Introduction : Part 2

The American Child
by Elizabeth McCracken

(Page 2 of 9)

The next day I got for the little girl at a "kindergarten supply" establishment a box of the paper woofs and warps, so well-known to kindergarten pupils. Not more than three or four days elapsed before I took them to the child; but I found that her busy mother had already provided her with some; pink and white, moreover, among other colors; and had taught the little girl how to weave with them.

"She understands, now, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one way and white the other!" the mother observed.

"Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some curiosity.

"Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time. She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do the spending the better for knowing just what she is buying, - what it is made of, and how it is made!"

It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents of all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me, however, that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of any other era or nation, think, in training their children, of what one might designate as a most minutely detailed future. The mother of whom I have been telling wished to teach her little girl not only how to buy, but how to buy gingham; and the father desired his small boy to learn not alone that his state had a board of health, but that he might hope to become a member of a particular department of it.

We occasionally hear elderly persons exclaim that children of the present day are taught a great many things that did not enter into the education of their grandparents, or even of their parents. But, on investigation, we scarcely find that this is the case. What we discover is that the children of to-day are taught, not new lessons, but the old lessons by a new method. Sewing, for example: little girls no longer make samplers, working on them the letters of the alphabet in "cross- stitch"; they learn to do cross-stitch letters, only they learn not by working the entire alphabet on a square of linen merely available to "learn on," but by working the initials of a mother or an aunt on a "guest towel," which later serves as a Christmas or a birthday gift of the most satisfactory kind! Perhaps one of the best things we do for the little girls of our families is to teach them to take their first stitches to some definite end. Certainly we do it with as conscientious a care as ever watched over the stitches of the little girls of old as they made the faded samplers we cherish so affectionately.

The brothers of these little girls learned carpentry, when they were old enough to handle tools with safety. The boys of to-day also learn it; some of them begin long before they can handle any tools with safety, and when they can handle no tool at all except a hammer. As soon as they wish to drive nails, they are allowed to drive them, and taught to drive them to some purpose. I happened not a great while ago to pass the day at the summer camp of a friend of mine who is the mother of a small boy, aged five. My friend's husband was constructing a rustic bench.

The little boy watched for a time; then, "Daddy, I want to put in nails," he said.

"All right," replied his father; "you may. Just wait a minute and I'll let you have the hammer and the nails. Your mother wants some nails in the kitchen to hang the tin things on. If she will show you where she wants them, I'll show you how to put them in."

This was done, with much gayety on the part of us all. When the small boy, tutored by his father, had driven in all the required nails, he lifted a triumphant face to his mother. "There they are!" he exclaimed. "Now let's hang the tin things on them, and see how they look!"

The boy's father did not finish the rustic bench that day. When a neighboring camper, who stopped in to call toward the end of the afternoon, expressed surprise at his apparent dilatoriness, and asked for an explanation, the father simply said, "I did mean to finish it to- day, but I had to do something for my boy instead."

One of the things we grown-ups do for children that has been rather severely criticized is the lavishing upon them of toys, - intricate and costly toys. "What, as a child, I used to pretend the toys I had, were, the toys my children have now, are!" an acquaintance of mine was saying to me recently. "For instance," she went on, "I had a box with a hole in one end of it; I used to pretend that it was a camera, and pretend to take pictures with it! I cannot imagine my children doing that! They have real cameras and take real pictures."

The camera would seem to be typical of the toys we give to the children of to-day; they can do something with it, - something real.

The dearest treasure of my childhood was a tiny gold locket, shaped, and even engraved, like a watch. Not long ago I was showing it to a little girl who lives in New York. "I used to pretend it was a watch," I said; "I used to pretend telling the time by it."

She gazed at it with interested eyes. "It is very nice," she observed politely; "but wouldn't you have liked to have a real watch? I have one; and I really tell the time by it."

"But you cannot pretend with it!" I found myself saying.

"Oh, yes, I can," the little girl exclaimed in surprise; "and I do! I hang it on the cupola of my dolls' house and pretend that it is the clock in the Metropolitan Tower!"

The alarmists warn us that what we do for the children in the direction of costly and complicated toys may, even while helping them do something for themselves, mar their priceless simplicity. Need we fear this? Is it not likely that the "real" watches which we give them that they may "really" tell time, will be used, also, for more than one of the other simple purposes of childhood?

The English woman said that we Americans did so much, so very much, for the children of our nation. There have been other foreigners who asserted that we did too much. Indubitably, we do a great deal. But, since we do it all that the children may learn to do, and, through doing, to be, can we ever possibly do too much? "It is possible to converse with any American on the American child," the English woman said. Certainly every American has something to say on that subject, because every American is trying to do something for some American child, or group of children, to do much, very much.