depressing; of praise, stimulating.
A certain boy has hanging on the wall of his bedroom an honor shield
on which silver “merit stars” are placed for conspicuous good deeds,
deportment, and scholarship. As each unworthy act or failure of duty
causes the removal of a star, the owner is keenly alive to keeping his
escutcheon bright with evidences of merit.
The boy is intensely human, although we may not at all times treat
him like a human being. As our own best efforts are inspired by
commendation or reward, so the boy is quickened to highest endeavor
by praise and not by blame. Rewards are more effective incentives
to excellence than demerits or punishments. The constant repression
of a child’s actions by prohibition is a cruel form of punishment
which drives him farther and farther out of the range of the parent’s
influence for suggestive helpfulness.
“Do this!” is more effective than “Don’t do that!”
CHAPTER VIII
THE SUGGESTIVE METHOD OF TRAINING
Every parent of a son should formulate some definite, determinate plan
for his training, and this can be done even though original research
and the formation of plans deduced therefrom are not always possible
to the parent whose life is bulging with other activities necessitated
by our hurrying civilization. Any definite plan of training is better
than no plan, inasmuch as it will cause us to think and to use our best
judgment on this important topic and so tend to a clarification of
preformed vague or inchoate opinions.
Would it were possible to state a simple golden rule for boy-training!
Unfortunately such a complex subject cannot be reduced to fixed rules
or mechanical formulas. The complexity of the problem is grounded in
the complexity of life; its solution is found in methods as variant
as the diverse needs of mind, soul, and body. The author has stressed
parental responsibility and the need of parental training as a basic
preliminary to solving the boy-problem. The far-flung necessity for
parental instruction is made imperative by the racial habit, of
Americans especially, of drifting out of touch with their children
during adolescence. In the preadolescent period--when our children
are childish--we preserve the closest intimacy and companionship by
unbending our mature dignity, at least in the privacy of home, to a
degree which puts us in perfect accord with their natures. Under such
conditions we are the recipients of their confidences and intimacies
which they give freely, naïvely and trustfully. In return for the gift
of our love, our own lives are rejuvenated by association with the
light, joy, and laughter of youth.
But the arrival of puberty marks a change in our attitude toward our
children of which we are not wholly conscious. At this age the boy is
neither man nor child, but part of both, and we become impatient with
the idiosyncrasies of his nature and conduct which constantly assert
themselves at this period of life. Our annoyance at the manifestations
of his psychic changes, which is caused by our failure to understand
them, arouses in him the suspicion that he is neither loved nor
appreciated and he drifts farther and farther out of the range of our
influence until he reaches the hinterland from which little tidings of
his inner self ever reach us. The realization of this fact comes to
the boy much earlier and with more poignant force than to the parent.
The consciousness of his isolation is evidenced by his secretiveness,
his opinion that he is not understood and his belief in parental lack
of sympathy. The former relationship of chum and comrade has been
superseded by an attitude of unresponsiveness or even hostility. The
secretiveness of the boy toward those who do not have his confidence
is only equalled by his frankness toward the adult with whom he is on
terms of intimate companionship.
How many fathers take the time to tell a story to their sons after
puberty? Or to explain the phenomena of the business, banking,
industrial, or mechanical world? The busy parent usually esteems
himself fortunate if he can escape the importunate inquiries of his
offspring concerning the facts of the man’s world; and the boy, seeking
the companionship of men for which he yearns during adolescence, is led
to the society of the drunken hostler who is ever ready to regale him
with a collection of stories replete with profanity and obscenity.
American children, during adolescence, are reputed to be the most
ill-bred children in the world. The apparently lax methods of the
French and the Japanese as well as the severe discipline of English
and German parents are both attended by a greater degree of filial
respect, obedience, and reverence for their elders than is exhibited
by our own children. Americans have been characterized as bringing
up their children by a series of fits and starts, which accounts for
much of the disrespect shown them by their children. At any rate, it
must be admitted that we have no settled, definite philosophy to guide
us in this important function, and the lack of a determinate system
may justly be assigned as a cause for such indeterminate results. The
delightful camaraderie between the French youth and his father is
conspicuous in this country by its relatively infrequent occurrence.
Our slap-bang, haphazard plans of boy-culture produce results in
conformity with the methods employed. But whatever may be the system
used, any definite, thoughtful, continuous policy is better than no
policy at all. The author is of the opinion that intimate companionship
continued through adolescence, combined with a median course between
French laxity and English strictness, will conduce to virile character
and manhood, and love and respect for parents.
Happy is the man for whom time has not rung down the curtain of
oblivion on the scenes of youth; for only in this state of mental
attunement is he able to retain the boy’s point of view which is an
indispensable requisite to chumship and comradeship with his son. A
delightful state of intimacy and confidence with his son makes it
possible for the father to guide his conduct by suggestion and counsel
which carry a weight and potency unattainable under other conditions;
and that counsel is most productive of results, which is positive--not
negative--for the reason that it is founded on sound psychology. The
evils of the repressive method of training find their antithesis in
the happy results of the suggestive method which is constructive in
principle. Suggestion is informative, optimistic, and inspirational,
and finds quick lodgment in the inquiring and acquisitive mind. As
negative commands are unwelcome because they produce mental hostility
and will combat, so constructive suggestions are welcomed because of
their friendly helpfulness.
Witness how enthusiastically a group of boys will accept the suggestion
of an adult who proposes a new game, sport, manual activity, or work
along the lines of social or civil service! A patrol of Boy Scouts,
under the suggestion of their Master, provided food, fuel, and clothing
for three destitute families during a winter of unusual severity, until
the heads of these families had recovered from sickness and resumed
their places as breadwinners. The intensity of their boyish enthusiasm
for this work of charity drove from their minds all thought of the
peccadillos which, to a greater or lesser degree, occupy the minds of
idle youths. The idle brain is still the devil’s workshop.
The boy hails as a friend and companion the adult who understands his
needs and who points out to him the clean activities which he loves and
for which he is blindly groping. No one is more “open to suggestion”
than the boy.
One winter’s day a gentleman encountered a lot gang who had captured
a stray cur, bound him to a post, and were bombarding him with snow
balls and chunks of ice as an expression of their desire for mental and
physical excitement. The yelps of pain which told that the missiles
had found their mark were greeted with shouts of exultation. Instead
of reproving them for their cruelty, he incited their curiosity by
tactfully inquiring if they had a mascot. On receiving a negative
answer, he suggested that every crowd of boys ought to have a mascot
and then began to discuss the fine points of the cur--more or less
hidden from the non-expert eye--and finally suggested that the dog
would make an ideal mascot, provided the boys knew how to take proper
care of an animal occupying such an exalted station. Spontaneous
yells of assent elected the dog to this honor and then the crowd, at
the suggestion of the adult, spent the remainder of the day bringing
him food and building a kennel which was copiously furnished with
discarded bed coverings, after which, on their own initiative, they
combed his hair and manicured his claws until he presented the
well-groomed appearance of a lady of fashion. Many subsequent hours
were spent in earning pennies with which they purchased a license and
a collar on which was a plate engraved with the name “Rags” which had
been unanimously conferred on him. The quarrels and disputes which
arose over their respective rights to the possession of the dog were
settled, at the suggestion of this same gentleman, by the organization
of the gang into a club which elected officers and adopted by-laws, the
president of which awarded the custody of the dog daily in turn to each
member--beginning with himself. The necessity for more pets to occupy
their attention resulted in the addition of a rabbit, two chickens, a
guinea pig and a goat to their embryonic menagerie. Their next step
was the giving of a “show” (admission one cent) in which the menagerie
was the chief attraction, closely followed in popular favor by “Rags”
doing tricks which the gang had taught him. Then they added more fowls
to their collection which proved to be the forerunner of a successful
poultry yard from which they made a profit by selling eggs and chickens.
A boy in an Iowa city, rejoicing in a superior physique but lacking
the brains to use it wisely, had bullied, beaten, and terrorized
the smaller boys of his acquaintance in spite of parental commands,
reproof, and repeated chastisements. A continuation of his brutality
finally landed him in the Juvenile Court, the judge of which was
sufficiently versed in boy-psychology to attempt the experiment of
making him a “boy-policeman” decorated with a tin star, authorizing
him to preserve order among the boys of his neighborhood and especially
charging him with the duty of protecting the smaller boys from the
assaults of the larger. From that time forward, the bully was prepared
to “punch the head off’n any feller wot licked a kid.” It is needless
to say that there were no more assaults on small boys in that locality.
Suggestion had diverted the exercise of his physical prowess from
unlawful into lawful channels.
James ----, age 15, was changed from a prodigal to a thrifty boy
through a plan for saving suggested and encouraged by his father who
opened a bank account in his son’s name and offered to add a dollar for
every dollar earned by his son. It proved to be a tremendous incentive
to industry as well as to thrift.
The foregoing incidents furnish typical illustrations of the
application of the suggestive method of training as distinguished from
the repressive method; and it may be applied either to the individual
or to the group with equally good results. The mental and physical
energy ordinarily expended in various forms of lawlessness can be
directed, unconsciously, into fields of economic and ethical value by
the application of suitable suggestions.
Negation arouses the spirit of combat; and obedience under these
conditions tends to inspire a feeling of surrender and defeat whose
influence on character is obviously prejudicial.
A father once said, “I have never commanded my son _not_ to do a thing.
Instead, I have suggested that I would prefer him to do the other.”
In this way, conflict of wills was avoided and the youth was required
to make a voluntary choice between two courses in which the father’s
preference invariably turned the balance in the desired direction.
On one such occasion the boy replied, “Dad, I wish you would tell me
I _cannot_ do it and then I would go and do it to show you I can; but
when you tell me that it would hurt you, I just can’t do it.”
The prohibition of a proposed action arouses all the resentment of
thwarted desire and unfulfilled attainment. Such consequences may be
avoided by the suggestion of better plans, methods, or acts, concurrent
with the reasons why such change is desirable or necessary. The
substitution of other activities or another course of conduct fills
the void made by denial and satisfies his psychological requirement
of being kept busy. Every normal boy is a safety-valveless steam
boiler, stored full of dynamic energy which expends itself in constant
action--usually physical--and failure to provide for the utilization
and consumption of this energy will result in an explosion in some
form of delinquency.
Cheerful, helpful, informative, intelligent, and inspirational
suggestion is the boy’s greatest need and he will accept it willingly
from a father who is joined to him by ties of sympathetic comradeship
which are long enough to encompass his needs within their bonds.
If a father’s influence is to count for much, he should be both a chum
and a big brother to his son.
CHAPTER IX
THE HABIT OF FALSEHOOD
The continued reiteration of a fantasy produces an impression on the
brain cells akin to the impression produced by a fact. The fantasy of
imagination roams without check or hindrance by childhood until it
reaches a land which is believed to be reality. The borderland between
fiction and fact is not always clearly defined and the immature mind of
youth generally fails to distinguish the line where the one ends and
the other begins. Fantasy is as real to childhood as reality.
Who cannot recall in his own childhood an event which illustrates the
point? I was once the happy owner of a snare drum which filled a large
place in my life. But I repeatedly and proudly claimed the ownership of
two drums--a bass as well as a snare drum. My claim to the possession
of a bass drum was founded on the discovery of a board in the wall of
the barn, which, when struck with the fist, gave forth a sound which
my childish fancy decided could be only the boom of a bass drum. While
a companion beat this sounding board with his fist, I played the snare
drum in unison. I never realized that I was lying when I said I owned
two drums. I was not. The sounding board was as real a drum to the mind
of my childhood as it is unreal to the mind of my maturity.
A little lad rushed into his mother’s room exclaiming, “Mamma, a
hundred big Indians tried to catch me. I shot ’em. I killed two or
free.” He was arrayed in an Indian suit, with a toy bow and arrows.
The back yard was the battle field which his imagination filled with
blood-thirsty warriors seeking his scalp. His vivid imagination was
running riot. It made every bush and tree an aboriginal. Shooting an
arrow into a bush he shouted, “I gotcha, you bad Indian! I killed ye
dead!” until his victory was complete and he ran to share his conquest
with his mother.
Painters, while at work on a residence, climbed up and down a tall
ladder extending to the roof. When the owner of the house returned home
from business he was met by his five-year-old son who, pointing to
the ladder, said proudly, “Papa, I climbed to the top of that ladder
today.” It was physically impossible for a child of such tender years
to accomplish this feat. His statement was not true but the child had
not lied. With intense admiration he had watched the painters climb the
ladder until in boyish fancy he himself was playing this heroic and
dangerous rôle. All day long he had marveled at the feat in which he
pictured himself placing the principal part, until his obsession became
a conviction. The actual facts photographed themselves in a blur on the
poor film of his brain, already impressed with the clear-cut picture of
his imagination, until the composite result was a mental image in which
fancy predominated. If a lie is the voluntary and conscious perversion
of the truth, he did not lie. An untruth is a misstatement of fact due
to ignorance or misconception. He was not conscious of a misstatement
of fact because he stated the facts as his mental processes recalled
them. His inability to distinguish between the real and the unreal
resulted in an error for which he was not morally responsible. He
related the incident as a fact because his brain, powerfully impressed
by the fancy, believed it to be a fact; therefore the boy told it as a
fact.
Fancy is a fairy, that can hear,
Ever, the melody of nature’s voice,
And see all lovely visions that she will.
--FRANCES S. OSGOOD.
When his mental development advances to a stage where he can
differentiate clearly between fact and fancy; when the maturity of his
mind enables him to draw clearer distinction between the real and the
unreal, when, in a word, imagination is superseded by reason, then
such errors will be impossible. His mistake was mental--not moral.
Therefore, he was not culpable. I knew a loving mother who washed
out her child’s mouth with soap as punishment for a similar “lie.”
No graver injustice can be perpetrated by a parent than punishment
for such an alleged offense. It should be recognized and accepted as
an incident which is natural to mental immaturity. The thought is
expressed by Dr. G. Stanley Hall in these words: “Sometimes their fancy
is almost a visualization and develops a kind of mythopic faculty which
spins clever yarns and suggests a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer
asserts of all mental activity and of all universe itself, that all
their life is imagination.” But I hear a mother, holding up her hands
in horror, exclaiming, “I cannot let my child prevaricate! I must
punish him or the habit will become fixed.”
Her solicitude for the child’s moral welfare is as commendable as it
is necessary and her desire to prevent such incidents from becoming
a habit is praiseworthy. Her methods, only, are wrong. Instead of
punishment the child is entitled to instruction which will develop
his mentality until he can distinguish between fact and fancy. With
growth in mental stature comes coördination of ideas and a clearer
discernment of the line of demarcation between the real and the unreal,
and when the child becomes mentally able to distinguish between the
two, such misstatements of fact will be at an end. Falsehood in
young children has been characterized by Dr. Hall as “a new mental
combination independent of experience.”
In rare cases this mental fog continues, with diminishing intensity,
through maturity. Everyone knows of the man who told a story so often
that he himself finally believed it. It chiefly manifests itself in
adults in exaggeration of the qualities, abilities, or prowess of the
teller. Witness the fisherman of your acquaintance whose account of the
weight and size of his biggest fish grows with each succeeding recital.
He does not mean to lie. He thinks he is telling the truth. In the
beginning he justified his exaggeration of weight and size by doubting
the accuracy of the scale and rule by which he weighed and measured
the fish. The continued repetition of his yarn produced an impression
on his brain closely resembling actuality. He deceived himself. Pride
in his piscatorial prowess made deception easy. His error was partly
mental, partly moral, the latter being in direct ratio to the clarity
of his mental processes. It is a tremendous tribute to the mental
stability and moral discernment of a fisherman to be able to refrain,
in after years, from overstating the weight of his biggest fish.
We now consider another phase of misstatement of fact--the falsehood
of the older boy. At the age of six or seven the mental fog begins to
clear. He sees things in a truer, brighter light. The relationship
of facts to each other becomes more and more cognizable. His moral
faculties are emerging from a chaos of mental impressions. This age,
approximately, marks the birth of moral consciousness. His conception
of right and wrong takes form and begins its process of development.
At this period he begins to distinguish between fact and fancy and
as his mental processes become clarified by increasing maturity, so
in a corresponding degree his confusion of the unreal with the real
disappears. Mentality begins to dominate imagination.
What of the boy, under these conditions, who tells a lie? An inquiry
into the motives which prompt his falsehoods may clarify the problem
and afford a solution. The study of a large number of untruthful boys
has developed the fact that their motives for mendacity are few and are
usually comprehended under one class--the desire to escape punishment
for an offense. Other and lesser incentives to lying are envy,
boasting, revenge, jealousy, and imitation, but none of these is as
potent as the fear of a reprimand, a scolding, or corporal punishment.
A scolding and a whipping are both painful--one in mind, the other in
body. It is natural for one to seek to avoid pain and suffering. It is
equally certain that punishment must inevitably follow the violation
of law--whether parental law, physical law, or the law of the land.
Loading the stomach with indigestible food brings its own punishment
in the disturbance of the bodily functions. The commission of a felony
necessitates a term of imprisonment after conviction; and with equal
certainty punishment should follow the violation of parental law.
But if that punishment is unnecessarily severe or if it violates the
boy’s sense of fairness and justice, he will seek to avoid it by the
most effective weapon of defense at hand--falsehood. Nothing is more
conducive to deceit than frequent scoldings or floggings for trivial
offenses, and the elimination of corporal and unduly severe mental
punishments will remove the chief incentive to falsehood.
The remedy for the falsehoods which have their origin in the lesser
provocatives referred to above is moral suasion, a hackneyed phrase
often used and little understood. Literally it implies the persuasive
influence of moral teaching. In its broader aspect and as a cure for
lying, it comprehends the culture of moral consciousness; training
of the will; fixation of the habit of obedience; teaching the evil
results which always follow falsehood; the development of mentality
(without which there can be no comprehension of moral concepts); and
the influence of parental example in the exact and scrupulous adherence
to truth. All these combined produce the composite result called moral
suasion, which is generally effective.
CHAPTER X
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
Among the corrective measures used in child-training since time
immemorial, corporal punishment occupies a large and conspicuous place.
While such punishment is, at present, on the decline, still it is
sufficiently widespread and frequent in its application to warrant a
discussion of its effectiveness in accomplishng the ends desired, as
well as a word concerning its moral effect on the child.
The infliction of corporal punishment implies the inability of the
parent to govern the child without it. It must be predicated on the
belief of the parent in its superior merits, which causes him to
submerge its humanitarian aspects beneath its supposedly utilitarian
effectiveness, or because he is unacquainted with other methods. It
would be difficult to conceive a parent who would beat a child from
personal choice when there were other corrective methods at hand which
he believed to be of equal efficiency.
The author recalls a man of high standing in the financial
world--successful in business, but cold, stern, austere and puritanical
in his personal code, who thrashed his son, from his tenth to his
fifteenth year, frequently as often as once a week. Then the boy ran
away from home to escape the tyranny and is now a wanderer over the
earth, his heart filled with bitter hatred toward his father, while the
latter deems himself a much abused parent and his son an ungrateful
and wayward boy. At no time during the many hundred beatings which
he administered did it occur to him that bodily punishment was not
a salutary corrective; he failed to realize the futility of a means
which did not accomplish the desired results. Had an analogous problem
arisen in his business, he would quickly have discarded any plan which
so thoroughly demonstrated its uselessness. This man had a profound
and earnest desire to rear his son to perfect manhood. He adopted the
method which seemed to him best designed to accomplish that result.
Today he is a broken-hearted man grieving over his lost son. Again we
hark back to the wayward parent. “Fathers, provoke not your children to
anger lest they be discouraged.” Col. 3:21.
The average child does not rebel against authority but only against
authority which he thinks is unjustly or harshly exercised. He
invariably revolts against corporal punishment because he believes any
degree of it to be excessive. From the boy’s point of view he is a
Lilliputian whom the Gargantuan parent abuses because of greater brute
strength. A fourteen-year-old boy who was being beaten by his father
for failure to perform some chore shouted in his face, “You wouldn’t
dare do that if I was as big as you.” And the boy spoke the truth. The
father who is addicted to the corporal form of punishment is deterred,
when his son approaches maturity, as much by fear of being vanquished
in the contest as by a realization of its futility as a corrective of
the later adolescent.
This form of punishment is commonly adopted to “break the will” of
the disobedient and rebellious boy. If breaking the will of the boy
means making it conform to that of the physically stronger father, the
attempt is as ineffective as it is brutal, for acquiescence under such
circumstances never is evidence of mental consent. Servile subjection
of will is out of harmony with that growth of will-power which is
necessary to the ideal development of the adolescent.
Persistent, unjust, or excessive punishments, either of body or mind,
furnish a powerful incentive for the boy to invoke his chief means of
defense against superior force--evasion and prevarication. Such conduct
is guaranteed to produce a youthful Munchausen.
What are a boy’s means of defense against a beating which he regards,
either rightly or wrongly, as excessive or brutal? He has only
two--flight and falsehood. He knows that he is incapable of matching
physical strength with his parent. This knowledge, combined with
whatever love for the parent has not been extinguished, prevents a
contest of strength which the child realizes would be futile. Flight
is frequently out of the question because of the boy’s dependency and
his inability to earn his own living. His last means of defense is
falsehood, the use of which he justifies as his only method of escape
from unwarranted or excessive punishment. Fully conscious of the wrong
of lying he considers it the lesser of the two evils.
Similar in its effect is the nagging of children, in which mothers are
more prone to indulge than fathers. Exhibitions of constant scolding,
faultfinding, and querulous temper, interspersed with boxing of
ears, smacking of cheeks, and slapping of hands, all tend to thwart
the child’s mental and moral growth and contribute to the making of
a wayward son. Such punishment is largely mental but none the less
reprehensible because it lacks the element of physical pain. To slap
a child’s hand as a correctional measure, with the sharp word of
reproof which accompanies it, gives the child a mental instead of a
physical shock; a slap of the same degree given in a playful mood will
cause him to laugh. When a boy, especially in the adolescent period,
begins to complain of the injustice of constant nagging, scolding,
and corporal punishment, it is a danger signal which should cause
the parent to stop, look, and listen. Such conduct on the part of
the parent alienates the love and sympathy of the child, conduces to
lying, secretiveness and evasion, and is productive of truancy and the
development of the wanderlust. Its psychological effect on the parent
is the loss of self-respect which is the inevitable accompaniment of
punitive injustice.
The punitive theory of the correction of youthful offenses is archaic
and should be relegated to the Paleolithic era from whence it sprang.
To mete out punishment as such is vengeance pure and simple; an
eye-for-an-eye-and-a-tooth-for-a-tooth policy which has no place in
modern child-culture.
With our present-day scientific knowledge of the boy, as distinguished
from our personal knowledge of him in the past, we recognize the
trend of tendencies and understand the portent of symptoms which
formerly were either unnoticed or disregarded. We have brought minute
investigation, analysis, and cold logic into the solution of his
problems over which we were wont to blunder. We have made no greater
blunders in the past than those we have committed in connection with
the corrective measures which it has been the custom of certain parents
to employ. The necessity for physical punishment has been superseded by
persuasive methods based on a more accurate understanding of the boy’s
mental and moral processes and his impulses for good and bad.
Love, sympathy, and justice beget loyalty where fear fails. Moral
suasion, mental development, the cultivation of will-power, the appeal
to reason, the deprivation of liberties and privileges, rewards for
merit, the exhibition of love, insight and sympathy, the use of tact
and the honor system, all are effective substitutes for physical
chastisement.
The preponderating weight of authority among sociologists and
penologists supports the view that the attitude of the parent toward
his filial offender and of the state toward the adult misdemeanant
should be on the one hand formatory and on the other reformatory--but
never punitory.
The desire to avoid punishment which the prospective recipient regards
as unjust, whether rightly or wrongly does not matter, results in the
concoction of many ingenious stories and schemes. Again the author
draws on his own boyhood experience for an illustration. At the age
of nine I was threatened by my mother with a severe switching for an
offense the nature of which has long since been forgotten. The timely
arrival of callers postponed the dreaded event and afforded me ample
time for reflection. The anticipatory torture which I suffered during
the hour preceding their departure was greater punishment than the
actuality.
My mental processes during that hour were these: “I didn’t do anything
very bad. I don’t deserve a whipping for it. I am sorry for what I have
done and won’t do it again. It’s unfair to whip me for such a little
thing. How can I escape this unjust licking?” At last, after long and
labored mental effort, I evolved a scheme which to my youthful mind
seemed the last word in ingenuity and effectiveness; it would appeal
to her pity and give her an object lesson she would never forget. My
plan was to obtain some oatmeal from the pantry, chew it until my mouth
was filled with froth and saliva and at the first blow of punishment I
would fall to the floor in simulation of unconsciousness, frothing at
the mouth.
These alarming physical symptoms were designed to touch the wellsprings
of pity in my mother’s heart and I would thus escape this threatened
chastisement, as well as future ones. At last the callers departed and
the hour of my doom arrived. She cut two switches from a peach tree
and entered the spareroom--that chamber of horrors--and I followed
reluctantly with halting steps.
When the first blow fell, my instinctive and unconscious activity in
endeavoring to avoid it caused it to strike my ear instead of my back
at which it was aimed. “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft
agley.” The lusty yell of pain which followed the contact of the
switch with my ear caused me to eject the oatmeal; and with succeeding
yells vanished all recollection of my carefully laid plans for
pseudo-fainting.
Boys frequently show great power of invention in minimizing or evading
punishment about to be inflicted. One boy pads the seat of his trousers
to mitigate the ordeal, where the anticipated weapon is the slipper;
another puts on three undershirts where the customary instrument of
torture is the switch or rod. Still another, suffering the indignity of
being compelled to cut his own switches, has been known to exceed his
instructions and cut the castigatory branch half way through in many
places.
The spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child policy has lost its significance
in these latter days. The rod is the emblem of parental ignorance and
incapacity. To beat a defenseless child is proof of lack of ability
to govern it through moral forces. It is a humiliating admission that
one is not qualified for his job as parent. The confirmed user of the
rod is either the parent whose neglect of training or wrong methods of
training have already produced delinquency in his offspring, or the
parent who believes that a liberal application of the birch will atone
for his ignorance on the subject of boy-training. To all other parents
the resort to the rod is as unnecessary as it is abhorrent.
The final question remains: Should the rod ever be used, and, if so,
under what circumstances? When lack of training or poor training has
produced delinquency in the boy and all other corrective measures have
failed--as they usually will fail when applied too late--then corporal
punishment, if not carried to the degree of brutality, may be attempted
as a last resort before confinement in the reform school or house of
detention.
I have profound pity for the fathers who expend less gray matter in the
training of their sons than they do in the training of their hunting
dogs. Give each the same thoughtful, intelligent, patient training and
the boy will surpass the dog in docility, obedience, and understanding.
With better knowledge of the boy and his psychology, and with better
trained parents, the necessity for the use of the rod has disappeared.
“Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will
not depart from it.” Prov. 22:6.
CHAPTER XI
THE CIGARETTE HABIT
The widespread use of tobacco has given rise to an equally wide
discussion as to its effects on the human organism. Medical men are
divided into hostile camps by their diversity of opinion as to the
effects of nicotine on the adult. The subject has engaged the attention
of reformers, educators, physical directors, scientists and physicians
for many generations. Without attempting an exhaustive discussion of
the subject, the author quotes the following from Dr. Clouston, an
eminent English physician, as to the effect of tobacco upon the adult
male:
“The use of tobacco has become the rule rather than the exception
among the grown men of Europe and America and of some parts of Asia.
If its use is restricted to full-grown men, if only good tobacco is
used, not of too great strength, and if it is not used to excess, then
there are no scientific proofs that it has any injurious effects, if
there is no idiosyncrasy against it. Speaking generally, it exercises
a soothing influence when the nervous system is in any way irritable.
It tends to calm and continuous thinking, and in many men promotes
the digestion of food. To those good results there are, however,
exceptions. It sometimes sets up a very strong desire for its excessive
use; this often passing into a morbid craving which leads to excess and
hurt. Used in such excessive quantity tobacco acts injuriously on the
heart, weakens digestion, and causes congestion of the throat as well
as hindering mental action. In many people its use tends towards a
desire for alcohol as well. I have repeatedly seen persons of a nervous
temperament where the two excesses in tobacco and alcohol were linked
together. Tobacco, properly used, may, in some cases, undoubtedly be
made a mental hygienic.”
Notwithstanding the insufficient scientific data available as to the
results of nicotine on mature men, there is a strong belief on the
part of numerous physicians and others that its effect is deleterious.
There is no diversity of opinion, however, as to the injury wrought
by nicotine on the morals, mind, and body of the adolescent boy.
Authorities who have given the subject exhaustive investigation
and careful thought are unanimous in their conclusions that the
use of tobacco in any form before maturity is injurious. Physical
deterioration as a result of tobacco and especially of cigarettes
has been conclusively demonstrated by measurements and tests of
large numbers of young men in colleges, which show beyond question
that physical growth is stunted; lung capacity, without which an
athlete cannot achieve distinction, is lessened; the nervous system is
irritated and the heart action is depressed. The lungs are rendered
susceptible to pulmonary and tubercular infection and the mental
development of the boy receives a serious check. Such physical and
mental influences cannot fail in producing moral defects as well.
Dr. George L. Meylan of Columbia University has compiled some
interesting data from his observations of a large number of college
students covering the three and one-half or four years of their
undergraduate life at age approximately of seventeen to twenty at
entrance and twenty-one to twenty-four at graduation. The following
instructive table prepared by him shows the age when smokers acquired
the habit:
+---------------------------------------------+
| Age | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
+--------+---+---+---+----+----+----+----+----+
| Number | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 11 |
+---------------------------------------------+
+---------------------------------------------+
| Age | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
+----------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
| Number | 11 | 18 | 30 | 23 | 16 | 0 | 1 |
+---------------------------------------------+
It will be observed that the largest number of boys contracted the
habit at age seventeen, with ages sixteen and eighteen next in point of
numbers. Few boys of the one hundred and fifteen observed in the above
table began the habit before the fourteenth year, the age near which
adolescence begins. Dr. Meylan reached the following conclusions based
on many years of medical examination of boys and young men and his
experience in teaching hygiene:
“1. All scientists are agreed that the use of tobacco by adolescents is
injurious; parents, teachers, and physicians should strive earnestly to
warn youths against its use.
“2. There is no scientific evidence that the moderate use of tobacco
by healthy mature men produces any beneficial or injurious physical
effects that can be measured.
“3. There is an abundance of evidence that tobacco produces injurious
effects on (a) certain individuals suffering from various nervous
affections; (b) persons with an idiosyncrasy against tobacco; (c) all
persons who use it excessively.
“4. It has been shown conclusively in this study and also by Mr. Clarke
that the use of tobacco by college students is closely associated with
idleness, lack of ambition, lack of application and low scholarship.”
Dr. Jay W. Seaver of Yale University has expressed the following
opinion as the result of his examination of thousands of university
students:
“The effect of nicotine on the growth is very measurable, and the
following figures are presented as a fairly satisfactory demonstration
of the extent of the interference with growth that may be expected in
boys from sixteen to twenty-five years of age, when they are believed
to have reached full maturity. For purposes of comparison the men
composing a class in Yale have been divided into three groups. The
first is made up of those who do not use tobacco in any form; the
second consists of those who have used tobacco for at least a year of
the college course; the third group includes the irregular users. A
compilation of the anthropometric data on this basis shows that during
the period of undergraduate life, which is essentially three and a half
years, the first group grows in weight 10.4 per cent. more than the
second, and 6.6 per cent. more than the third; in girth of chest the
first group grows 26.7 per cent. more than the second, and 23 per cent,
more than the third; in capacity of lungs the first group gains 77.5
per cent. more than the second, and 49.5 per cent. more than the third.”
The figures quoted above furnish a powerful and convincing argument
against the use of tobacco in any form by the person who has not
attained maturity. The cigarette is generally considered the most
pernicious form in which tobacco can be used and this is the form in
which boys generally begin its use. Both before and after puberty
the boy is imitative of his elders. “The boy apes the man” and the
desire to appear “manly” in the eyes of his companions is one of the
strongest incentives to acquire the habit. As smoking is common among
men, he seeks to acquire this evidence of masculinity by adopting its
semblance. It possesses an insidious attraction in its daintiness and
apparent harmlessness. The phenomenon of combustion, the ascending
ribbon of smoke which vanishes to nothingness, the cohesiveness of
the ash, the experiment of blowing smoke rings in the air and the
curiosity to learn the effect of smoking on the individual, all are
powerful incitements to the inquisitive mind of a boy. The cigarette
habit is usually contracted during the period of adolescence, or even
earlier, when the organs, glands, tissues, and muscles of his body
are in a formative stage of development. It requires no corroboration
from medical experts to convince the man of average intelligence that
such a powerful narcotic as nicotine cannot be beneficial to growth
under these conditions. Common sense as well as expert opinion join
in condemning the nicotine drug habit of children. You will find
nicotine classified in pharmacopœias as a drug whose effects are
somewhat similar to those of opium and morphine. From 3 to 8 per cent.
of tobacco is composed of nicotine, of which 50 to 60 per cent. is
inhaled in smoking, the remainder being consumed in combustion.
The use of tobacco in the cigar or the pipe is less objectionable
than in the cigarette for many reasons. It is the almost universal
custom of those addicted to the cigarette to inhale the smoke, which
is the exception with the pipe and cigar smoker. But nicotine is not
the only poison generated in the cigarette even where tobacco is not
combined with opium or other drugs used to contribute to its flavor
and aroma; the combustion of tobacco with the rice paper in which it
is rolled makes a compound which is neither tobacco smoke nor paper
smoke, but an alkaloid known as acrolein, “the name of which is known
to all scientists and the smell of which is known to everyone.” Another
injurious product of cigarette combustion is carbonic oxide. These two
products of the cigarette are far more virulent than tobacco smoke.
They enter the blood through the mucous membranes of the mouth,
throat, bronchial tubes, and lungs and act as powerful depressives on
the heart. Cigarette poisoning manifests itself in lung and throat
irritation, restlessness, nervousness, petulance, inability to
concentrate thought, and depression of the nervous system.
The effect is not only physical but moral. The keen sense of
discrimination between right and wrong is blunted and the finer moral
conceptions become obtused. The highest scholarship in our colleges and
universities is attained by men who are non-smokers. The famous college
athletes have a smaller proportion of smokers than those who have not
achieved distinction in athletics. If these facts are true of college
men approaching maturity, they will be still more apparent in younger
boys. Unfortunately, there has been no scientific investigation along
these lines among boys in our secondary schools. But the head of one
of our leading preparatory schools is authority for the statement
that tobacco is the bane of his school and that more boys break down
in health and are sent home from its influence than from any other.
A recognition of the evil results of cigarette smoking by minors is
crystallized in the enactment of laws in more than a dozen states
against selling cigarettes to minors, as well as making it an offense
for adolescents under specified ages to smoke cigarettes on the streets.
The records of juvenile and criminal courts disclose the fact that
the cigarette fiends furnish 90 per cent. of their young criminals.
Dr. George F. Butler of Chicago gives this testimony as to the moral
weakening of the boy from the cigarette habit: “In my work some years
ago at the Chicago police stations and later as county physician in
the detention hospital I found that almost without exception the young
criminal, dement or delinquent, was a cigarette fiend. I am forced to
believe that this habit has largely to do with these mental and moral
infirmities.”
The boy at the rear end of a lighted cigarette has little chance of
obtaining a position from a business man. Even the telltale yellowish
discoloration of the fingers and the cigarette stench of his breath
give sufficient warning for the employer to inform the applicant that
he is not wanted. It takes a strong body and a clear mind to succeed
in competitive business. The boy handicapped in the race of life by
the cigarette habit is in the same condition as the sprinter who is
hopelessly handicapped in a hundred-yard dash; neither has any chance
of winning. John V. Farwell, the Chicago merchant, is quoted as saying:
“I would as lief employ a boy who steals sheep as one who smokes
cigarettes. One is no more to be trusted than the other.” To the same
effect is this warning of a well-known English physician: “A boy who
early smokes is rarely known to make a man of much energy and character
and he generally lacks physical and mental as well as moral energy.”
This subject is big with importance for the boy’s future. It is one of
the great boy-problems and it should be discussed frankly by father
and son before puberty, soon after which period so many boys acquire
the habit. It may be difficult for the father, with a cigar in his
mouth, to persuade his son that tobacco is injurious, but whether the
father is a smoker or not, a thorough discussion of the subject in all
its aspects is sure to prove beneficial. As the boy at this age is in
the hero-worship period and as his heroes in early adolescence are
always athletes, an appeal to his innate longing to attain physical
perfection and athletic distinction will be found more potent than
the appeal for mental or moral perfection, although the latter should
not be neglected. The additional grounds of abstinence from motives
of personal purity and self-respect have their effect, although the
argument that he should not needlessly cause annoyance or discomfort
to others has little weight with a boy prior to the reflective period.
If such warning is given to the boy before he contracts the habit it
will usually prove effective. Some parents conclude their instruction
with the statement that the son, on attaining his physical maturity at
approximately twenty-four years of age--when the danger of nicotine
poisoning on the growing boy has passed--may then make his own decision
as to whether he will or will not smoke.
In conclusion a word of suggestion is offered as to the means which
should be employed with boys who have already contracted the habit.
Dr. H. Krebs of Chicago, Secretary of the Anti-Cigarette League, has
used in his practice a simple remedy for the cigarette habit which is
reputed to be of great effectiveness. Its base is the chemical reaction
of a weak solution of silver nitrate with nicotine, which creates an
intensely disagreeable taste in the mouth. After the smoker has rinsed
his mouth with this solution and draws in a whiff of cigarette smoke,
the chemical effect of the nicotine in combination with the solution
produces such a nauseating taste that further smoking for that day is
impossible. The treatment should be protracted until desire has waned
and will-power has become reëstablished.
CHAPTER XII
BOY GANGS
Boys are as gregarious as sheep. Their desire to herd together and have
a leader is one of the requisites of play, a most important factor in
their educational development. The call of the wild to you is not half
so loud as the call of the lot to your boy. It is as natural for boys
to run in gangs as it is for minnows to run in schools; youth calls to
youth. There they find others possessing the same viewpoint, tastes,
desires, ambitions, and occupations as their own. To the active boy the
gang is a democracy made up of those of his own kind in which he is a
free citizen without paternal or maternal restraint. In his new world
there is no querulous nor uncomprehending adult to shout repressive
commands directed at conduct or action. All is as wild and free as his
own wild nature.
There are two classes of organization to which boys belong--those
formed by themselves without supervision; and those formed and
supervised by adults for them. In the former class are the street
and alley gangs, the “Dirty Dozen,” the “Noisy Nine,” the “Pirates’
Crew,” the scrub baseball team, the “Swipers” (organized for petty
depredations), the lot loafers, school fraternities, school “crowds,”
“bunches” or cliques, and other loose organizations whose only bond
of cohesion is some common interest. The latter class comprises boys’
clubs; Boy Scout patrols; Sunday-school classes; nature-study clubs;
baseball, football, and basketball teams under the direction of a
coach; and numerous other boy organizations having a common interest,
which are controlled by an adult.
The gang spirit is strongest between the tenth and fifteenth years and
it is at this period that boys spontaneously form themselves into a
gang. The leader of the gang is the member who is best equipped for
the position by reason of age, courage, physical prowess, and inherent
qualities of leadership and the selection is never made by formal vote
but by tacit recognition of the leader’s superiority and by willing
obedience to his commands.
A place of meeting or “hang out” is essential to every gang. It may be
a room behind a shop, an attic, a stable loft, a dugout, or a shack
built of old boards, scrap tin, and paper. Such shelter supplies the
place for their meetings, houses their communal property, and satisfies
their atavistic desire for cover, privacy, and security. They exhibit
a strong sense of proprietorship in such a retreat. It is all their own
and is guarded from intrusion by other boys with all the physical force
necessary to accomplish this result.
The morale of an unsupervised gang (just as of a mob) is never so high
as the individual morale of its constituents--while in the supervised
gang it is higher. The gang will steal milk bottles from a back
door-step, loot a fruit stand, or smash a window, when no individual in
it would commit the same acts.
The love of excitement and adventure and the desire to be “doing
something”--including the joy of being chased by the police without
capture--are the motives which prompted a certain gang to grease street
car rails and to derail cars by placing spikes in the switches; none
of which depredations would have been committed had the interest
of the members been directed to legitimate activities and sports
which would occupy their leisure time and satisfy their need of
physical activity and mental occupation. Such offenses are unnatural
manifestations of natural tendencies--exuberance run wild, because
unrestrained. The contest of matching wits with the police is thrilling
in its possibilities for adventure. Hours of time are occupied in
planning depredations and much ingenuity is afterwards shown in evading
detection and capture. Their common danger is the bond which knits them
together. They have a code of honor--exhibited principally in their
dealings with one another--the first and chief rule of which is that no
member shall “snitch” on any other member of the gang. And woe betide
the gangster who violates this cardinal principle! He may confess as to
himself, but under no circumstances may he include the others, under
the certain penalty of a beating--or worse still, in the eyes of the
boy--ostracism by the gang. Psychologically considered, this trait is a
manifestation of loyalty gone wrong. It is as unwise as it is useless
to attempt to stamp it out, when it can and should be directed into its
proper channel of manifestation in which it becomes one of the highly
prized virtues.
The great mass of male offenders haled to our juvenile courts are
members of uncontrolled gangs and only rarely is there seen a member of
a controlled gang. Street and alley gangs are the training schools for
delinquent boys and from them is graduated the juvenile criminal. The
arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of such offenders will not work
their reformation. It can be accomplished only through the parent on
whom the duty naturally devolves, or, in the event of parental default,
through the Judge of the Juvenile Court, by patiently pointing out the
evil results of such lawlessness to themselves as well as to others,
by the stimulation of their pride and honor, and most of all through
diverting the gang’s activities, by parent or probation officer, to
lawful channels such as the school, office, workshop, athletic field,
and supervised society.
Here may be seen the beneficent results flowing from the application
of positive suggestions for employments which will supersede those
of harmful import. The inhibition of a lawless activity without the
substitution of a lawful one to fill the void thus created has always
proven resultless. The gang spirit is inherent in boy-nature and can
never be suppressed. No one who understands the boy would attempt to
suppress it. Objection should not be made that your boy belongs to a
gang--and he does belong to one of some sort--but only to the kind
of gang with which he is associated. It is your concern whether he
belongs to a Boy Scout gang or a Dirty Dozen gang. The good gang should
be encouraged; it is good because it is supervised; and the bad gang
should be converted into a good one by adult direction. The recognition
of the psychologic necessity for gangdom has changed the former
prohibition against gang association to the encouragement of the boy to
join a clean crowd engaged in clean activities. This innate tendency
to gangdom furnishes the cue for his reclamation. Supervised gangs
are the tongs by which many boys have been pulled from the fires of
delinquency. They furnish the means for his reformation as well as for
his formation. It is an everlasting stigma on the parent that his son
needs reformation. If the boy’s formation has been properly nurtured
there will be no need for his reformation. The supervised gang forms
the normal boy and reforms the delinquent boy, while the unsupervised
gang unforms both.
Recognizing this intuitive tendency of boys to organize and maintain
gangs, in whatever multifarious forms it may take, and the pernicious
influence of unguided and unrestrained organizations on his moral and
physical life, it is incumbent on parents and those standing _in loco
parentis_ to supply him with an organization which will satisfy the
gang spirit in his nature. A failure in this regard will drive the
boy to association with the unsupervised gang which is frequently the
school for dishonesty, untruthfulness, bullying, profanity, unclean
speech, disregard of the personal and property rights of others,
cigarette smoking, and social impurity. The unclean gang exerts a
powerful pull toward criminality, while the clean gang stands as a
barrier between the boy and delinquency.
Your boy is a natural gangster, therefore encourage him to join a clean
gang.
CHAPTER XIII
THE BOY SCOUT INFLUENCE
What magic there is in the name of Scout! It calls up before the mind’s
eye the vision of a buckskin-clad pioneer, inured to the hardships of
the trail and endowed with the virtues of strength, fortitude, clear
thinking, and courage which boys admire so much; one whose everyday
life is made up of a series of thrilling adventures and hairbreadth
escapes. Is it to be wondered at that the hero-worshiping boy, still in
the semi-savage state, should desire to emulate such a romantic figure
in our national life?
The organization known as the Boy Scouts of America is a national
movement, rather than an organization, whose primary object is
character-building. It is non-sectarian and non-military. It furnishes
the adolescent boy with facilities for the expression of his growing
body, mind, and soul and inspires the virtues of patriotism, chivalry,
honor, courtesy, loyalty, self-respect, faithfulness, cheerfulness,
thoughtfulness, and obedience.
There are three classes of Scouts; the tenderfoot, the second-class
Scout and the First-class Scout, advancement being made according to
the proficiency shown by examination. Suitable badges awarded for each
class are prized as great honors and furnish the incentive to further
progress in Scoutcraft. The reader is referred to the official handbook
of the organization for a detailed statement of the many subjects
included in their curriculum. These subjects cover practically the
entire range of an adolescent’s interests and activities apart from
the home, the school, and the church.
Not the least important among the many requirements of the scout is the
good turn or kindness which he must do for someone every day without
financial reward. The performance of the daily good turn develops
courtesy, gallantry and social consciousness and fixes in his mind a
realization of the fact that he is one of the threads in the social
fabric of humanity. The boy-training of today, whether parental or
organizational, should emphasize the importance of service to others,
and the boy in whom this altruistic idea is grounded will not give his
parents great cause for worry. If this organization had no requirement
other than the daily good turn, that fact alone would be sufficient
excuse for its existence. These samples of good turns, taken from
the records of a Scout troop, are as varied as the natures and
opportunities of the boys themselves and afford an interesting study in
adolescent psychology:
1. I helped a blind man ’cross the street.
2. A steam roller was passing and frightened a horse, I held the horse
until the roller went by.
3. Fed a starving cat.
4. I gave a dime to a orfun asilam.
5. Picked up a broken bottle from the road so it wouldn’t cut a horse’s
foot or an automobile tire.
6. Gave a lady my seat in a street car.
7. I helped my mother clean out the garret.
8. I gave a nickel to a poor lame hobo.
9. I loaned your chauffeur a dime when he was broke.
10. I picked up a girl’s slate in school when she dropped it and
sharpened her pencil.
11. Helped an old lady with a lot of bundles get on a street car.
12. Put out a fire in the weeds in a lot.
13. Ran after a girl’s hat which blew off and brought it back to her.
14. A team hitched to an ice wagon was walking down the street and I
climbed in the back way and stopped them and drove them to the police
station. Just then the driver came running up for his team and cussed
me for driving them off, when I was only doing him a good turn.
15. I found a borde in the street with a nail stickken up and I threw
it in a vacunt lot and pushed the nail in the ground.
16. I uncanned a dog (i. e., removed can from dog’s tail).
17. I build a bird house in my back yard.
18. I licked a big boy for licking a little boy.
19. I run errands for my mother when I ot to have bin playin ball.
20. Took some pervisions to a pore fambly near the gas wurks.
21. Helped a boy with his arithmetic lessons.
22. Showed a man where Washington street was.
23. I stopped two kids from fighting.
24. When my mother was sick, I worked all day helping her on Sattiday.
25. I went and staid with a sick boy and cheered him up.
26. I found a dog which was lost and I ast Scotty who belonged to the
dog and he sed he thot Mr. Edwards up the street, so I took the dog
back to Mr. Edwards and he sed thank you and offured me a quarter and I
sed Boy Scouts do not take tips.
27. I swore off smokin cigerets.
28. I turned in my wages to my mother.
29. I cleaned up the alley back of the house.
30. I helped a little girl pick up a bag of potatoes when the bag
busted and made another kid quit laffing at her.
31. I went for a can of beer for Mrs. Schwartzberger.
It is evident that the last good turn was performed by a slum boy who
had recently joined the troop.
It requires no student of psychology to recognize the different
developments of moral concepts shown in these replies. Some betray the
first signs of the dawning of moral consciousness, while others show a
keen appreciation of altruistic ideals, the result of ennobling home
influence and proper training.
The performance of the daily good turn develops the faculty for the
formulation of ideals. A new relationship to duty is thus fixed and
the boy’s moral nature is builded, slowly but surely, until one can
visualize the completed character of the future. Of all this, the boy
himself is wholly unconscious.
The boy knows little, if anything, of the principles or purposes of the
Boy Scouts before he becomes a member. For that matter, the average
parent has made no great effort to inform himself on the objects, scope
and workings of the organization, as too frequently he assumes it to be
a method devised for his son’s amusement, which will relieve the parent
of the duty of personal supervision while the boy is so occupied. He
regards it as a species of boy entertainment, wholly disassociated from
its educational and ethical import.
The youth knows only two things about Boy Scouts, which he has learned
from observation--that they wear uniforms and go on hikes. Both of
these make a powerful appeal to his imagination and interest. The
uniform and the parade satisfy the spectacular and dramatic needs of
his nature and the hikes gratify his savage and atavistic tendencies
which prompt him to seek the wilds and live temporarily as did his
remote ancestor--the primeval man. He joins the organization to satisfy
these primitive desires and thus effects a return to the simple life,
which furnishes, to the city youth especially, an antidote for the
injury wrought by our increasingly complex civilization and hurried
methods of living.
He does not dream nor care that the fundamental purpose of the
organization is character-building; indeed, if he were informed of this
fact, his interest would probably wane. He dislikes character-building
in the abstract, but is intensely interested in concrete scout
activities which silently and inevitably produce character.
The system of teaching a boy ethics and morals by lecturing him or by
feeding him with tracts which hold up to view the abstract beauties of
morality has long since been thrown into the discard as archaic and
useless. It is one of the relics of unscientific training--Puritanical,
wasteful, inefficient. The keen discernment of the boy’s mind sees the
dry bones of such methods. The boy is red-blooded and alive and wants
live methods. Some of our forefathers truly believed they had found
the secret of boy-training in the cultivation in him of a sense of
self-abasement, personal unworthiness, and insignificance which they
fostered by requiring the boy to sing hymns which likened him to a poor
worm groveling in the dust. I have never yet met a boy who admitted his
relationship to the worm--apart from his compulsory expression of the
sentiment in song.
The Scout idea is to get back to elemental things by contact with the
earth, the ozone of the open, the wild life of the forest and stream.
These things not only make him a strong, healthy animal, but teach him
the joy of living and how to live. They train the boy to “Be Prepared”
for all the various contingencies of life and thus exemplify the motto
of the organization.
Scout camps and hikes are a school for training the imagination in the
legends of the woods and of animal life, which are inspired by the
mystery of the camp fire and the glorious solitude of the starry night,
faintly stirred by the wind in the tree tops. The gleam of wavering
lights from the camp fire transforms the faces of the circling scouts
into animated sprites. Ascending flames split the darkness into dancing
shadows which people the surrounding woods with living myths and
fables. A kaleidoscopic riot of color mounts upward, painting luminous
images on the retina as it sketches in chromatic outline the heroes of
fantasy. It is such things which inspire the poetry of life. Nothing
furnishes such stimulus to the imagination as the camp fire. It calls
into play all the mystery and mysticism of the human mind; it discovers
the hidden wellsprings of romance, legend and adventure; it inspires
the art of the story-teller as nothing else can do and furnishes a
perfect stage setting for the dramatic tale which unobtrusively carries
its own moral. It is here that the _raconteur_ can weave his tale from
the warp of adventure and the woof of romance until the resulting
mantle of heroism fits every boyish auditor. Deeds of daylight loom
large with valor against the background of night. The potent influence
of such surroundings for driving home lasting impressions on the
imaginative and sensitive mind of youth has never been equaled.
Around the nightly camp-fire “council” are recounted the events of the
day; awards for merit are given; songs breathing the martial spirit
which boys love so well are sung; the Scout Master’s story of heroism
and adventure is heard with eager ears and is followed invariably by
frank comments indicating the manner of its reception; finally a drowsy
song like “My Old Kentucky Home,” reflecting the somnolent spirit of
the lengthening hours, brings the “council” to a close; soon the soft
tones of “taps” are heard droning from the bugle and, rolled in their
blankets, the little tourists quickly journey to slumberland.
Scout associations foster _esprit de corps_ and team work, as well as
a recognition of relative rights and duties which is in the highest
degree cultural. The appreciation of property rights is cultivated to
such an extent that a scout will not willfully damage the property of
another. Not the least beneficent influence exerted by the organization
is its inculcation of obedience, discipline, loyalty, truthfulness,
chivalry, courtesy, respect for women, helpfulness to others,
patriotism, and manliness. These qualities are unconsciously and
unobtrusively impressed on his plastic character during the formative
age until they become a component part of it. A scout is taught that he
is always “on honor,” and that his word is accepted unreservedly, as
the truth. The youth feels more needs than the home, school, and church
can supply--the need for companionship, play, sports, adventure, and
romance. His gregarious and social instincts must be fed by association
with those of his own age; his love of adventure and physical
expression must be gratified by the clean activities of the forest,
the stream, the ball field; his love of romance needs find expression
in the extraordinary experiences of woodcraft, pathfinding and cave
exploration; and his love of play must be satiated by rough sports,
games, and athletics through which he attains his physical, mental, and
ethical development. It is an application of Froebel’s epoch-making
theory of training and developing boys by means of play. It is the
utilization of his “wild period” by systematic direction and oversight
for the upbuilding of character and manhood.
The Scout movement is playing a huge joke on the boy in supplying him,
under the guise of fun, play, sport, and adventure with work, study,
and developmental activities whose real import is the upbuilding of
character, mind, and body; but this ulterior motive is never suspected
by the boy until after these results have been accomplished. If the
instinctive tendencies to companionship with those of his own age are
not normally gratified by membership in a supervised gang they will
find expression in his association with an unsupervised gang with the
evil results which inevitably flow from such association. The Boy Scout
organization is the ideal gang because it satisfies his natural desires
for gangdom while it is silently and surely building both body and
character.
“Of all present-day organizations for the improvement and happiness
of normal boyhood,” Dr. G. S. Hall has written, “the institution
of the Boy Scouts is built at once on the soundest psychology and
the shrewdest insight into boy-nature. The Scout Patrol is simply
a boy’s gang, systematized, overseen, affiliated with other like
bodies, made efficient and interesting, as boys alone could never
make it, and yet everywhere, from top to bottom, essentially a gang.
Other organizations have adopted gang features. Others have built
themselves around various gang elements. The Boy Scout Patrol alone
is the gang. The whole Boy Scout movement is a shrewd and highly
successful attempt to take the natural, instinctive, spontaneous boys’
society, to add nothing to what is already there, but deliberately to
guide the boy into getting completely just that for which he blindly
gropes. The obvious answer to the whole gang problem, therefore, is
this: Turn your gang into a Boy Scout Patrol.” A troop of Scouts is
only a denatured gang whose activities have been changed from vicious
to character-building tendencies, a result which is accomplished by
the systematic, helpful, and inspirational guidance of the Scout
Master along the lines of the Scout curriculum. The potent influence
of activities disguised as play, which produce physical and moral
betterment, is nowhere more apparent than in this organization. The
things for which the unsupervised gang was blindly seeking have been
completely furnished by the supervised Scout Patrol. Judge Edward
Porterfield of the Kansas City Juvenile Court paid this tremendous
tribute to the influence of the Boy Scouts: “If every boy in the city
would join, the gangs would disappear, the juvenile court would soon
be a stranger to the youth, and we would rear a generation of men
that would not require much police protection. I have never had a
boy scout in my court and there are twelve hundred of them in Kansas
City.” President-emeritus Charles W. Eliot of Harvard stated in a
recent address: “I feel sure that nothing but good will come from the
educational or training qualities of the Boy Scout movement as a whole.
It is setting an example that our whole public-school system ought to
follow.”
The scheme supplies the companionship of those of his own age and
the opportunity, under competent supervision, for the exercise of
physical, mental, and manual activities which make for his betterment.
Its effectiveness lies in the universality of its appeal; it touches
the life of every boy regardless of social status or religious
affiliations; it gets a moral grip on boys of every phase of
temperamental condition; and its moral virus gets under a boy’s hide
like a hypodermic injection.
The universality of its appeal to boyhood is shown by its membership
which is recruited from all ranks of society--from the slum to the
palace. It touches the boy on every side of his manifold interests.
The best proof that the organization is founded on correct psychologic
principles is its popularity with the boys themselves and the splendid
caliber of the boys who are graduated from it. Its strong appeal is
grounded in its harmony with boy-nature. Without understanding his
mental processes or the psychology of his preferences, the boy knows
what he likes and what he dislikes. He loves the Boy Scouts because it
is an organization which satisfies the cravings of his boy heart. One
Scout expressed the thought in these words, “Scouts are always doin’
things and they have the most fun.” Always doin’ things! What a world
of psychological truth is crystallized in this youthful statement! It
drops the plummet in the wellsprings of truth. Continuous action is
the key to his evolution and by it the budding boy blossoms into the
mature man. In a word, the entire Scout plan consists of crowding the
boy’s life so full of agreeable activities of useful and ethical import
that he has no time for noxious things. The busy boy is the best boy.
The Scout influence is one of the most powerful factors for good in the
boy’s life and is the most potent supplemental agency which has yet
been devised for adolescent development.
We hear much, in these latter days, of business and industrial
efficiency. Experts in this line are able to systematize a business,
a railroad, or a factory so that a given amount of labor will produce
a maximum of results. Even such unskilled labor as shoveling is
susceptible of scientific improvement. An efficiency expert employed by
a great corporation decreased the number of movements of ore shovelers
one-half, with a corresponding increase in tonnage of ore handled, and
without an increase in the expenditure of physical energy.
It is equally important that efficiency methods should be employed in
the training of boys. Scientific methods applied to boy-culture will
increase the quality of the output as well as make the work easier for
the boy and the parent. The Boy Scout movement is an efficiency method
of scientific boy-training in mass. It supplements perfectly the work
of the home, the school, the church. It furnishes a kind of training
which none of these supplies and in making this statement I do not
undervalue the inestimable influence of these institutions on the life
of the boy today.
The home is the primary and most important agency for the boy’s general
training, the school for mental development, and the church for moral
and religious culture; but in the wide field of boy-nature not reached
by these agencies the Boy Scout organization directs his development
from the child into the man.
The organization has passed the experimental stage and is now on
the highway of proved success. Thousands of boys are clamoring for
admission which must be denied until Scout Masters can be enlisted and
trained to take charge of troops. Here is a wonderful field for social
service, ripe for harvest, awaiting the man who loves boys and who
recognizes his duty in having some part in raising the standard of our
future citizenship.
CHAPTER XIV
JUVENILE READING
Next to environment and companions, books exercise the most powerful
influence for good or evil on the life of the boy. His companionship
with books is as intimate as his companionship with playmates and
usually occupies as large a portion of his life, especially after
puberty. The value of literature is two-fold: it molds the character
and develops the taste, both of which processes are closely related. It
is natural for the boy to want “something to read” and this desire is
not satisfied by schoolbooks, biographies, or histories. History which
is a mere recital of facts, names, and dates in which the human element
is little emphasized becomes wearisome and unprofitable. The boy
voluntarily reads for entertainment; he studies because he is compelled
to.
It is, of course, apparent that the child’s reading should be
suited to his mental and psychological requirements. He begins with
nursery rhymes and jingles and then follow fairy tales, folklore and
wonder-tales told by the parent. These serve as an introduction to
tales and stories of mythology, which are in turn stepping stones to
history and biography. At the age of nine or ten he begins to develop a
taste for fiction, tales of adventure, chivalry, and daring experience
which exploit the virtues of some hero, on which he feeds for a number
of years.
Still another class of reading not denominated literature is contained
in the so-called “useful” books which are purely informative and
educational in character. Shortly before the “teen age,” when he is
interested in experimentation and construction, he seeks books giving
information about gardening, handicrafts, mechanics, physics, magic,
and manual training, the latter usually accompanied by plans and
diagrams for making such things as sleds, boats, model aëroplanes, and
electrical apparatus.
The boy whose reading has been properly directed graduates from tales
of adventure into the better forms of literature, including standard
fiction, imaginative narration, history, historical novels, essays, and
poetry. Few children, unaided, develop a taste for good literature; it
must be cultivated by judicious direction. The best literature is as
potent in its influence for good as trashy reading is for evil. The
boy’s love for the thrilling, exciting story of adventure beyond the
realms of his own experience leads him to devour the so-called “nickel
library” and “dime novel,” which may be easily procured from certain
news-stands and provides his private reading of which the parent knows
nothing.
These paper-back pamphlets are usually brilliantly illuminated in
colors to attract the eye and exhibit a thrilling picture illustrating
some incident in the story. A few of the titles of these “yellow”
books afford ample evidence of their contents and influence. I recall
through the aid of boyhood recollection such titles as “Hobo Harry,
the Boy Tramp”; “Reckless Rob, the Red Ranger of the Rockies”; “Dare
Devil Dick, the Boy Bandit”; “The Jesse James Weekly,” devoted to the
exploits of that outlaw gang; “Slippery Sam, the Boy Detective,” and
others of that ilk. The widespread demand for such stories is shown by
their circulation which now exceeds a million copies annually.
In all these lurid tales, the detective, outlaw, vagabond, adventurer,
bandit, or tramp is made the hero. Their pernicious effect on the boy’s
character results from idealizing the reputed virtues of the criminal
or semi-criminal hero until the lad’s moral sense is debased; and this
is quite apart from the vitiating effect on the boy’s literary taste
which is the inevitable result of feeding on these potboilers and
penny-a-liners. Such reading matter may be instantly recognized by the
parent from its outward dress and should be as promptly banished.
But not all trashy reading bears such open and extraneous evidence of
its character. Another equally vicious class of books appears in the
outward form of good fiction, bound in boards, with attractive titles
and covers, and sometimes written by authors of well-known reputations.
They consist of stories that fascinate the boy with their thrills but
inspire false ideals of life even though they do not always possess
the fault of openly idealizing vice; the story of the cabin boy
who advanced to captain through some impossible deed of heroism or
adventitious circumstance, without the training or experience necessary
to qualify him for the position; the story of the boy who achieved
honor and distinction by trickery or sharp practice; the story of
the hero who gained wealth by some get-rich-quick method, all are as
vicious in their suggestion and influence as the “nickel library.” And
the poison of such literature is as subtle as it is fatal. Mr. E. W.
Mumford is authority for the following statement: “Many a parent, who
would promptly take John out to the woodshed if he learned that the boy
was collecting dime novels, himself frequently adds to John’s library a
book quite as bad.”
The author once requested a twelve-year-old boy friend to tell him
about the best book he had ever read. Here is his reply: “It is a story
about two boys who went to Florida in an aëroplane to explore the
Everglades. They got lost in the swamps and jungles and were captured
by a tribe of wild Indians. These Indians had also captured a little
white girl who had wandered away from her parents. One night, the boys
killed nearly all the Indians with tomahawks as they slept and escaped
with the little girl in the aëroplane followed by a volley of poisoned
arrows which just grazed ’em but didn’t hit ’em.” The impossibility of
the situations, the false ideals presented, the mock heroics and the
lack of literary quality in the story all were unnoticed by the boy.
He saw only a youthful hero engaged in a thrilling adventure which
culminated in a rescue of chivalric idealism.
The danger from such books is even greater than from the “nickels”
because, coming in the guise of good fiction, their appeal is more
insidious. The average boy knows, either by intuition or by direct
statement of the fact, that the “blood-and-thunder nickel” is
prohibited by his parents; hence he reads them in the barn or in the
privacy of his room and hides them meantime where they will be safe
from the inquisitive eyes of spying parents.
I once asked a boy who was engaged in this prohibited reading if
he knew the reasons for his parents’ opposition. His reply was
characteristic: “They don’t want me to read nothin’ excitin’.” They
committed the mistake of attempting to crush his natural desire for
exciting tales of adventure and heroism by confiscating “nickels”
without giving him equally exciting books of daring enterprise which
breathed a high moral spirit. Instead, they fed him on goody-goody
books which he accepted with the same grace with which one takes a dose
of bitter medicine, until finally he rebelled. By outside suggestion,
conveyed through his parents, this boy is now reading “thrillers” of
some ethical and moral value, which already give evidence of becoming
the gateway to a desire for good literature.
The “yellow” tale bound in boards should be confiscated and destroyed
by the parent as quickly as he would cast an armful of paper-bound
“libraries” into the furnace. The reading of this stuff by boys is much
more common than is ever suspected by parents. Boys exchange these
books with each other until they become dog-eared and dirty through
repeated readings, and the supposed merit of each is passed from lip
to lip as the reader lends the book to a companion with the statement,
“It’s a pippin.” The continued reading of this trash cannot fail
to have its effect in a lower standard of morals and a longing to
achieve the fruits of industry, ability, and experience by impossible
short-cuts; in addition to which it keeps him out of touch with good
literature.
Equally detrimental in their influence are most of the comic Sunday
supplements of the newspapers, especially where they picture the small
boy engaged in vicious or mischievous acts alleged to be humorous. No
parent would wish to see his own offspring copy the examples set by
these comic heroes--yet the inspiration to emulate them is furnished
when the parent hands the supplement to his son.
There are many books of fiction which give the boy the thrills he seeks
for and at the same time present high ideals, a decent standard of
morals, and such reasonable approach to probable conditions as will not
destroy the boy’s perspective by their illogicality or impossibility.
Such books do not always possess the highest literary quality--but
they do serve as stepping stones by which the blood-and-thunder addict
mounts to better literature, and, as such, they have a definite and
valuable place in juvenile reading.
It must be apparent that morals cannot be acquired by committing
to memory a set of rules, but are unconsciously fashioned by every
influence which strikes the impressionistic and receptive character of
youth and leaves its indelible imprint for good or evil throughout the
life of the individual. Character is formed during the short period of
boyhood. It is, therefore, of superlative importance that all character
forming influences to which the boy is subjected, including his
reading, shall be of the best and highest type.
Ideal companions for our sons are more difficult to find in real
life than in fiction. The perfect boy may live somewhere--but not
in my immediate neighborhood. The companions of our boy are usually
worse than he--at any rate we think them so; if one is good-natured
he may be a bully; if another is of high moral character he may be
so lazy and untidy that his influence is unwholesome; a third may
be untruthful, while still another may be so goody-goody that his
influence is positively depressing. But in the carefully selected
literature of today may be found suitable companions for your son--the
heroes who exemplify in the achievement of enterprises of adventure
and daring the virtues which all boys should seek to emulate. Manly
models are unconsciously copied. From the intimate companionship with
such heroes gained by reading, the boy obtains inspiration for bravery,
truth, obedience, honor, loyalty, industry, manliness, courtesy, and
ambition. Chumming with virtue inspires virtue.
“There is a world,” says Walter Taylor Field, “into which children may
enter and find noble companionship. It is the world of books. Let your
boy escape for a time from the meanness of the boy across the street,
and let him roam the woods with Hiawatha, sail the seas with Sindbad,
build stockades with Crusoe, fight dragons with Jason, joust with
Galahad; let him play at quoits with Odysseus, and at football with Tom
Brown. These are playmates who will never quarrel with him nor bully
him, but from whom he will learn to be brave, self-reliant, manly,
quick to do for others, and set with his face toward the light.” The
character-building qualities of such books are as unquestioned as their
intellectual value.
A library has been termed by Lord Lytton a “literary pharmacopœia”
which contains the remedies for mental and moral shortcomings.
Modified to suit the requirements of boyhood it means that doses
of literature should be administered as specifics for diseases
of character, as well as to act as tonics to build up the moral
virtues. For the boy inclined to deceit books are prescribed in which
truthfulness and honor are exalted; for the lazy boy is prescribed
the tale of monumental achievement through industry; the anemic
bookworm should receive a course of reading concerning athletics,
sports, and life in the open; disloyalty and disobedience would
call for a diet of stories in which the antithesis of these defects
is exploited. In a word, it is an attempt to correct his moral and
temperamental deficiencies by placing him under the influence of the
heroic characters of fiction who exhibit the moral qualities which the
boy lacks. This device is no longer a mere theory; it has been tried
in innumerable instances and always with good, if variable, results.
The effectiveness of this unique plan will doubtless be in proportion
to the skill of the diagnostician in recognizing the exact moral
ailment and the accuracy of the literary physician in prescribing the
corrective reading.
Every boy admires a hero and seeks to emulate him. If his hero is
one of questionable morals, the effect of his companionship on the
boy reader will be almost as pernicious as the influence of an evil
chum in daily life. On the other hand, companionship with the noble
characters of fiction cultivates in the reader the same virtues as
those exhibited by the hero and inevitably establishes moral standards.
When the boy demands that virtue shall be rewarded and vice punished it
is an evidence of his ethical evolution, and the continued recurrence
of these instances in his reading finally fixes for all time his
criterion of moral values.
The dust-covered books which formerly filled the shelves of our
Sunday-school libraries depicting milk-and-water characters and heroes
of immaculate goody-goodyness, happily, have been replaced by books
portraying virile, red-blooded, intensely human heroes who are not
afraid to get their clothes dirty. No dust ever accumulates on such
books but they do become worn and soiled with constant reading.
Stories of animal life are valuable when informative of their customs
and habits and they generally inspire a love for animal heroes which
prompts a manifestation of kindness toward all dumb creatures. Not
infrequently the hidden moral contained in these stories is driven
home as forcibly as in the best fiction in which human beings play the
principal rôles.
A well selected juvenile magazine should find a place on every boy’s
reading table, not so much for the value of its fiction--which is so
variable in quality--as for its news features concerning the things
which loom big in the boy’s life--school and college athletic events,
Boy Scout meets, new games and sports, the latest improvements in
wireless construction, and new ideas in handicraft. It is from such
a journal that he obtains information of current events which are
commanding the attention of all boys and he thus keeps abreast of the
times in Boyville.
The book which furnishes entertainment as well as inspires interest
commands the attention of the adolescent in the direct ratio that these
elements conform to his psychological development. Juvenile fiction
is usually interesting to the adult only when read from the juvenile
viewpoint. When so read it may prove a fascinating recital of human
aspirations and achievements as well as a profound study in the covert
psychological impulses which actuate the several characters of the
story.
“The great problem in juvenile reading for the parent,” to quote
Franklin K. Mathiews, librarian of the Boy Scouts, “is to choose from
the huge mass of boy’s books the ones the boy will like best and yet
those which will be best for the boy.” It is obvious that he will not
read what he does not like, but it does not follow that he should
be given all books that he likes irrespective of their influence.
Rest assured that your boy does not himself select a book because of
its high moral tone or its qualities of uplift. He would doubtless
side-step it if he suspected such influence. He is looking for
thrills, excitement and adventure--something outside the domain of his
everyday experience. If he finds them he is satisfied with the book
irrespective of its tendencies for good or bad. I am now speaking of
the average red-blooded boy and not the halo-crowned youth of supernal
goodness. As long as we supply him with the needed thrills coupled
with good influence, he will not go after the thrills coupled with bad
influence. Juvenile fiction which does not count for character-culture
is worthless. As he advances in years and increases his intellectual
equipment his love for lurid tales will wane, and if his reading has
been supervised, a desire for the best fiction, history, biography,
essays, ethics, and poetry will easily and naturally take its place.
The limitations of this chapter have prevented more than a brief
discussion of the influence of literature in shaping the boy’s
character and intellect and the reader is referred to those books which
will be found useful by the parent in outlining and directing a course
of reading for the boy at his several periods of development from
infancy to manhood. The first two volumes given below are especially
valuable for their comprehensive lists of suitable books.
TITLE AUTHOR
The Children’s Reading Olcott
Fingerposts to Children’s Reading Field
How to Tell Stories to Children Bryant
How to Teach Reading Clark
Special Method in Primary Reading McMurray
Special Method in the English Classics McMurray
Books and Libraries Lowell
Books and Culture Mabie
Biblical Masterpieces Moulton
Readings in Folklore Skinner
History and Literature Rice
Childhood in Literature and Art Scudder
Little Folks’ Lyrics Sherman
Counsel upon the Reading of Books Van Dyke
Kindergarten Stories and Morning Talks Wiltse
CHAPTER XV
AGENCIES FOR SEX-INSTRUCTION
The importance of educating the young in the physiology and hygiene of
sex is no longer doubted. The widespread ignorance and misinformation
among boys concerning the human sexual function is proof of the
necessity of substituting therefor normal, accurate knowledge which
will conduce to hygienic and eugenic betterment. However much one may
close his eyes to the fact, it is nevertheless true that many children
acquire distorted information about matters of sex at a very early
age--much earlier than the average parent ever suspects. Among boys,
misinformation on sex matters is the rule and correct information the
exception.
The necessity for scientific knowledge on the subject is based on (1)
the preservation of individual sex health, (2) the improvement of the
progeny; (3) the relief of boys from the mental disquietude caused by
certain normal manifestations of adolescence; (4) his rescue from the
clutches of quack “medical specialists”; (5) the suppression or control
of venereal diseases; (6) the abatement of false modesty which prevents
sane discussion among adults of a question so important to humanity, to
pave the way for sex-education backed by an enlightened and coöperating
public opinion, without which a general dissemination of knowledge
covering the dangers to health and morals resulting from wrong sex
habits is impossible.
There is an ever-present disposition to ring down the curtain of
taboo on the discussion of sex. A subject which so vitally affects
the health and morals of both the individual and the community should
warrant such discreet discussion and thoughtful consideration as will
best conserve these vital fundamentals of life. The former antipathy to
any reference to the subject is now being slowly superseded by a nobler
and purer sentiment which invites the formation of plans and methods
designed to obviate the grave physical and moral dangers attendant
on ignorance and misinformation. A healthier public opinion and
enlightened conscience will clear the way for the instruction not only
of the young but of adults concerning the sacred processes of human
reproduction.
It is obvious to say that instruction on sex can best be given the
child by his parents; they are his natural teachers, possessing the
confidence of the child and having the intimate relationship, affection
and sympathetic understanding which renders personal instruction
effective. But the neglect of this parental duty is so prevalent
even among educated parents who are solicitous for their children’s
future, that courses of instruction in our grammar and high schools
and colleges are now being advocated to supply this parental omission.
Indeed, one or more public high schools in our large cities have
already added sex-instruction to their course of study, while a number
of normal schools and colleges have for some years included it in their
curriculums. Such a revolutionary innovation has not been unattended
by opposition, chiefly from parents and public school boards, but only
rarely from the heads of educational institutions of advanced grades.
The introduction of such a course is attended by some impediments,
not the least of which is the difficulty of procuring teachers who
possess both the tact and the pedagogic knowledge necessary to give
instruction on the subject in its biological, hygienic, and ethical
aspects in such a manner as will inform and warn the child against
the dangers of premature sex excitation and satisfy his curiosity
without stimulating his interest. Another difficulty in the way of
teaching the subject in public and other schools--even when classes are
segregated by sex--is the psychology of the mob, evident in a large
group of boys who already are possessed of copious misinformation
which tends to a more flippant and prurient reception of the subject
than when the information is given privately. This is evident even in
advanced schools. One of our greatest institutions of learning has two
courses of lectures on sex-hygiene for freshmen and seniors, which are
generally referred to by the students as “Smut One” and “Smut Two.” The
American Federation for Sex Hygiene is perhaps the leading advocate
of the policy of sex-education in graded and high schools, to be given
in conformity with a thoughtful and conservative plan which has its
basis in biological study. The heads of many prominent colleges and
universities have given their indorsement to this plan which is endowed
with such elasticity that it may be varied to meet the needs of the
differing mental and physical requirements of the young.
Conceding that the average public-school teacher has one essential
qualification for giving such instruction, i. e., the confidence of
the children, her incapacity because of the lack of a broad scientific
knowledge of the subject, or youth, or both, is generally recognized.
The other alternative--special lecturers of known scientific
qualifications--is open to the suggestion that they would soon be known
as “sex specialists” and the presentation of the subject under these
conditions would place upon it an undue emphasis instead of having it
taught in its natural and orderly sequence as a part of nature-study,
biology, and ethics where it belongs. So, also, the children’s lack
of confidence in an outside lecturer would minimize the good results
of such information. Physicians are generally regarded as the proper
persons to give this instruction, although the suggestion has been made
that inasmuch as the ideal instruction must concern the normal function
of sex, and that a physician’s work is chiefly along the abnormal
line (disease) and a tendency to the development of certain morbidity
necessarily results therefrom--the biologist, especially if a regular
instructor, is the one best equipped for this delicate task. There
is an ever-present danger, either from unqualified teachers or wrong
pedagogic methods, of unduly emphasizing the topic in such a manner
that the curiosity of the child will be stimulated. This is the very
result which should be avoided; the boy should be given only enough
instruction, as an incidental part of one of the broader subjects
with which it is intimately related, to satisfy his natural curiosity
and suffice the physical and ethical requirements of his particular
stage of development. On the other hand, the difficulties connected
with sex-instruction should not be unduly stressed, for they are not
insurmountable.
By whatever instrumentality the instruction is given to classes it is
agreed that, as in private instruction, the information should be only
sufficient to satisfy the psychological and physical needs of the child
at the period of development which he has then attained. During the
period of adolescence the scope of information is, therefore, greatly
broadened to meet the requirements of that period. The opponents of
sex-instruction in schools believe that it will obtrude the subject too
prominently in the consciousness of the youth and thereby destroy the
restraints of modesty which were intended to be conserved.
The advocates of the school plan insist that the beneficent results
of such instruction will greatly outweigh any possible evil which may
follow from it. They submit that the moral and physical dangers to
which children are subject as the result of ignorance, and the presence
of venereal disease in boys to a degree not understood by the general
public, are sufficient warrant for such instruction--wholly apart from
other considerations.
The entire subject is of tremendous moment and worthy of the careful
study, thought, and judgment of parents and scientists for the
formulation of a future policy which can adequately cope with this
great problem.
In a report of the Special Committee of the American Federation for Sex
Hygiene on the matter and methods of sex-education this recommendation
is made: “Your committee would emphasize the necessity of good judgment
and tact in introducing sex-instruction into schools. It should
not be introduced prematurely, but only so fast as teachers can be
found or trained who are competent to give it, and so fast as public
sentiment will support it. On the other hand, undue weight must not
be given to the difficulties attending such instruction even under
present conditions, inasmuch as even occasional mistakes will do far
less harm than allowing children to continue to gain this knowledge,
as many of them now do, from impure sources--receiving a pernicious
first impression which induces in them an attitude of mind toward the
subject that makes it extremely difficult later to give them the best
instruction. In not a few such cases subsequent sound teaching is
practically fruitless.”
CHAPTER XVI
AN OUTLINE OF SEX-INSTRUCTION
The limitations of this chapter will prevent more than a mere outline
of the periods in a child’s life when sex-information should be
imparted and the character of it. Familiarity with the boy’s psychology
given in Chapters III and IV will be of value in its application. From
birth until the child is six years old--the prescholastic age--he
is at home under the care and guidance of his mother, excluding the
kindergarten which is attended by a small proportion of children.
During this period the mother’s chief concern should be the hygienic
care of the child’s body and the prevention of danger which may come
from an injudicious or immoral nurse. The only sex-instruction
should be a simple answer to his question as to the origin of human
life--usually prompted by the birth of a baby whom he has seen or of
whom he has heard. This may be done by the statement that God sent it
in a human basket and the doctor delivered it, or other phraseology
which carries the same import and will satisfy his curiosity for the
time being until another inquiry is made. It is desirable to remember
that the child up to approximately ten years of age will continue these
interrogatories to his mother from time to time and that whenever he
ceases to make such inquiries it is evidence that he believes he has
obtained full information on the subject either from parental or from
outside sources.
The mother, not the father, should begin the sex-education of her son.
The most effective method of imparting sex-information is by what is
called the biological approach. At age seven or eight the foundation
for sex-instruction should be laid by information concerning plant
production; that the pollen dust of the father plant becomes attached
to the legs of the honey-seeking bee and is transferred to the mother
plant, where it fertilizes the seed from which a baby plant grows. The
function of the wind, also, in effecting the conjunction of pollen with
the ovule of the stigma should be explained; and how the pollen or male
principle fertilizes and gives life to the female ovule, making seed
from which a new plant is born.
Now by successive stages and in detail his mind should be directed
to the processes of reproduction in the lower forms of animal life,
such as fishes, snakes, and frogs; then to the higher forms of life
represented in birds and domestic fowl, and then to the still higher
form of mammals, and finally to reproduction in the human being,
emphasizing its biological and sacred aspects. The wonderful workings
of nature should be made predominant in explaining the reproduction of
the lower orders of life while the pure and spiritual phase of human
reproduction should be stressed. Coincident with the conclusion of such
instruction, there should be given a brief explanation of the functions
of the generative organs in the process of reproducing the species, the
injury of secret vice and the necessity for personal purity.
At this first sign of approaching puberty the father should assume
the duty of further instruction, which should now advise the boy of
the wonderful sexual changes about to take place in his body and the
new and powerful desires about to be awakened. The normal development
of adolescence should be pointed out and a warning sounded as to the
error of mistaking certain natural phenomena for the abnormal.
At the age of fifteen to sixteen the necessity arises for admonition
against sexual promiscuity and its relationship to the hygienic health
of the individual and its eugenic influence on coming generations.
During the entire period the note of personal purity should be sounded
by a strong appeal to his moral and religious sense.
Untold numbers of boys go wrong sexually through ignorance, who would
have kept to the paths of purity had they but known.
It is important that the boy, especially during adolescence, shall be
kept from the contaminating influences of theatrical productions whose
sex-appeal is conspicuous. The moving picture show, which fascinates
children with its interest, is objectionable chiefly because of its
connection with the cheap vaudeville so commonly associated with it.
Few vaudeville “turns” have any ethical, moral, or intellectual value.
They are, at best, ephemeral entertainment and frequently are so coarse
as to be unmoral if not positively immoral in their persuasiveness. The
sex excitation produced by the physical display of the partly clothed
female, _risqué_ dialogues and suggestive songs which are common, in
some degree, to a certain class of musical comedies, burlesques, and
vaudeville shows is a potent reason for keeping the adolescent away
from their influence. And it must be obvious that the sex-problem play
is equally unsuited to his needs.
As a guide to the subject matter and methods of sex-instruction the
author appends a brief bibliography culled from the flood of literature
on the subject. Much that has been published is good; some is bad and
some is indifferent. The necessity for widespread sex-education has
resulted in the formation of many societies whose primary object is
the dissemination of knowledge on the subject through lectures and the
publication of pamphlets designed for the education of the parent in
how and when to impart sex-instruction to his child. Other pamphlets,
graded according to the age of the reader, are to be placed in the
hands of the boy himself. Such leaflets may be purchased from these
societies for the few cents which they cost to publish, and samples are
frequently issued gratuitously. Among the many pamphlets, leaflets,
and circulars issued by the several societies for sex-hygiene, the
following are suitable for the instruction of parents or may be placed
in the hands of the boy himself if so indicated:
AMERICAN FEDERATION FOR SEX HYGIENE.
105 West 40th St., New York City.
“Report of the Special Committee on the Matter and Methods of Sex
Education.” Thomas M. Balliet, Dean of the School of Pedagogy, New
York University; Maurice A. Bigelow, Professor of Biology, Teachers
College, Columbia University; Prince A. Morrow, M.D. 34 pp.,
December, 1912. Copies upon request.
“The Teaching of Sex Hygiene.” Prince A. Morrow, M.D. Copies upon
request.
CALIFORNIA SOCIAL HYGIENE SOCIETY.
U. S. Custom House, San Francisco, Cal.
Four circulars as follows:
“The Four Sex Lies.” 4 pp.
“When and How to Tell the Children.” For parents. 7 pp.
“The Secret of Strength.” For boys ten to thirteen years of age. 5
pp.
“Virility and Physical Development.” For boys thirteen to eighteen
years of age. 7 pp.
Samples upon request with postage.
COLORADO SOCIETY FOR SOCIAL HEALTH.
1434 Glenarm St., Denver, Colo.
“Teaching Regarding Sex in the Public Schools.” Edward Jackson, M.D.
Reprint from Denver _Medical Times_. 7 pp.
Samples upon request with postage.
CONNECTICUT SOCIETY OF SOCIAL HYGIENE.
42 High Street, Hartford, Connecticut.
“Sex Hygiene for Young Men.” 8 pp.
CHICAGO SOCIETY OF SOCIAL HYGIENE.
305 Reliance Building, Chicago, Ill.
A circular:
“Self Protection.” Sexual Hygiene for Young Men. 4 pp.
MARYLAND SOCIETY OF SOCIAL HYGIENE.
15 East Pleasant Street. Baltimore, Md.
Two circulars on Social Hygiene:
“Sex Hygiene for Young Men.” 1912. 4 pp.
Reprint of seven Charts, on “Methods of Teaching Sex Hygiene,” from
the exhibit of The American Federation for Sex Hygiene. 1913. 8
pp.
Samples and prices upon request.
DETROIT SOCIETY FOR SEX HYGIENE.
Wayne County Medical Society’s Building, Detroit, Mich.
Three leaflets:
“A Word to Parents on Sex Hygiene.” 6 pp.
“A Plain Talk with Boys.” For parents to tell boys from six to
fourteen years old. 4 pp.
“Some Plain Facts for Young Men upon Sexual Matters.” 6 pp. Single
copies upon request with postage; 25 cents per 100.
ST. LOUIS SOCIETY FOR SOCIAL HYGIENE.
4069 Shenandoah Ave., St. Louis, Missouri.
Two circulars:
“A Plain Talk with Boys on Sex Hygiene.” 4 pp.
“The Effect of Venereal Diseases on Young Men.” 4 pp.
Samples upon request.
THE SOCIETY OF SANITARY AND MORAL PROPHYLAXIS.
105 West Fortieth St., New York City.
Educational pamphlets:
“The Young Man’s Problem.” 32 pp.
“Instruction in the Physiology and Hygiene of Sex.” For teachers. 24
pp.
“The Boy Problem.” For parents and teachers. 32 pp.
“How My Uncle, the Doctor, Instructed Me in Matters of Sex.” 32 pp.
“Health and Hygiene of Sex.” 32 pp.
Each 10 cents.
THE OREGON SOCIAL HYGIENE SOCIETY.
719 Selling Building, Portland, Oregon.
Five circulars:
“The Four Sex Lies.” 4 pp.
“When and How to Tell the Children.” 8 pp.
“Books for Use in the Family on Sex Education.” 2 pp.
“The Secret of Strength.” For younger boys, ten to thirteen years of
age. 6 pp.
“Virility and Physical Development.” For older boys, thirteen to
eighteen years of age. 8 pp.
PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF SOCIAL DISEASE.
1708 Locust St., Philadelphia, Penna.
“The Social Evil in University Life.” Robert N. Willson, M.D. 1912.
Reprint from the New York _Medical News_. 19 pp.
Prices upon request.
THE TEXAS STATE SOCIETY OF SOCIAL HYGIENE.
T. Y. Hull, M.D., Secretary, San Antonio, Texas.
“Instructions Our Children Need to Form Ideas of Personal Purity.”
Malone Duggan, M.D. 10 pp.
“The Child.” Theo. Y. Hull, M.D. Reprint from _Club Woman’s Argosy_,
December, 1910. 8 pp.
THE SOCIETY OF SOCIAL AND MORAL HYGIENE OF SEATTLE.
League Building, Seattle, Washington.
“Stamp Out the Black Plague.” An envelope containing three
circulars:
“Four Sex Lies.”
“The Black Plague.”
“Why, What, When and How Parents should Instruct Children in Sex
Matters.”
Samples and prices upon request.
THE SPOKANE SOCIETY OF SOCIAL AND MORAL HYGIENE.
422 Old National Bank Building, Spokane, Washington.
Five circulars: “The Need for Education in Sexual Hygiene.” 4 pp.
“A Frank Talk with Boys and Girls About Their Birth.” Children six
to ten. 4 pp.
“A Straight Talk with Boys About Their Birth and Early Boyhood.”
Boys ten to thirteen. 4 pp.
“A Plain Talk with Boys About Their Physical Development.” For boys
approaching puberty and during puberty. 6 pp.
“Sexual Hygiene for Young Men.” 8 pp.
Sample Set upon request for 10 cents in stamps.
The following books, among others, are recommended:
“Truths. Talks with a Boy.” Dr. E. B. Lowry, Forbes & Co., Chicago.
“From Youth to Manhood.” Dr. Winfield S. Hall. Association Press. New
York.
“What a Father Should Tell His Little Boy.” Isabelle T. Smart. Bodmer
& Co., New York.
“What a Father Should Tell His Son.” Isabelle T. Smart. Bodmer & Co.,
New York.
“The Renewal of Life. How and When to Tell the Story to the Young.”
Margaret W. Morley, A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago.
CHAPTER XVII
CHILDREN’S COURTS
No work on boy-training would be complete without a reference to an
instrumentality of recent origin for reclaiming the wayward boy which
marks a forward step in the solution of the child problem--the juvenile
court. The most notable change in American jurisprudence in the last
decade has been the establishment and development of such courts for
child saving and the prevention of crime. Before the advent of these
courts, all children charged with the commission of offenses were tried
in criminal and police courts as criminals and with criminals. While
awaiting trial, they were confined in jail with thieves, confidence
men, beggars, drunkards, burglars, hold-up men, and murderers, because
the state had made no provision for their separate detention pending
trial.
Under such conditions the child acquired through association and
conversation the viewpoint of the criminal as well as an education in
crime which he would put into practice after his release. Amid such
surroundings were laid the foundations for the careers of many of the
criminals who now crowd our jails and penitentiaries to overflowing.
Speaking of such conditions, Judge Richard S. Tuthill of the Children’s
Court of Chicago said, “The State had educated innocent children in
crime and the harvest was great.” A thoughtful police official once
remarked of a boy in such surroundings, “He is on a toboggan, the lower
end of which rests in hell.”
The gradual recognition, by an aroused public conscience, of the evil
results of such a system put into operation the forces which in many
states have abolished the old plan of regarding and punishing the child
as a criminal and substituted the principle that the wayward child is
a dependent whom the state, like a wise parent, will restrain from
evil and educate in the paths leading to good citizenship, through
the agency of the juvenile court and its efficient aid, the probation
officer.
We now recognize the inability of the child to commit a crime, judged
by the standards applicable to the adult criminal, for the reason
that his mental and moral concepts have not yet reached the stage of
development which can distinguish between right and wrong with the
clearness of the adult. What in the adult with full consciousness of
the import and effects of his acts would be trespass, assault and
battery, larceny, and burglary, are in the child varied forms of
moral disease which it is the state’s business to cure--not punish. It
is conceded that it would be monstrous and brutal to punish a child
for contracting measles, scarlet fever, or whooping cough, and it is
equally monstrous for the state to punish the same child before he
attains moral maturity, for contracting a moral disease which manifests
itself in acts which are crimes only when committed by adults with full
comprehension of their moral significance.
Again we revert for our guidance to the child’s viewpoint which in many
instances is closely akin to that of the untutored savage. During a
summer which I spent in the wilderness of the great woods of the North
I encountered an Indian who habitually killed deer out of season and
in violation of the laws of the state in which he lived. When I asked
him why he did not obey the law, he replied, “God made deer for Indian
before white man made book [the law].” From his viewpoint, he was not
guilty of wrongdoing in killing deer to supply food for his family;
from the viewpoint of the law he was a lawbreaker.
The underlying principle of the operation of children’s courts is
the recognition of the fact that the offender under sixteen years
of age should not be judged or punished by adult standards; that he
should not be arrested, indicted, convicted, imprisoned, or punished
as a criminal. Evidence of the offense is not regarded as proof of
criminality but rather as light on the question as to how the state,
standing _in loco parentis_, can best exercise its parental function
in the formation of the embryo character needed to make the boy a good
citizen.
The child is not punished to make an example of him, nor to reform
him--but to form him. Reformation implies the change of a character
already formed. The child’s character is in an evolutionary period,
susceptible to formation but not to reformation. The criminal power
of the state metes out punishment for reformation and as a deterrent
to other persons who may be tempted to violate the law. The parental
authority of the state is exercised to train the boy to be good and to
remove him from the vicious environments which chain him to delinquency.
Boys are naturally good--not bad. A study of the records of juvenile
offenders will show that there are four dominant causes of delinquency,
stated here in the order of their importance, for none of which is the
boy himself directly responsible, namely: environment, poor training
or lack of training, the bad example of parents, and heredity. I do
not subscribe to the theory of the “innate cussedness” of boys. The
“innate cussedness” of parents, in the last analysis, is usually the
propelling factor in juvenile delinquency.
The establishment of children’s courts has been significant in the
awakening of the public mind to the state’s duty toward those of its
children who from parental neglect or otherwise are delinquent or
dependent. This moral awakening to the consciousness of governmental
responsibility for the child has manifested itself in many states in
the enactment of laws for the establishment of juvenile courts, and
in others in the revivification and enforcement of sleeping statutes
designed to meet the juvenile problem.
But the state’s duty does not end with the placing of laws on the
statute books; it still remains for them to be made effective by a
judge who not only knows the law but who is inspired by a sympathetic
understanding of child problems and child-nature; one who is able to
ingratiate himself into the confidence of the boy and thereby become
his friend, helper, and co-worker in his salvation. A knowledge of
adolescent psychology will be of great help in getting the juvenile
viewpoint which is so essential for a solution of the problems of
wayward children. In a report by the Honorable Samuel J. Barrows,
Commissioner for the United States on the International Prison
Commission, he has this to say concerning the fitness of a judge of
such court: “The personality of the judge, as well as that of the
probation officer, is an element of vast importance in the success
of any juvenile court. Such a court cannot be run on automatic or
mechanical methods. Let it be reduced to a mere technical mechanism
of rules and procedure and it will fail altogether. A firm yet
sympathetic, tactful man of magnetic personality, as well as of legal
knowledge, who understands boys and can secure their confidence is the
man needed for this work; and some such men have already been called to
this position.”
To the same effect is the testimony of Judge Stubbs of the Juvenile
Court of Indianapolis as to the necessity of securing the offender’s
confidence: “It is the personal touch that does it. I have often
observed that if I sat on a high platform behind a high desk, such as
we had in our city court, with the boy on the prisoner’s bench some
distance away, that my words had little effect on him; but if I could
get close enough to him to put my hand on his head or shoulder, or my
arm around him, in nearly every such case I could get his confidence.”
The probation system and probation officers are necessary and
effective elements in the operation of juvenile courts. The function
of the probation officer is to investigate the facts before trial, and
after probation to visit the child in his home; keep in close touch
with his conduct and school attendance; admonish or cite for punishment
parents who in any way have contributed to the child’s delinquency;
advise and encourage the child and report conditions to the court.
Most courts have one or more paid probation officers, the others being
volunteers. One Indiana court was fortunate in having the assistance of
two hundred volunteer probation officers who responded in turn whenever
needed to assist in the work of probation and parole. The effectiveness
of a juvenile court is measured by the ability, efficiency, and
character of its judge and probation officers.
Judge Ben B. Lindsey of the Juvenile Court of Denver, a leading
authority on this subject, said:
“Of course a juvenile-court system, while under any average
circumstance, is bound to be a step in advance of the old methods
of the criminal law in dealing with children, yet its permanent
and more complete success depends upon the individuals to whom its
execution is intrusted. We have heard a great deal about probation
officers. Upon the character, tact, skill and intelligence of the
judge and his assistants--the probation officers--largely depends the
success of the court. Without personal touch, influence, patience,
encouragement of the child, and attempt to arouse all the nobler and
better impulses, and to subdue and suppress the discords of the soul,
complete success is not likely to be attained. The law itself is of
small importance compared to these elements. There is no higher or more
important position of a public character in the community than that
of a probation officer, unless it be the judge of the juvenile court.
Perhaps this might illy come from one occupying that position, yet I
have no apology to make for the statement. I am sure the statement
can be appreciated by few more than by one who occupied so important
a position. As this work progresses and its wonderful results are
constantly observed, the force of the statement impresses itself more
and more upon the mind of the judge of the juvenile court.”
The same authority gives the following résumé of his method of dealing
with the boys brought within the jurisdiction of his court: “In my
opinion the best way to reform a boy waywardly disposed is first to
understand him. You have got to get inside of him and see through
his eyes, understand his motives, have sympathy and patience with
his faults, just as far as you can, remembering that more can be
accomplished through love than by any other method. But I would not
have you misunderstand me. It has been well said that love without
justice is sentiment and weakness! We must be just. There is no justice
without love and yet we can judge in the light of both, forgetting
not firmness and the right of others. We cannot be just without the
exercise of patience and a plentiful supply of those higher qualities
of the soul which must be brought to bear if we are able to call out
the noblest impulses and the highest and most energetic forces of
a child. The juvenile court and the probation system simply supply
the machinery for doing this where heretofore such machinery was not
permitted by the law. We pursued the blind, brutal, incongruous methods
of recognizing a child as an irresponsible being in dealing with its
dollars and cents, and denied it the right of contracting even while
it was a minor, whereas when it came to offending against the law,
when its moral welfare, its very soul, was involved, we denied its
irresponsibility and placed it upon the same plane and in the same
category with an adult.”
Supplemental to the juvenile law is the adult delinquency law, now
on the statute books of certain states, which makes it a misdemeanor
for any parent or other person to encourage, cause, or by any act
contribute to the delinquency of a child, punishable by a fine not to
exceed $1,000 or by imprisonment not to exceed one year or by both
such fine and imprisonment; and the juvenile court is given exclusive
jurisdiction over such offenders. Such statutes are a complete
recognition of parental responsibility for many cases of juvenile
wrongdoing, such as visiting saloons to obtain beer for parents;
stealing coal from railroad yards; stealing brasses or appliances from
cars; breaking open cars and stealing goods, usually edibles, which are
taken home and used either with the tacit or express consent of the
parents; and many other thefts the fruits of which are shared directly
or indirectly by the parents.
From this class of depredations the boy graduates into burglary and
highway robbery. The adult delinquency law punishes such parents
and drives home the consciousness of their responsibility to their
children. Practically all delinquent boys who appear in our juvenile
courts have one or both parents delinquent--delinquent either in the
active, direct sense stated above, or in the passive, indirect sense of
indifference or ignorance whereby their sons do not receive the moral
training which is their birthright.
The result of the new method of boy-control now used by children’s
courts is to reduce the number of commitments to industrial schools,
reform schools, and other similar agencies of detention and correction
from seventy-five to approximately ten in each hundred. Where the
environment of home life is bad, the court does not hesitate to remove
the child from his home to a place in which he will not be handicapped
by such influence.
Our juvenile courts are at once a standing reproach to thoughtless,
indifferent, ignorant, and wayward parents and a beacon light for the
guidance of the unhappy children of such parents to useful citizenship.
They inspire the admiration, sympathy, and coöperation of every lover
of children who sees in them the future of our great republic.
CHAPTER XVIII
CONCLUSIONS
Every boy is endowed “with certain inalienable rights,” not the least
of which is the right to be so trained that he will approach the
stature of perfect manhood. It is a birthright in the same sense as
his right from birth to food, clothing, and shelter. And this right of
the child fixes upon the parent the corresponding duty of supplying
intelligent training and character-building environment. The basis of
all boy-training is parent-training, which I wish to emphasize even at
the risk of continued reiteration. And parent-training should be based
on a knowledge of boy-psychology and its application to the evolution
of the boy, which will throw a flood of light on many of the problems
which we formerly attempted to solve in the dark. His physical and
moral growth are so dependent upon or intimately related to his mental
growth that the solution of his psychological problems will, in most
cases, tend to solve the others.
The subject presents no serious difficulties to the parent who
possesses a consciousness of its importance to the welfare of his son.
All of us have certain preconceived ideas on boy-training which emanate
from the adult viewpoint and the adult standard of morals. We realize
how, if we were in our son’s place, we would act or ought to act, but
too often we forget that this is an application of the adult standard
which is psychologically impossible to the boy. Get the boy’s viewpoint.
Patience, tact, and insight; insight, tact, and patience will work
wonders with your boy. Insight is but another name for the boy’s
viewpoint; it implies acquaintance with his psychology. The adult
viewpoint of boy-problems is out of focus. We must re-adjust our
psychologic lenses to see and perceive the motives which actuate his
conduct, if we are to judge justly and sentence righteously. While the
parent is passing judgment on his son’s acts, he should not forget
to pass judgment on his own judgment. In training your boy, “you are
handling soul-stuff and destiny waits just around the corner.”
Again I would stress the need of a companionship between father and
son which should attain the intimacy of chumship. Such relationship
is indispensable to a knowledge of all his difficulties, trials and
troubles, for he will attempt to solve them in his own crude way if
there is no one to whom he can lay bare his soul in the belief that he
will find sympathetic understanding and advice. Fewer sons would go
astray if more fathers would be big brothers to them. The foundation
of such companionship is laid in infancy and early boyhood, but it is
neglected and frequently lost at puberty, at which time it is most
needed. We are quite willing to accept the pleasures of association
with the light-hearted frankness and joyousness of infancy, but too
often we evade the responsibility of sharing the burdens of the
adolescent.
Few fathers know their adolescent sons. It is true that they recognize
the exterior boy and are familiar with his patent activities, but
they seldom know his inner self and it is his inner self which needs
help. Unfortunately, we men are endowed with a superfluous amount of
egotism which causes us to assume that our sons will, through heredity
or force of our example, absorb or inhale much of our surplus moral
virtue. Few boys can work out their own salvation. The let-alone policy
is no policy at all. A passive system of training cannot be commended
for results. Instead, a plan of active, suggestive, sympathetic,
intelligent, and informative coöperation will produce the same
beneficial results when applied to the boy-problem as to a business
problem.
Certain apparent deficiencies of intellect as well as of character
are often the result of influences far removed from those which are
commonly assigned as their compelling causes. It is usual for us to
look for the immediate and proximate causes of ailments while remote
causes are often unsuspected. Among such causes are the physical
abnormalities known as adenoids and hypertrophied tonsils, both of
which exercise sinister influence in repressing the growth of intellect
and character. It is now generally conceded by the medical profession
that these conditions exercise such a profound influence on the
physical and nervous system that the free and normal development of
intellect as well as of character is retarded. Frequently the boy who
is backward in school and who often displays tendencies toward truancy,
evasion, and falsehood because of his mental retardation has reached
this state on account of his physical condition.
The correction of astigmatism, myopia, and other defects of eyesight
(alarmingly prevalent among children) by supplying him with proper
eyeglasses uniformly results in better school grades as well as marked
improvement in cheerfulness. The evil effects of impaired hearing,
decayed teeth, and malnutrition on intellectual progress are also
noticeable. The backward, indolent boy should always have the advice
and assistance of the physician, the oculist, and the dentist before
he receives blame for either mental deficiency or laziness.
The effects of heredity and prenatal influence in determining the
character of the child have been, in the opinion of many investigators,
greatly overestimated by the popular mind. The causative influence of
training (and environment which is a part of training) is immeasurably
more potent in the upbuilding of strong moral qualities than heredity.
The records of the Children’s Aid Society of New York, covering more
than 38,000 children, many of whom are the offspring of drunken and
criminal fathers and dissolute mothers, show beyond cavil that a good
home with love and moral training will usually submerge hereditary
tendencies be they ever so vicious. A very large proportion of these
children of delinquent parents, stamped (according to the theory of
heredity) with rotten physiques and rottener characters, have, through
good training and good environment, developed into law-abiding and
useful citizens. Among them may be mentioned two governors of states,
two congressmen, four judges, one justice of the Supreme Court,
nine members of state legislatures, thirty-five lawyers, eighty-six
teachers, nineteen physicians, twenty-four ministers, sixteen
journalists, twenty-nine bankers, and countless farmers, mechanics,
clerks and business men. The theory of the “inherent depravity” of the
boy, whether attributed to heredity or to an act of God, is a rapidly
fading myth. The boy is inherently good--not bad.
First know your son and love him; then you will be able to help
him. When you come to know the boy--even the adolescent--he is an
exceedingly lovable creature; and his inherent potentialities for
future excellence should be our inspiration for such assistance as
will build them into perfect manhood.
Do not deceive yourself with the belief that your Johnny is different
from other boys and that therefore the principles of boy-psychology
have no application to him and to his problems. Diversities of
temperament and character differentiate individuals, but all boys
possess a common nature whose evolution progresses according to fixed
laws. Idiosyncrasies and abnormalities of character are of slow growth.
They do not erupt suddenly like the measles. It must be obvious, on
consideration, that no simple panacea can be found for the speedy
cure of such complex and diverse diseases of character. Good training
and wholesome environment supplied throughout boyhood will make good,
wholesome character in manhood.
We may summarize, in so far as it is possible to do so (of necessity,
crudely and imperfectly) the principles of boy-training in the
following statements:
“Better boys!” should be our slogan.
Intelligent training is the birthright of every child.
The boy is the mirror of his home.
The wayward boy is usually the son of a wayward parent.
When we reclaim wayward parents we will reclaim wayward boys.
The average parent is either unskilled or underskilled in boy-training.
The first step in boy-training is the education of the parent.
The intelligent parent is the natural and best teacher of his own child.
The busy boy is the best boy.
Constant activity is the key to his evolution.
Encourage athletics and out-of-door activities for the growing boy.
Work _with_ boys, not _for_ them, produces the best results.
Get the juvenile viewpoint.
Insight and patience are the corner stones of boy-training.
Every father can become a hero to his son through chumship.
Through play the boy attains a large part of his growth--physical,
mental, and moral.
Fix the habit of obedience early.
Every boy is a gangster at heart. Encourage him to join a good gang
instead of a bad one.
Never punish him in anger. He has a keen sense of justice. Let the
punishment fit the “crime.”
The mother’s influence on the child is most potent before puberty--the
father’s after puberty.
Adolescence is the period of storm and stress in which incongruities
of conduct and character are certain to appear. With your patient
helpfulness he will outgrow them.
Train by positive, helpful suggestion, rather than negative repression.
Never prohibit an act without suggesting a substitute to fill the void.
Give him your reasons for the change.
Environment molds a score, where heredity molds one.
Do your part in building up symmetrically all four sides of his
nature--physical, mental, moral, and spiritual--and the result will be
God’s noblest work--a Man!
What profound emotions are stirred in the father’s breast when he
realizes that his long years of intelligent training have borne fruit
in the son he has sired; and what supreme joy comes to the mother when
she beholds her son standing at the threshold of superb manhood and she
can truly say, “I mothered a man!”
If I have seemed too severe in my strictures of delinquent parents, it
is because of a desire, grounded in the necessities of the case, to
impress upon them duties and responsibilities which are so frequently
neglected. If I have seemed too ardent a champion of the adolescent, I
offer no apology but the fact that he is often misunderstood and needs
an advocate to present his side of the case at the bar of parental
judgment.
Happy the man who has a son and thrice happy he who has three!
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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