The Mind of the Child - Child Psychology : Part 11

The Story of the Mind
by James Mark Baldwin

(Page 14 of 21)

3. Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually close relationship between children in youth, such as childish favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home, etc. We have in these facts - and there is a very great variety of them - an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed influences. It has never been studied by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure, teachers have been alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and students to room together; but that has been with view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as teachers and leaders of our children, must go deeper than that. Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and roommate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of what all isolated children are subject to.

A sensitive nature, a girl whose very life is a branch of a social tree, is placed in a new environment, to engraft upon the members of her mutilated self - her very personality; it is nothing less than that - utterly new channels of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the greatest possible variety of social influences. Instead of this, she is allowed to meet, eat, walk, talk, lie down at night, and rise in the morning, with one other person, a "copy" set before her, as immature in all likelihood as herself, or, if not so, yet a single personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers, mothers, teachers, elders, give the children room!

They need all that they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety; variety is the soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in the stress of the conflicts of suggestion, born right out of his imitative hesitations; and just this is the analogy which he must assimilate and depend upon in his own conflicts for self-control and social continence. So impressively true is this from the human point of view that, in my opinion - formed, it is true, from the very few data accessible on such points, still a positive opinion - friendships of a close exclusive kind should be discouraged or broken up, except when under the immediate eye of the wise parent or guardian; and even when allowed, these relationships should, in all cases, be used to entrain the sympathetic and moral sentiments into a wider field of social exercise.

One of the merits of the great English schools and of the free schools of America is that in them the boys acquire, from necessity, the independence of sturdy character, and the self-restraint which is self-imposed. The youth brought up to mind a tutor often fails of the best discipline.

4. The remainder of this section may be devoted to the further emphasis of the need of close observation of children's games, especially those which may be best described as "society games." All those who have given even casual observation to the doings of the nursery have been impressed with the extraordinary facility of the child's mind, from the second year onward, in imagining and plotting social and dramatic situations. It has not been so evident, however, to these casual observers, nor to many really more skilled, that they were observing in these fancy plays the putting together anew of fragments, or larger pieces, of the adult's mental history. Here, in these games, we see the actual use which our children make of the personal "copy" material which they get from you and me.

If a man study these games patiently in his own children, and analyze them out, he gradually sees emerge from within the inner consciousness a picture of the boy's own father, whom he aspires to be like, and whose actions he seeks to generalize and apply. The picture is poor, for the child takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than of the good! But, be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets. Heredity does not stop with birth; it is then only beginning.

And the pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is simply left to take its course for the further establishing and confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did not leave the real school to make a play school, setting up a box for one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? Was there ever a child who did not play "church," and force the improvised "papa" into the pulpit? Were there ever children who did not "buy" things from fancied stalls in every corner of the nursery, after they had once seen an elder drive a trade in the market? The point is this: the child's personality grows; growth is always by action; he clothes upon himself the scenes of the parent's life and acts them out; so he grows in what he is, what he understands, and what he is able to perform.

In order to be of more direct service to observers of games of this character, let me give a short account of an observation of the kind made some time ago - one of the simplest of many actual situations which my two little girls, Helen and Elizabeth, have acted out together. It is a very commonplace case, a game the elements of which are evident in their origin; but I choose this rather than one more complex, since observers are usually not psychologists, and they find the elementary the more instructive.

On May 2 I was sitting on the porch alone with the children - the two mentioned above, aged respectively four and a half and two and a half years. Helen, the elder, told Elizabeth that she was her little baby; that is, Helen became "mamma," and Elizabeth the "baby." The younger responded by calling her sister "mamma," and the play began.

Copyright 1902 by D. Appleton and Company.

About the Author

James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.