Childishness

“ And as this is the true state of childhood: so whosoever is in this state, whatever his age may be, his office, or his dignity in life, is yet as truly in the state and folly of childhood, as he that is but four years old. Take an instance or two: a child whose heart is half broken at some misfortune, may perhaps be made easy with a picture of a huntsman and a pack of hounds; but if you would comfort the father that grieves for his eldest son, the hounds must all be alive; they must cry, and run, and follow a hare; and this will make the father as easy as the picture did the child. ”

“ If it faithfully depict the psychology of child life, of adolescence, of dawning maturity, devoid though it be of plot and, as a whole, of dramatic interest, it may yet, as a typical human portrait, justify itself; may aid the young to a better understanding of their own natures, and help those no longer young to a keener remembrance, a deeper sympathy, and a broader tolerance concerning the struggles, problems, and complexities that beset the young lives around them. ”

“ So it is with the human being: the character and habit are directed easily in infancy, with difficulty during childhood, but they are well-nigh impossible of direction by the time adolescence is established. ”

“ The world, like every individual, has its progress from infancy to maturity—How many follies do we commit in childhood? how many errors are we precipitated into by the fervour and inexperience of youth! ”

“ Childhood is like a mirror, catching and reflecting images. One impious or profane thought, uttered by a parent's lip, may operate upon the young heart like a careless spray of water thrown upon polished steel, staining it with rust, which no after scouring can efface. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There comes in both a period of adolescence, of the stirring of new powers, of an increase of strength, of the dawn of new ideals, of the awaking of self-consciousness; contours become defined and abrupt, awkward and hasty movements succeed to the grace of childhood; and there is a curious mingling of refinement and brutality, stupidity and tenderness; the will is subject to whims; it is easily roused and not so easily quieted. ”

“ I have had pupils with as violent passions, as determined will, as much intellectual insight, and a temperament that made every emotion as keen as the stroke of a Damascus blade, but a sensibility that would respond to the gentlest touch, and a conscience whose stings were like a sharp goad. This keenness of nature made childhood's experience like that of a matured mind that had seen and felt the consequences of evil ”

“ And can it be called strange that the feelings, the thoughts, and emotions of our youth should come welling up from the long past, or that with the return of boyish emotions, the language and actions of boyhood should be indulged in again? ”

“ Yet, think what it means for a boy of sixteen, without discipline or experience to steady him, to drop, literally in a moment, from notoriety to neglect, activity to stagnation; almost from life to death. ”

“ For our own parts, we have been perfectly amazed at the work we have seen done by children of six or seven—bright, merry creatures, who have all the spirit of their childhood active in them, repressed by no parent’s selfish love of ease and silence, cowed by no dull-witted teacher of the A B C and the pothooks. ”

“ If we consider childhood itself, is there anything so weak and wretched as a child, anything so utterly at the mercy of those about it, so dependent on their pity, their care, and their affection? Does it not seem as if his gentle face and touching appearance were intended to interest every one on behalf of his weakness and to make them eager to help him? ”

“ In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can rarely be ascertained with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall the emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is banished without a trace, save as scattered hints may be gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the recollections of others. But the best observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the development of which is very largely subterranean. ”

“ I'm afraid I was what the French call un enfant terrible—in the vernacular, an awful child! full of irresistible life and impulsive will; living fully in the present, looking neither before nor after; as ready to execute as to conceive; full of imagination—a faculty too often thwarted and warped by the fears of parents and friends that it means insincerity and falsehood, when it is in reality but the spontaneous exercise of faculties as yet unknown even to the possessor, and misunderstood by those so-called trainers of infancy. ”

“ I would satisfy their desire, chattering as eagerly as the children themselves, and often, in spite of the self-assurance of youth and the ridiculous pride which it takes in the miserable crumbs of worldly wisdom it possesses, I would feel like a twenty-year-old child in a conclave of sages. ”

“ Between childhood, we say, and maturity; it is the transition from one to the other. When human beings, then, are neither boys nor men, girls nor women, they must be for a few years anomalous creatures, must they? ”

“ An infant’s misery makes!
We overrule, and over-teach,
We curb and we confine,
And put the heart to school too soon,
To learn our narrow line.
No; only taught by love to love,
Seems childhood’s natural task ”

“ But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ”

“ As the intelligence of the child awakens, it no longer perceives in the lazy, dreamy way in which the infant is conscious of a light; it apperceives, takes into itself the object, the word, the thought, and grows thereby. ”

“ Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as with ours ”

“ For a new age has dawned, and another kind of child,—a child who reasons and thinks, and studies arithmetic and the science of objects. We have lost our worshippers. Even the babies sprawling in their mothers' laps know better than to believe in us. Long we strove,—we practised all our lore, traced our rings in the grass, dropped fairy favors into little stockings, made bluebottle-fly and dragonfly our messengers,—but all in vain. ”

“ Vicious propensities will, perhaps, begin to show themselves; and in the hardened and shameless youth it will be hard to recognize any trace of the innocence of infancy. But, perhaps, instead of viciousness, carelessness is developed, and youth is brightened by gayety, amiability, and ready generosity. ”

“ But, in abstraction from the atmosphere of feeling, one behaviour pattern is as good as another; and they ate all equally uninteresting. The chief value of memories of infancy and young childhood is that with unconscious naiveté they convey the tonality of the society amid which that childhood was passed. ”

“ No, if nature has given the child this plasticity of brain which fits him to receive every kind of impression, it was not that you should imprint on it the names and dates of kings, the jargon of heraldry, the globe and geography, all those words without present meaning or future use for the child, which flood of words overwhelms his sad and barren childhood. ”

“ The danger to the child's culture, artistic, intellectual, and moral, of the ordinary juveniles lies just here, the heaping-up of sensations, the effort to provide a thrill for every page, throws the story out of balance, strains the child's nerves, and helps to produce a depraved taste. ”

“ Here is where our appreciative contemplation of childhood becomes self-conscious; we cannot see the little ones doing what we did in years gone by. Perhaps this, perhaps that; we have our first moral doubt. ”

“ What relationship he is relying on we can get only by watching the child’s own activities. The second part [Pg 4] of the task is to discover what is pattern to the untrained but unspoiled ears, eyes, muscles and minds of the little folk who are to consume the stories. Each part of the task has its peculiar difficulties. But fortunately in each, children do point the way if we have the courage to forget our own adult way and follow theirs. ”

“ As a man forty years of age he returns to the condition of childhood previous to his fright—a child in intellect and knowledge, having no occupation; he is simply an ordinary, quiet, well-behaved, obedient boy. ”

“ There is coming to be a greater sympathy between teachers and learners, as there is a clearer knowledge of the way the mind grows. But even yet one may detect a certain note of condescension in the treatment of the characteristics of early childhood. The child, we say, has eager curiosity, a [Pg 182] myth-making imagination, a sensitiveness to momentary impressions, a desire to make things and to destroy things, a tendency to imitate what he admires. ”

“ The period of adolescence here assumes the prominence that childhood has in the psychological study preparatory to teaching in lower schools. This is the period of beginnings, the beginning of a more ambitious and generous life, a life having the future wrapped up in it; a transition period, of mental storm and stress, in which egoism gives way to altruism, romance has charm, and the social, moral, and religious feelings bud and bloom. ”

“ Such men have a way of fixing youth with intense, severe gaze—of smiling with a fiendish self-complacency over their own superiority—of raising their eyebrows and reprimanding should the child be watching the flight of a sparrow instead of being ever alert for an unexpected question or bit of information which a grown person might put to him on earth. ”

“ Just so irrational, inconsequent, loving and heroic, and generally tiresome to the grown-up world were our own impulses that long ago, on which we look back with tenderness, but seldom with complacency. If we rise, after reading, The Story of a Child [See Appendix A] , a little more humble, a little more diffident, ready to believe more than we see, why, it will do us no harm, and should bless and help the children. ”

“ The child's interest in expressions of face, its subtle, unconscious responses to the moods and to the current general nervous conditions of its nurse or mother, its delights, and later its terrors in the contemplation of strange persons, these things go far beyond what the mere association of ideas can warrant or explain. ”

“ I might say elders, parents, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, but the word which the child himself uses seems to me, for all reasons, to be the best word for my use, because it expresses fully and finally the nature of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the people who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a child. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change—to watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in the world. ”

“ Does not this rightly imply that between childhood and boyhood is fixed a perceptible gulf, physical, spiritual, psychological, and that in minds in which the powers and tendencies conspicuous in boyhood, and more or less dormant or latent in earlier years, predominate, those of childhood are apt to fade and fall away? ”

“ And oh, how instinctively do we hang over the early scenes of our boyhood, brightened by the recollection of that waking eye that never closed while a single wave of misfortune or danger sighed around her child. ”

“ For although so much stress is laid upon the impressionability of first childhood and the ineffaceable marks that are engraven on it, yet as to all that belongs to the mind and judgment this third period, in the early years of adolescence, is more sensitive still, because real criticism is just beginning to be possible and appreciation is in its spring-tide, now for the first time fully alive and awake. ”

“ After you come to a clear appreciation of the value of imagination in the child's development you will, instead of suppressing his feelings, look around for ways of encouraging this activity of his mind. You will see a new value in fairy tales and fables and a new significance in every turn of his fancy.
IV. THE LIES CHILDREN TELL None of the petty vices of childhood appears to shock adults so much as lying; and none is more widespread among children—and among adults. ”

“ There springs up as a consequence of this, childish timidity, which is a moral malady acquired by a will which could not develop; and which with the usual calumny with which the tyrant consciously or not, covers up his own mistakes, we consider as an inherent trait of childhood. ”

“ This yea-saying to anything and everything, which surges up with the conviction of an explosion at every moment, everywhere, is far more important, far more profound, far more solid, as a characteristic of childhood, than that mythical innocence and sweet merriness which is the only characteristic of healthy childhood that superficial child-lovers will either grant or recognize. ”

“ What an unnatural thing it is to confine a child several hours a day to his lessons; why, you might as well put a colt in harness, and make him work for his living! A child is made for play; his roguish little eye, his lithe figure, his antics, and his drollery, all point out that he is cut out for play—that it is as necessary to his existence as the food he eats, and as the air he breathes! ”