Immaturity

“ Occupying someone else's home, they are not well acquainted with adult responsibilities. Stunted growth and stagnant immaturity are the hallmarks of an entire generation, stifled by the ominous proximity of suffocating, invasive love. ”

“ Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; ”

“ Now, in the case of boys especially, it may happen that these dull adolescents lie in wait to bully and tease the young gifted boy, whose "book-learning" they detest and whose immaturity suggests the term "baby." ”

“ Much could be said of the special problems of the young gifted child in this period of immaturity when his intellectual needs are those of an adolescent while his emotional control and physical powers are still but those of a child. It would be of great interest to study the reactions of older persons to the insistent questions and searchings of these young children. "You are too young to understand." "You can't know all that till you grow older." ”

“ A little child should be surrounded with the best influences of all sorts, and with behaviour not to avoid, but to imitate. The long period of immaturity, which is one of [238] our human distinctions, has its value in the accumulated improvements which may be built into the race in that time. It is a period of enrichment, of clear growth. To expose the young to disadvantageous conditions, especially the very young, is a method of education finding no precedent in nature and no justification in reason. ”

“ On the assumption that maturity and experience are relevant to intelligent and responsible exercise of the elective franchise, are the immaturity and inexperience of the average 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old sufficiently serious to justify denying such a person a direct voice in decisions affecting his or her life? ”

“ Many of your characteristics are those of immaturity, notwithstanding your years, your education, and your experience. You still retain many youthful tendencies. You are inclined to be impulsive. You are very responsive emotionally, and when your emotions are aroused you are prone to decide important matters without reference to facts, reason, and logic. Another very youthful characteristic in you is your tendency to be headstrong, wilful, stubborn, and opinionated. When you have arrived at one of your swift conclusions you find it very difficult to take advice. ”

“ Ignorance and lack of definite purpose, the two prime causes of misfits, have many different ways of bungling people into the wrong job and keeping them there.
IMMATURE JUDGMENT
The first of these is immaturity of judgment on the part of young people. There is a popular fallacy that the thing which a young man or a young woman wants most to do must be the thing for which he or she is preeminently fitted. "Let him follow his bent," say some advisors, "and he will find his niche." This does not happen often. The average young man is immature. His tastes are not formed. He is undeveloped. ”

“ The seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality of the possibilities of immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. The fulfillment of growing is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is to say, an Ungrowth, something which is no longer growing. The futility of the assumption is seen in the fact that every adult resents the imputation of having no further possibilities of growth ”

“ Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a positive force or ability,—the pouter to grow. We do not have to draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them ”

“ They are signs of possible growth. They are to be turned into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or cultivated for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena (even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are moving toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent and teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot be better put than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the child. ”

“ And the path indicated by the law is continuous and progressive, with no transition stage from the cradle to the grave, except that maturity takes up the regular self-direction to which immaturity has been trained. ”

“ It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity. ”

“ No doubt you say to yourself: ‘I am young, I am of the period, it is for me to act as interpreter between the parent, who is of another generation, and the youth, who belongs to mine.’ But if I read your thought correctly, my child—and I have no doubt that I do—it is an arrogant one, and altogether unworthy of you. ”

“ When night came on and I was restless instead of wooing slumber on my behalf with soft and soothing lullabies, or telling me fairy-stories such as children love, she would say: The child's mind is immature. His conclusions, therefore, are immature. Whence his decisions as to what he likes lack maturity, and consequently to give him that for which he professes to like is equivalent to feeding him on unripe fruit. So we conclude that what he says he likes he really does not like, and to please him therefore, it becomes necessary to give him what he professes to dislike. ”

“ This unmanliness is so common a result of our half-education,—teaching a youth Latin and metaphysics and history, and neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy,—allowing him to skulk from the games of ball and skates and coasting down the hills on his sled, and whatever else would lead him and keep him on even terms with boys, so that he can meet them as an equal, and lead in his turn,—that I wish his guardians to consider that they are thus preparing him to play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. ”

“ He is qualified for no profession, and plodding his way in ignorance, his associations must be low, and grovelling, and in his path through life he must be vicious and unhappy. And let me ask, for what profession is it possible that the boy can be prepared that was never instructed at home, nor at school, nor any where else? The answer is suggested to every mind by the question itself. And what is such a boy fit for? He is fit for the pursuit of vice and wretchedness; and that is the pursuit upon which he will be likely to enter. Ignorance and vice are the parents of misery. ”

“ What sympathy can we have with that state of being which we regard as immature, so long as we commit the double mistake of sometimes attributing to children motives which could only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes denying to them the same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our maturer life? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not made up of separate parts, but is one—is a progressive whole. When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind. ”

“ There are things that happened to me in my adolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me, the first humiliations I was made to suffer, the waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my youth. ”

“ Entrusted with the moral and intellectual training of a score or two of juveniles, with all sorts of temperaments, and all sorts of bringing up, and some with no bringing up at all; some, so full of fun and roguery that an attempt to repress them seems like turning nature out of her course; others, so obstinate that the most to be hoped for is sullenness, instead of submission, their parents the while watching with jealous eyes any assertion of authority which they have not seen fit to maintain ”

“ Thou art deficient in firmness and coolness; hence all thy errors in the education of the little one. Teach him that when thou hast once denied him anything it is determined and irrevocable, and that neither petulance nor the most urgent entreaties will be of any avail:—once fail in this, and you have an ill-taught obstinate boy, particularly with the natural tendency to strength of character which our little one possesses; and it costs a hundred times more labour to set him right again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [14] 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. ”

“ Oh! beware, beware, you who complain of the behaviour of children now-a-days, lest your children have as much cause to complain of you. Are your children selfish, lovers of themselves?—See that you have not set them the example by your own covetousness or laziness. Are they boastful?—See that your pride has not taught them. Incontinent and profligate?—See that your own fierceness has not taught them. If they see you unable to master your own temper, they will not care to try to master their appetites. ”

“ Very readily such a child perceives that in comparison with himself his parent is slow-witted and lacking in general information. Yet in self-control and in experience of life, the child is still very immature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This perversity and positiveness of temper, ultimately arise from the want of occupation, and from deficient energy of mind. We may guard against these evils by education: when we see a playful, active child, we have little fear of his temper. "Oh, he will certainly be good tempered, he is the most obedient, complying creature in the world, he'll do any thing you ask him." But let us cultivate his understanding, and give him tastes which shall occupy and interest him agreeably through life, or else this sweet, complying temper will not last till he is thirty. ”

“ Hand in hand with spells of most irritating self-assertiveness, the adolescent is subject to spells of most depressing humility and self-abnegation. Indeed, at every point this period is marked by the most violent contrasts and alterations of mood. Hours or days of seeming indifference to all interests and activities will be followed by keen excitement and enthusiasm. A fit of doubt in his own ability and worthiness will be followed by almost ludicrous self-confidence. ”

“ The cause of shy, bashful, self-conscious youngsters is wrong training. They are repressed instead of developed. Their natural tendencies are held down by constant reminders and scoldings and warnings. ”

“ But I was thinking then, and I may tell you now, that you remind me not of the women of my own Earth, but of petted children suddenly transferred to a harsh school. You speak and look like such a child, as if you expected each moment at least to be severely scolded, if not beaten, without knowing your fault. ”

“ But for the most part, adults have given training rather than education. An impatient, premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of adult habits of thought and affection has been desired. The combined effect of love of power, timidity in the face of the novel and a self-admiring complacency has been too strong to permit immature impulse to exercise its re-organizing potentialities. ”

“ My life, I am going to tell you, has not been an ideal one. After the wildness of youth came the deliberate transgressions of maturity, then the more flagrant, because purposeless sins which followed satiety. ”

“ We are urged to courses that are petty, unworthy, selfish, debasing, supine, and brutal by our own natures or those of our mates. But for the child we act nobly, its call to us is always to our finer side, and so gradually we are lifted higher. ”