Dealing with Moral Crises : Part 2

Religious Education in the Family
by Henry F. Cope

(Page 20 of 28)

3. Anger

An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or that it was acquired in the adolescent period.

The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person; there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school of normal social living.

Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character of the child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons, first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control, to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace and interfere with the well-being of others.

It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.

In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.

4. Methods of Dealing with Anger

It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant will not help the case. He may feel the emotion of your anger but misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first exercises in training character.

Consider the future. Each family is a social unit, a little world. Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality, under similar circum stances, serve in the business of mature life? Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character. Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must guide it.

When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own temper.

Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, train him in self-control. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but it is the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and school and street.

Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.

Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of forgiveness and, if the occasion warrants, the dignity and courage of the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how great is the victory of forgiveness.

I. References for Study

The Problem of Temper. Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.

E. P. St. John, Child Nature and Child Nurture, chap. v. Pilgrim Press, $0.50.

J. Sully, Children's Ways, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.

II. Further Reading

Patterson Du Bois, The Culture of Justice, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.75.

E. H. Abbott, The Training of Parents. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.

M. Wood-Allen, Making the Best of Our Children. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each.

H. Y. Campbell, Practical Motherhood. Longmans, $2.50.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral crises?

2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in children?

3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?

4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?

5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy authority?

6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?

7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?

8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly developed life?

Copyright 1915 by The University of Chicago