Child psychology

“ The children are occupied each one in a different way, and the directress, watching them, can make psychological observations which, if collected in an orderly way and according to scientific standards, should do much toward the reconstruction of child psychology and the development of experimental psychology. ”

“ To gather and hold the children it is necessary, not only to understand the child, but also to be of the child spirit. The study of child psychology is fascinating, and of great value; but one may be an expert therein, and never attract a little one. To do that, the very tone and temper of childhood is necessary. ”

“ It is most important that the mother should observe the first and slightest traces of the articulation (Gliederung) of the child as an active, emotional and intellectual being, and watch it in his development from existence to experience and thought, so that in his development no side of his nature should be cultivated at the cost of the others, nor should any be repressed or neglected for the sake of the others. ”

“ Putting into practice this first principle of education through the suggestive power of a parental example characterised by correctness of speech, soundness of thought, and the moral qualities of cheerfulness, unselfishness, kindness, politeness, industriousness, and the other virtues, the greatest care must also be taken to “fertilise” the child’s mind through proper adjustment of his physical surroundings. Nothing is more certain—and least appreciated by the average parent—than the fact that every detail in the child’s material environment is of suggestive significance to him. ”

“ Let them look into themselves, and their own course of development and its requirements, let them recall their own earliest years, then later stages of development, and look deeply into their present life. Next, let them look equally deeply into the life of the child and what he must require for his present stage of development. Having scrutinized what the child needs, let them scrutinize his environment, and first observe what it offers and does not offer for the fulfilment of such requirements. ”

“ With this inadequate review of the advantages of infant psychology, it is well also to point out the dangers of the abuse of it. Such dangers are real. The very simplicity which seems to characterize the life of the child is often extremely misleading, and this because the simplicity in question is sometimes ambiguous. Two actions of the child may appear equally simple; but one may be an adaptive action, learned with great pains and really very complex, while the other may be inadaptive and really simple. ”

“ How easy and tempting it would have been, e.g. in the present case, to admire, excite, and develop prematurely the child's eager desire for learning, and thereby develop an unnatural blasé state and a precociousness masking a neurosis! In such cases the parents must look after their own complexes and complex tendencies and not make capital out of them at the expense of the child. The idea should be dismissed once for all that children are to be held in bondage by their parents or that they are their toys. They are characteristic and new beings. ”

“ We are repeatedly impressed with the conviction that everything that is to be done for the specifically human development of the child must be connected with the fostering of this instinct to employ himself. ”

“ Unfortunately our knowledge of the finer mental processes in the child is so meagre that we are after all not in any position to say where the greater trouble lies, whether in the parents, in the child, or in the conception of the milieu. ”

“ The study of children is often the only means of testing the truth of our analyses. If we decide that a certain mental state is due to a union of simpler elements, then we may appeal to the proper period of child life to see the union taking place. The range of growth is so enormous from the infant to the adult, and the beginnings of the child's mental life are so low in the scale, in the matter of mental endowment, that there is hardly a question of analysis now under debate in psychology which may not be tested by this method. ”

“ The interest and investigation of the child into this problem, aided by observations and deductions from various actions and attitudes of the parents, who have no idea of the watchfulness of the child, lead him, because of his imperfect knowledge and immature development, into many false theories and ideas of birth. ”

“ But, more fundamental for our purposes, is the fact that all the important stimuli which play upon the child during his first two years, when the human mind is being developed, are social stimuli. So true is this, that the child's commerce with physical things runs in social terms. The child interprets the physical objects about him personally, attributes life and human attributes to them, holds conversation with them, praises and blames them, makes companions of them. This animism of the child, so puzzling to an old-fashioned psychology, is readily explained by social psychology. ”

“ It is the business of the school to create in the child the right kind of needs. As was pointed out in our study of the instincts, we must make the child over again into what he ought to be. But this cannot be a sudden process. One cannot arouse enthusiasm in a six-year-old child over the beauties of higher mathematics. It takes ten or fifteen years to do that, and it must be done little by little.
Control of the Emotions. Without training, we remain at the mercy of our baser emotions. The child must be trained to control himself. Here is where habit comes in to modify primitive action. ”

“ A good share of the child's undirected education consists in learning to perceive the intentions and characteristics of other people by aid of little signs. He learns to read the signs of the weather in the family circle, and he learns in some measure to be a judge of men.
I once saw an instructive little incident, in which an older boy suddenly grabbed the cap from a little boy's head, and held it out to the driver of a passing automobile, as if giving it to him. ”

“ In fact, every condition or characteristic of a child that is in any way abnormal may lead on to other conditions and characteristics, often of a serious nature. The growth of adenoids, for example, may lead to a serious impairment of the mind. Poor vision may affect the whole life and character of the individual. The influence of a parent, teacher, or friend may determine the interest of a child and affect his whole life. The correct view of child life is that the child is affected, in greater or less degree, by every influence which acts upon him.
Significance of Development and Causality. ”

“ This will stop those efforts, painful alike for children and parents, that are applied in directions which offer no reward to effort.
But the study of the psychology of the child, begun at its birth, continued in its play, its work, its rest, means a daily comparative study, and requires the undivided attention of one person. It can only be done by a person who has charge of but a few children; in a crowd it is impossible. It is all the more impossible because children in a crowd resemble one another more or less; and this makes observation more difficult.
The kindergarten is only a factory. ”

“ In a word, they must think and behave as they desire him to think and behave, and, so far as is humanly possible, they must thus behave all the time. This of course necessitates considerable self-restraint and self-training on the parents’ part; but it is absolutely indispensable. The child’s eyes and ears are always wide open; his suggestibility is such that he is prone to absorb and react to any inconsistency of parental speech or behaviour, no matter how occasional or seemingly insignificant it may be. ”

“ A restless and nervous individual infects his surroundings with unrest and dissatisfaction, a grumbler with his discontent, etc. Since grown-up persons are so sensitive to surrounding influences, we should certainly expect this to be even more noticeable among children, whose minds are as soft and plastic as wax. The father and mother impress deeply into the child's mind the seal of their personality; the more sensitive and mouldable the child the deeper is the impression. ”

“ Such expressions are often used as an appeal to the emotions of children. But children have a right to have feelings, or not have them, and to have them as undisturbed as grown people. The same holds good of their sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive feelings of children are constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of grown people, their easily stimulated aversions are constantly being brought out. But the sufferings of children through the crudeness of their elders belong to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. ”

“ Instincts are inherited tendencies to specific actions. They fall under the heads: individualistic, socialistic, environmental, adaptive, sexual or mating instincts. These inherited tendencies are to a large extent the foundation on which we build education. The educational problem is to control and guide them, suppressing some, fostering others. In everything we undertake for a child we must take into account these instincts. ”

“ Besides this, by keeping the child’s mind occupied with wholesome and profitable matters, it saves him from the idleness and waste of energy which, in childhood as much as in adult life, favour the formation of bad habits. And assuredly the methods by which his mental education may best be carried on in the first years of existence are such that they may be readily applied by all parents. ”

“ It is not the good and pious precepts, nor is it any other inculcation of pedagogic truths that have a moulding influence upon the character of the developing child, but what most influences him is the peculiarly affective state which is totally unknown to his parents and educators. ”

“ The one thing which such a study as this reveals is that children have their own point of view, many times radically different from that of the adult. One must first try to understand children and get their point of view if one is to treat them sympathetically and be helpful to them. Pedagogy sins more just at this point than perhaps in any other way. Many a parent may love his child and want to do all that is necessary for its welfare and yet utterly fail because of this inability to see things from the point of view of the child's psychic evolution. ”

“ The narrow scope of the traditional elementary curriculum, the premature and excessive use of logical analytic methods, the assumption of ready-made faculties of observation, memory, attention, etc., which can be brought into play if only the child chooses to do so, the ideal of formal discipline—all these find a large measure of their explanation in neglect of just this psychological distinction between the child and the adult. ”

“ Meanwhile, of course, the fertilisation of the child’s mind should also be continued by other educative measures—as the maintenance of an inspiring environment, ready and intelligent response to the child’s innumerable questions, and skilful guidance of his thoughts to subjects which it is especially desirable for him to study. ”

“ In growing children particularly, there are many influences which affect their emotions, things of which we seldom think, such as the condition of vision and hearing, the condition of the teeth, nose, and throat, and the condition of all the important vital organs of the body. When a child’s disposition is not what we think it ought to be, we should try to find out the causes.
Training the Emotions. The emotions are subject to training. The child can be taught control. Moreover, he can be taught to appreciate and enjoy higher things than mere animal pleasure ”

“ This is only another way of saying that childhood is the most suggestible period of life. Precisely because the critical faculty is then undeveloped the child readily accepts and translates into some form of action the suggestions impinging on his mind from the external world. ”

“ The greater the sensitiveness and impressionability of the child, the more he will be stamped with the familial environment, and the more he will unconsciously seek to find again in the world of reality the model of his own small world with all the pleasures and satisfactions, or disappointments and unhappinesses with which it was filled. ”

“ Her plan with every child whose education is intrusted to her is to start by teaching it to distinguish between various touch sensations; and she does this so successfully that her pupils, aged from three to seven, are able, blindfolded, to state the differences in extremely fine gradations of cloths, papers, coins, and seeds. Any parent can do the same thing, beginning by drilling the child in distinguishing between massive sensations, and gradually developing delicacy of touch. ”

“ It seems to me most necessary for the comprehension, and for the true treatment of child-nature, that such observations should be made public from time to time, in order that children may become better and better understood in their manifestations, and may therefore be more rightly treated, and that true care and observation of unsophisticated childhood may ever increase.”—L., p. ”

“ In reality, as modern psychology has made very clear, every child at the outset of his life is much like every other child, a plastic, unmoral little creature, [53] exceedingly impulsive and exceedingly receptive, readily impressed for good or evil by the influences that surround him. ”

“ The child does not learn to walk, or the bird to fly, in any strict sense of the word ‘learn’; the innate tendencies settle to their perfect work as time goes on. We note, secondly, that the tendencies may ripen at very different levels of individual development; the culmination of sex-interest at adolescence, the appearance of bashfulness in the child of three or four years, the lack of fear in the new-born babe, are cases in point. Thirdly, they are extraordinarily persistent. ”