The Contested Ground of Childhood, Between Ideal and Reality

“ To have had a happy childhood is a very beautiful thing, it makes all after-life sweeter, it is like the first spring flowers which we gather in the meadow, and although by and by the snow will come and cover the place where they bloomed, it cannot take away the memory of their sweetness and loveliness, for that is in our hearts and will stay there forever. ”

“ The man should not be, in all respects, as the child. The child cannot have the glory of the man. If it is not polluted by his vices, it is not ennobled by his virtues. But in so much as the child awakens in us tenderness, and teaches us sincerity, and counteracts our coarser and harder tendencies, and cheers us in our isolation from human hearts, by binding us close with a warm affection, and sheds ever around our path the mirrored sunshine of our youth and our simplicity, in so much the child accomplishes for us a blessed mission.
II. Children teach us faith and confidence. ”

“ The state of infants, however, excels that of all others in this respect, that they are in innocence, and evil from actual life has not yet taken root in them. And such is the nature of innocence, that all things of heaven may be implanted in it ”

“ On our journey through life we have been disappointed in meeting many people who did not come up to our ideals. We are weary of the petty ambitions, the injustice of the world—of everybody’s faults, our own included. In the twinkling of an eye we are transported back into the lovely child-garden, where faith, love, and hope bloom! Little hands cling trustingly to us, a little cheek is laid against ours, eyes like stars smile up at us! There is a new heaven and a new earth!
The bond between age and childhood is known of all men. ”

“ Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one of those children, born and bred in neglect and vice, who have never known what childhood is: who have never been taught to love and court a parent’s smile, or to dread a parent’s frown. The thousand nameless endearments of childhood, its gaiety and its innocence, are alike unknown to them. ”

“ The vagrant boy has known nothing of the stages of childhood, conducting with beautiful simplicity from one timid step to another, and gradually forming it for the realities of the world. But the neglected infant has wilted into the premature man, with his old cunning look, blending so fantastically, so mournfully, with the unformed features of youth. Knowing the world on its worst side—knowing its hostility, its knavery, its foulness, its heartless materialism—knowing it as the man does not [198] know it who has only breathed the country air, and looked upon the open face of nature. ”

“ The musical laughter muffled and broken; the spontaneous smile transformed to a sad suspicion; and the austerities of mature life, the fearful speculation, and forecast of evil, fixed and frozen on a boy's face! And then the sorrow of a child is so absorbing—for he lives only in the present. In the afflictions which fall upon him, man has the aid of reason and faith—he looks beyond the present issue, he detects the significance of his calamity, and strengthened thus a brave heart can vanquish any sorrow. ”

“ No, indeed! The floor was bare, and so were the walls; there was no bed in the room, no chairs, no tables; but on the floor lay a dead woman, and over her stood her own little girl, named Katy, only nine years old that very day, crying, as I told you, as if her little heart would break. In her hand was a basket of cold victuals, that her mother had sent her out alone to beg; and there lay her mother, dead! and now little Katy was all alone in the great city, with no friend to whom she could tell her troubles, and no money even to buy a coffin for her dead mother. ”

“ It was a great thing for Katy when a mouse scratched on the wainscot, or her grandmother’s ball rolled out of her lap, giving her a chance to stretch her little cramped limbs. And now the village bell began to toll, with a low, booming, funereal sound, sending a cold shudder through the child’s nervous and excited frame. What if her mother should die way off in the city? What if she should always live in this terrible way at her [248] grandmother’s? with nobody to love her, or kiss her, or pat her little head kindly, and say, “Katy, dear;” ”

“ Oh, Katy, I did abuse her!” and a bitter sob attested the genuineness of Wilford’s grief for his treatment of Katy. “I despised her family, I treated them with contempt. I broke Katy’s heart, and now I must die without telling her I am sorry. But you’ll tell her, Bell, how I tried to pray, but could not for thoughts of my sin to her. She will not be glad that I am dead. I know her better than to think that; and I believe she loves me. But, after I am gone, and the duties of the world have closed up the gap I shall leave, I see a brighter future for her than her past has been ”

“ Instead, hundreds of thousands of children each year suffer abuse and neglect, most often at the hands of their own parents or other family members. The horrors of physical or emotional trauma deny these young people their childhood, and our abused children carry the psychological scars of their mistreatment throughout their lives. ”

“ How many, through ill-treatment and neglect in childhood, carry the marks to their dying day in weak and sickly constitutions! how many more in a distorted body and crippled limbs! These are but the too sure consequences of the neglect of a mother, and, consequent upon that, the neglect of servants, who, feeling the child a burden, lessen their own trouble; and many a mother who, perhaps, now that her child has grown up, weeps bitter tears over his infirmities, might have saved his pain and her own sorrow by attending to his wants in infancy. ”

“ I thought of what agonies the poor little child had suffered in the mysterious silence of his baby mind—that pitiful, terrible silence of childhood that has covered so many cruelties, so much unspeakable fear, since the childhood of the human race began. ”

“ The adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments and other things which caused him in his childhood anxious days or nights, which produced the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite despondency, burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of justice, the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame, his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness. ”

“ That youthful dream, in which life has stretched out like a sunny landscape with purple mountain-chains—is it not well that it is broken up, and we strike upon rugged realities? Does not all the strength of manhood, and the power of achievement, and the glory of existence, depend upon these things which are not included in the young boy's vision of a happy world. Welcome, O! disappointment of our hope that life would prove a perpetual holiday. Welcome experience of the fact that blessing comes not from pleasure, but from labor! ”

“ I have no regrets now for that tragedy of my childhood, though it took me many years to give up regretting. I do not think it a good or gracious thing for a human being to come through childhood without having looked upon some of the gaunt realities of life. Such glimpses tear away illusions while the mind is still plastic enough to reform to the actual, give a capacity for evaluating joy impossible to the untried child, give maturity a poise that life's worst blows can only temporarily disturb. ”

“ A weary burden is our human life, from the first even to the last. We talk of the happiness of childhood!—in what does it consist?—in the denied delight, and in the enforced task! Think how the child must turn from the wearisome page, whose future value it is impossible then to appreciate—turn from its dry and intricate characters to gaze upon the sun shining on the grass, and grudge the hours that must pass before play-time! ”

“ It is the fickleness of the age, it is this continual distraction, heritage of infancy, which follows us to that age where reflection takes the place of sports, and casts the first clouds on the face where there have shone, up to that time only, the candour of innocence and the expression of happiness. But here I am arrived at an age where childhood is for me only a dream; all the illusions of life have disappeared, and sad realities have taken their place. It is then that one is no longer sufficient for himself ”

“ It is unfair, perhaps, to blame parents and teachers, as we sometimes do in youth, for consciously biasing our child-minds in a falsely idealistic direction; for the child will infallibly idealize even his poorest of experiences. His broken glimpses and anticipations of his own future show him everything that is orderly, happy, and beautifully fit. He sees his grown-up life as old age, itself a sort of reversed childhood, sees its youth. The passing of childhood into youth is, therefore, like suddenly being turned from the cosy comfort of a warm fireside to shift for one’s self in the world. ”

“ In the present day, the narrow materialistic system refuses to reckon with the wings of childhood, the divine instincts of the budding imagination and its necessity to wonder, that faculty which formerly gave us our saints and heroes, poets and artists. The child of to-day no sooner opens his eyes than his elders try to wither up both heart and soul. Poor lunatics! Life and the day-school, above all the school of experience, will teach him but too soon the mean realities of life, and the disillusions, analectic and scientific, of all that so enchanted our youth. ”

“ And yet people persist in calling youth the time of unclouded bliss--youth, which through mere mental confusions and self-invented tortures lets itself be cheated out of heaven's best gifts; counterfeits feelings in order to achieve unhappiness, and passionately presses the unattainable to its heart! ”

“ The innocence of childhood or of children is not genuine innocence, for it is innocence not in internal form but only in external form. Nevertheless one may learn from it what innocence is, since it shines forth from the face of children and from some of their movements and from their first speech, and affects those about them. It can be seen that children have no internal thought, for they do not yet know what is good and what is evil, or what is true and what is false, of which such thought consists. ”

“ The sentimentalist clings tenaciously to the association of youth with innocence; the sociologist knows that even the age-limit which the law fixes as a boundary-line of innocence has no corresponding restriction in fact. ”

“ The day will come when our present barbaric attitude toward youth will be altered. Before it can be altered, however, we must completely revise our conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly innocent than it is certainly happy, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounds youth is not to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness. Innocence, besides, can last too long. Every one has pitied stale innocence. If a New York child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may quite easily be shocking to older people. ”

“ It is a misfortune to fail of finding an opportunity for the culture of conscience in childhood, and to acquire bad habits in youth, which at great cost you must revolutionize at a later day. But it is a yet greater loss to miss the opportunity of affectional growth; a sad thing to be born, and yet not into a happy home, — to lack the caresses, the fondness, the self-denying love, which the child's nature needs so much to take, and the mother's needs so much to give. ”

“ What is more astonishing is the fact that parents will strip themselves of everything, will sacrifice everything for the physical well-being of their child, will wake nights and stand in fear and agony before some physical ailment of their beloved one; but will remain cold and indifferent, without the slightest understanding before the soul cravings and the yearnings of their child, neither hearing nor wishing to hear the loud knocking of the young spirit that demands recognition. ”

“ One of the mistakes of our age is, that we begin by educating our children's intellects rather than their emotions. We leave these all-powerful factors, which give to life its coloring of light or darkness, to the oftentimes insufficient training of the ordinary family life—insufficient, owing to its thousand interruptions and pre-occupations. The results are, that many children grow up cold, hard, matter-of-fact, with little of poetry, sympathy, or ideality to enrich their lives—mere Gradgrinds in God's world of beauty. ”

“ Yet simple as this duty seems, society with all its aims and appliances, has not as yet attained the refinement of culture needful to the receiving of a child into its bosom, and of educating it to the full demands of its endowments. With the child comes the seed of states; the family being the nursery of the citizen, the measure of a people's civilization. As the homes, so the state; as the parents, so the children. Nor has society fathered its functions till all children, befriended from the first, are fashioned into the image each is capable of attaining. ”

“ I want to enter my protest against thrusting upon children the care-taking thought that should not be theirs for years to come. When the responsibility that is inseparable from every life bears heavily upon us, we sigh for the carefree days of childhood, but we do not hesitate to inflict upon our babies the complaints and moans which teach them, all too soon, that life is a hard school for us. A child must either grieve with us or become so inured to our plaints that he pays no attention to them. ”