in any community in this country fifty years ago who could buy whatever they wanted for their children; or, indeed, for themselves. There was no such freeness of purchases for children, for the table, for the house or the household, as is now common on every side. Children then did not expect a new suit of clothes every few months. Often they had old ones made over for them, from those of their parents or of their elder brothers and sisters. A present from the toy-shop or bookstore was a rarity in those days. There was not much choosing by children what they would eat as they sat down at the family table. There was still less of planning by them for a summer journey with their parents to a mountain or seaside resort. Self-denial, or more or less of personal privation, came as a necessity to almost every child in the younger days of many who are now on the stage of active life. But how different now!
The average child of the present generation receives more presents and more indulgences from his parents in any one year of his life than the average child of a generation ago received in all the years of his childhood. Because of this new standard, the child of to-day expects new things, as a matter of course; he asks for them, in the belief that he will receive them. In consequence of their abundance, he sets a smaller value upon them severally. It is not possible that he should think as highly of any one new thing, out of a hundred coming to him in rapid succession, as he would of the only gift of an entire year.
A boy of nowadays can hardly prize his new bicycle, or his “double-ripper” sled, after all the other presents he has received, as his father prized a little wagon made of a raisin-box, with wheels of ribbon-blocks, which was his only treasure in the line of locomotion. A little girl cannot have as profound enjoyment in her third wax doll of the year, with eyes which open and shut, as her mother had with her one clumsy doll of stuffed rags or of painted wood. A new child’s book was a wonder a generation since; it is now hardly more to one of our children than the evening paper is to the father of the family. It is now hard work to give a new sensation—or, at all events, to make a permanent impression—by the bestowal of a gift of any sort on a child. It would be far easier to surprise and to impress many a child by refusing to give to him what he asked for and expected; and that treatment would in some cases be greatly to a child’s advantage.
A distinctive feature of the child-training of the ancient Spartans was the rigid discipline of constant self-denial, to which the child was subjected from infancy onward. And this feature of child-training among that people had much to do with giving to the Spartans their distinguishing characteristics of simplicity of manners, of powers of endurance, and of dauntless bravery. The best primitive peoples everywhere have recognized the pre-eminent importance of this feature of child-training. Its neglect has come only with the growth in luxury among peoples of the highest material civilization. The question is an important one, whether it is well to lose all the advantages of this method of training, simply because it is not found to be a necessity as a means of sustaining physical life, where wealth abounds so freely.
It is not that a child is to be denied what he wants, merely for the sake of the denial itself; but it is that a child ought not to have what he wants merely because he wants it. It is not that there is a necessary gain in a denial to a child; but it is that when a denial to a child is necessary, there is an added gain to him through his finding that he must do without what he longs for. It is every parent’s duty to deny a child many things which he wants; to teach him that he must get along without a great many things which seem very desirable; to train him to self-denial and endurance, at the table, in the play-room; with companions, and away from them: and the doing of this duty by the parent brings a sure advantage to the child. Whatever else he has, a child ought not to lack this element of a wise training.
VIII.
HONORING A CHILD’S INDIVIDUALITY.
A child is liable to be looked upon as if he were simply one child among many children, a specimen representative of childhood generally; but every child stands all by himself in the world as an individual, with his own personality and character, with his own thoughts and feelings, his own hopes and fears and possibilities, his own relations to his fellow-beings and to God. This truth is often realized by a child before his parents realize it; and if it be unperceived and unrecognized by his parents, they are thereby shut off from the opportunity of doing for him much that can be done by them only as they give due honor to their child’s individuality as a child.
A little babe is not a mere bit of child-material, to be worked up by outside efforts and influences into a child-reality; but he is already a living organism, with all the possibilities of his highest manhood working within him toward their independent development. Here is the difference, on a lower plane, between a mass of clay being molded by the sculptor’s hands into a statue of grace and beauty, and a seed of herb or tree containing within itself the germ of a new and peculiar individual specimen of its own unchanging species. An acorn is more than the fruit of the oak that bore it; it is the germ of another oak, like, and yet unlike, all the oaks that the world has known before the growth of this one. So, also, a child is more than the mere child of his earthly parents; he is, in embryo, a man with characteristics and qualities such as his parents could never attain to, and which, it may be, the world has never before seen equaled.
The possibilities of Moses, who was to put his impress upon the world’s character, were in the Hebrew babe, as his loving mother laid him tenderly in the pitch-daubed basket of papyrus, to hide him away among the flags of the Nile-border, as they were not in any native babe of the household of Pharaoh; and if his mother had any intuitive womanly sense of his grand future in the providence of God, her zeal and faith in his behalf were quickened and inspired accordingly. And so it has been all along the ages; the germs of power and achievement were already in the babe, who was afterward known as Plato, or Cæsar, or Muhammad, or Charlemagne, or Columbus, or Shakespeare, or Washington. And who will doubt that many a germ of such possibility in a young child has been quickened or repressed, according as that child’s parents have perceived and honored, or have failed to realize and to foster, the best that was involved in the child’s individuality?
It was to the credit of the high-priest Eli, that he perceived that the child Samuel was capable of receiving communications from the Lord, such as were denied to the possessor of Urim and Thummim; and that he honored the child’s individuality so far as to encourage him to declare the message that God had sent by him; instead of treating the child as one who could receive nothing from God, save as it came to him through the medium of his guardians and seniors. This spirit it was that prompted Trebonius to bare his head as he entered the school-room where he was looked up to as the teacher; because, as he suggested, he recognized in every child before him there the possibility of lofty attainment in his developed individuality. And it can hardly be doubted that this attitude of the teacher Trebonius had its measure of influence in bringing to its fruition the germinal power in his pupil Martin Luther. Trebonius and Eli are—so far, at least—a pattern to the parents of to-day.
It is not merely that the child is to be the possessor of a marked and distinctive individuality, and that therefore he is to be honored for his possibilities in that direction; but it is that he already is the possessor of such an individuality, and that he is worthy of honor for that which he has and is at the present time. Many a child, while a child, is the superior of his parents in the basis and scope of character, in the attributes of genius, and in the instincts of high spiritual perception. This is the true order of things in the progress of God’s plans for the race; the better is in the coming generations, not in the past. But even where the child is not the superior, he is always the peer in individuality of those to whom he looks up with honoring reverence as his parents, and he is entitled to recognition by them in that peership.
Every one who recalls clearly his child-time thoughts
