MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION Mother- Love 
/;/ Motion 
BY 
PRUDENCE BRADISH 
Harper & Brothers Publishers 
New York and London Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the United States of America 
Published, January, 1919 
A-T 
Mother-Love In Action TO 
ALL MY CHILDREN 
WHEREVER THEY MAY BE ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
MOST of the material in this book has 
been published during the past three 
years, in weekly articles in the New York 
Evening Post and other newspapers. Grate- 
ful acknowledgment is made now to the 
New York Evening Post, Inc., for per- 
mission to use the material in this form. 
Even much greater is my gratitude to 
all those lovers of children, of this day 
and other days, who have contributed 
immeasurably with ideas, expressions and 
inspiration out of their vast experience. 
Prudence Bradish. CONTENTS 
CHAP. PAGE 
Introductory xi 
I. Before the Baby Comes 1 
EE. Playing with Baby 8 
III. Sense-plays 17 
IV. When the Children Sleep .... 34 
V. Baby Talk—and Good Conversation . 40 
VI. Playmates 47 
VII. Training and Breaking Wills . . 55 
Vin. Educational Materials Right at 
Hand 60 
IX. Habits ! . 66 
X. Young Liars—and Their Parents . 73 
XI. Punishments 78 
XII. Curiosity in Children 83 
XIII. . Making a Fearless Child .... 89 
XIV. Obedience, and Self-control ... 95 
XV. Dirt and Happiness 101 
XVI. Dolls—and the Girl 107 
XVII. The First Year of School .... 114 
XVIII. Friend Teacher 121 
XIX. Mirth, the Household Tonic . . . 127 
XX. The Atmosphere of Love and Affec- 
tion 132 CONTENTS 
CHAP. PAGE 
XXI. Father, This Is for You . . •. . 138 
XXII. Story-telling for the Children . . 145 
XXIII. Poetry in the Home 151 
XXIV. Let the Children Tell Stories . . 157 
XXV. Every Child His Own Dramatist . 163 
XXVI. The Collecting “Bug” - 169 
XXVII. Out-of-door Lessons 175 
XXVIII. Table-talk 181 
XXIX. Good Manners vs. Good Breeding . 189 
XXX. Fretters and Whiners 196 
XXXI. Traveling with Children .... 202 
XXXII. “Avenues of Escape” 208 
XXXIII. Ignorant Girls Who Get Married . 214 
XXXIV. When the Children Go Away . . 219 
XXXV. Away at School and College . . . 225 
XXXVI. Home Again After Commencement . 232 
XXXVII. The Test of Training 238 INTRODUCTORY 
CVEN a plumber or a letter-carrier—and I 
' have a full appreciation of both—has to 
have some training for his business. What 
trade is there for which one is not fitted some- 
how by instruction, by knowledge of the ele- 
ments of the work to be done? But mothers! 
Most of us were suffered to go about the most 
important trade in the world with little or no 
preparation or understanding of any of its 
aspects. For most of us, we were left to learn 
our business of being mothers by the hardest 
kind of experience, and at the expense of the 
first of the children. Yes, it was a wonder that 
they turned out as well as they did! 
During the last twenty years or so the 
change in the general attitude toward this 
subject has borne fruit in a wonderful lot of 
research on the part of doctors, scientists, re- 
formers, statesmen, teachers, and plain, earnest 
women without professional status. The physi- 
cal, mental, and moral growth of the child has 
been worked over and written about until 
XI INTRODUCTORY 
there is a large and inspiring literature about 
every phase of his development from infancy 
through adolescence—until son or daughter is 
ready to go forth into the world as an adult 
and take up the work of man or woman. 
This book is put forth by a mother who has 
met and tried to solve the manifold problems 
constituting the Mother’s Job, with the desire 
to awaken and inspire those who may not have 
realized the privilege and the wonder—and the 
enormous responsibility of it—to provoke and 
encourage a deeper sense of the magnitude and 
importance of the task that lies at the hand of 
her who has dared to bring a live child into the 
world. MOTHER-LOVE IN 
ACTION 
I 
BEFORE THE BABY COMES 
A FRIEND of mine once talked delightedly 
of the possibility of her adopting children. 
She has none of her own. 
“I would love,” she said, “to adopt two little 
girls about three or four years old; they are so 
cunning at that age, so sweet and pretty to 
dress! But I’m not sure. I saw two girls about 
seven to-day—they used to be so pretty! Now 
they are so awkward and plain-looking; and 
they’ve lost their front teeth.” 
“But wouldn’t you want a real little baby if 
you could get one?” I asked. “It would seem 
so much more your own, and then you could 
watch it develop from the very first.” 
“Oh dear, no!” she cried, “Not I! I don’t 
1 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
care for little babies—they are so helpless, and 
really a nuisance.” 
Perhaps wise Providence knew best when He 
gave this woman no children; but I really be- 
lieve that if she had a baby of her own—or even 
adopted one new-born—she would see how won- 
derful it was and how full of possibilities. 
There is nothing so wonderful on the whole 
earth as a new-born baby, and wise mothers 
know that from the very first hour every minute 
counts, and tells for good or ill in the making of 
character. To have the right environment and 
influence from the very beginning and through 
the infant years is essential to wholesome, nor- 
mal character, but it is astonishing how few 
mothers realize this. 
But there is something that comes even 
earlier, and it begins in the attitude of the ex- 
pectant mother. Child-training begins with the 
training of the mother. Doctor Holmes thought 
it ought to begin at least with the careful selec- 
tion of grandparents—or was it great-grand- 
parents? For most of us, however, the best we 
can do is to try to get the parents, and especially 
the mother, into the right frame of mind toward 
the expected infant, and toward the tremendous 
job she has undertaken. 
Happily for most of the mothers of to-day, 
the coming of a child is no longer spoken of in 
2 BEFORE THE BABY COMES 
whispers, as if it were something to be ashamed 
of. Almost extinct is that nauseous breed of 
dirty-minded folk like the woman who “thought 
it indecent to speak of a child until it was at least 
six months old!” The right-minded mother, 
surrounded by right-minded friends, goes about 
her wonderful business of preparation secure in 
the knowledge of sympathy and approval. 
Sadly few women enter upon marriage with 
any adequate notion of the importance and 
privilege of motherhood. Many of them are 
well educated in mathematics, languages, litera- 
ture, history, art, economics, science, and so on, 
and all that is well enough; but the principal 
reason and purpose of marriage is still treated 
as if it were the least of the happenings of life. 
For few of them is there any definite prepara- 
tion for the most wonderful experience they are 
to have, an experience involving not only their 
own welfare and the welfare of their children, but 
that of the whole of humanity. Who knows what 
this child that is coming may be in the history of 
his generation and the generations following? 
T TEREDITY is no doubt immensely impor- 
* tant, but that is a settled matter. Let 
us hope that you selected the right father for 
your child. Anyway, it is too late now to alter 
3 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
that. Be the heredity what it may, you can 
work wonders with environment. The worse 
the heredity the more important it is that the 
environment shall be the best possible, and the 
physical well-being and mental attitude of the 
mother are for the child the beginnings of 
environment. 
First of all, the woman who knows that she 
is to become a mother must realize how vastly 
important it is that she should keep well, that 
her body should be a fit home for the coming 
child. She must see that she has plenty of 
simple, nourishing food, warm and comfortable 
clothing, freedom for constant walking and 
muscular action and for her own breathing, and 
without restriction of the soft parts that must 
have room for the growth of the child during 
the entire nine months before the baby is born. 
Every minute of the period is important if 
mother and child are to keep well. 
Try to live in an atmosphere of love and 
happiness. I know that is sometimes easier to 
say than to do, but strive for it, nevertheless. 
Try to keep sensible, calm, well poised, high- 
minded. Avoid petty gossip and irritating quar- 
rels. Keep worry out of your life, and anger 
most of all; both are deadly poisons. Keep 
out of doors at least two hours of every day, 
and walk as much as possible—two or three 
4 BEFORE THE BABY COMES 
miles, if you can. Let the doctor advise you 
about how much physical exercise you can 
safely undertake. Insist upon ample and un- 
disturbed sleep at night, and have a nap during 
the day. 
See that your house is in good running order; 
reduce its detail to the utmost of simplicity, 
and in any event do not permit yourself to get 
fussed over picayune matters. Let nothing in- 
terfere with your daily bath and rub, deep- 
breathing exercises, and as much of a walk as 
you can stand. After the baby comes there 
will be a most exacting round of duties; your 
leisure will be scant, your sleep will be inter- 
rupted, and every ounce of strength that you 
can store up in advance will be drawn upon. 
Begin your study at once, even if you expect 
to have a trained nurse to care for your baby. 
You will want to know whether the nurse is 
doing it properly. 
There is a large literature on the subject to 
which you can resort. In every degree of 
simplicity and elaboration they are available, 
in any good library; or any bookseller can show 
you the list. Your doctor will help you to 
know the best ones. I am very far from mean- 
ing that you should delve deep into medical 
books and get yourself into a morbid state of 
mind by reading of obstetric technicalities. 
5 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
Leave that to the doctor; it is his business. 
But I do mean that you should make yourself 
intelligent about the experience that is to come to 
you, and about the great task you have under- 
taken, of bringing a new life into the world. 
'T'HERE is something about doing the 
* physical things for your child as much 
as you can yourself that draws you together 
wonderfully. For myself, I would not surrender 
this experience altogether to any nurse, though 
she were the most competent in the world. The 
whole character and personality of the child are 
influenced by these simple and commonplace 
things. The body, mind, and soul of a child 
are not confined in separate compartments; he 
is a person, and all of him grows together and is 
influenced together. Every detail reacts upon 
his whole nature. Right at the beginning, the 
simplest physical experiences may be dealt with 
in such a way, or neglected so, as to fasten upon 
him bad habits that will clog or curse his whole 
life. That is why you should inform yourself 
in advance about the best way to conserve the 
physical welfare of your child. 
Prepare plenty of simple clothing for him; 
consider your own diet with reference to your 
intention to nurse your own child. Take ad- 
6 BEFORE THE BABY COMES 
vantage of every opportunity to equip your 
mind to lead his. 
Get in touch with a good kindergartner, who 
may be able to explain to you some of Froebel’s 
“Mother Plays” dealing with the early life of 
the child. Read good and helpful books, attend 
concerts, visit art galleries, do everything to 
get and keep yourself in a peaceful, happy, for- 
ward-looking state of mind. Keep it before 
your very soul that you are about the most im- 
portant and most fundamental business there is 
in the whole world. II 
PLAYING WITH BABY 
WHAT a wonderful thing it would be if 
you could get inside the mind of a little 
child—an infant—and look out through the 
baby’s eyes! Of course, you did do that once; 
you “were it”; but you were so busy taking 
things in, registering your first impressions of 
the amazing world in which you found your- 
self, choosing between the things you did that 
proved useful and the things that didn’t “get 
you anywhere,” that you forgot to remember 
how things looked to you. Now you feel as 
if you had always been here, as if you came 
anyway, with a ready-made knowledge of heat 
and cold, hardness and softness, surfaces and 
shapes, colors and sounds. By no means; 
you had to learn them all; you had to learn 
even the difference between that which was you 
and that which was the rest of the world. One 
of the first and best ways of learning these 
things was the plays you had with your mother. 
8 PLAYING WITH BABY 
I don’t mean the games you played after 
you were pretty well along in childhood; I 
mean the very first things, when you didn’t 
know anything at all; when your tiny fingers 
reached out and clutched the air; when you 
hadn’t learned to direct even your eyes; when 
your little legs just sprawled about without 
intention or direction. Gradually you began 
to notice—mother’s hands pushing against your 
feet, mother’s finger in your grasp, mother’s 
voice crooning little songs to you, mother’s 
face between you and the vague mass of every- 
thing else. Mother was the first thing you 
knew that was not yourself, and by littles, 
probably scarcely realizing herself what she 
was doing, she led you on in the experiences 
that developed in you more and more conscious- 
ness of yourself as something other than and 
different from the rest of the universe. 
“ T WANT to be the one to teach my boy to 
* read,” a mother said to me once. It was 
a worthy ambition; but I happened to know 
that from the very early infancy of her child 
she had left him almost constantly in the care 
of a series of none-too-competent nurses; that 
the preparation of that child’s mind for read- 
ing and for everything else had been intrusted 
9 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
to more or less ignorant girls whose moral 
character, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, 
had been reasonably assured, perhaps, but 
to whose mental equipment she had devoted 
no thought at all. 
Froebel devoted enormous study to the re- 
lations of mothers with their babies, and his 
“Mother-Play” book is one of the most valu- 
able contributions to the literature of education. 
Not a “play” in that wonderful book (which 
you can get at any bookstore) but that you 
would find it inspiring; not one that would 
offend the njost advanced of modern baby 
doctors. Froebel found that the “plays” were 
common to mothers of the whole world and of 
all time, and he reasoned that they must have 
a profound utility in the development of the 
child. 
There is a fad, nowadays, of fear that the 
little child may be “overstimulated,” and the 
extremely “modern” mother hardly dares play 
with her baby at all. Well, it is wise to be 
considerate of the little mind and body; a 
baby is not a plaything furnished for the amuse- 
ment of mothers and relatives and visitors. It 
is a human soul, the beginnings of a personality, 
and much harm can be done by unintelligent 
rollickings, tossing in the air, hard rocking, or 
screaming at the child. 
10 PLAYING WITH BABY 
But there is a middle ground, a reasonable, 
discriminating, intelligent play with the child, 
not only harmless, but essential to its develop- 
ment. Nature has taught the mother in her 
very instincts the rudiments of it, and it can 
be developed usefully by study and thought. 
Some of the plays are better than others; we 
should try to find and use only the best. Every- 
thing you do to or with the baby has its influ- 
ence upon him; the things you say, your man- 
ner, your tones of voice, the very motions of 
your hands, he comes to notice and to imitate. 
You are his Fountain of Ultimate Wisdom. 
Through you he is making acquaintance with 
the world and forming those underlying im- 
pressions which will color his attitude toward 
life from now until he dies. 
r"PHE very jingles you sing to him have an im- 
* portance that you may not realize, and sug- 
gest acts which, however trivial they may seem 
to you, have their influence with him. “This 
little pig goes to market/’ for example, is better 
than “This little pig said, ‘I’ll go steal wheat.’” 
Play is the child’s means of education; it 
is his serious business in life. As J. G. Holland 
says, these unstudied plays between mother 
and child are (I quote from memory): 
11 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
. . . gossamer links 
By which the manikin finds his way 
Out from the shore of the Great Unknown, 
Blind and waiting and alone, 
Into the light of day. 
The first plays with the mother are those of 
touching—contact; they develop the sense of 
feeling. You know the familiar “face plays.” 
The baby begins to realize his own separate 
identity; that he has a brow, nose, eyes, mouth, 
and chin, and the mother and sister have them, 
too. 
Brow, brow, brinkie; 
Eye, eye, winkee; 
Mouth, mouth, merry; 
Chin-chopper, chin-chopper, chin! 
And the other one, equally familiar—don’t 
you remember when mother did it to you? 
Probably you don’t—more’s the pity; but you’ve 
done it to babies: 
Knock at the door, peep in! 
Lift up the latch, walk in! 
The “feet plays” also have their utility and, 
believe me, a very great antiquity as well. 
They are played, in one form and another, 
all over the world, and in virtually every 
language; 
12 PLAYING WITH BABY 
This little pig went to market, 
This little pig stayed at home! 
This little pig had a piece of bread-and-butter, 
This little pig had none, 
And this little pig cried “Wee, wee!” all the way home! 
Don’t you remember it? Dear me, it was 
about the first song you ever heard in your life, 
and you heard it scores of times while mother 
checked off, one after the other, your little 
pink toes! Maybe you can remember “Shoe 
the Old Horse,” or 
Pitty, patty, polt, 
Shoe the wild colt, 
Here a nail, and there a nail, 
Pitty, patty, polt. 
OE careful not to tickle the baby much 
while you are playing these, and do it 
very gently. At the first sign of undue excite- 
ment, stop and rest awhile. This applies es- 
pecially to such plays as “Creepie, Mousie” 
and “Round the House.” Be careful of mere 
physical pleasure; you will see the difference 
between mere reflex action and intelligent mo- 
tion when the little limbs begin to respond to 
you, because they are obeying the intentions 
of the brain. 
The baby begins to know himself very soon, 
but it is ordinarily ten or twelve months be^ 
13 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
fore he really sees himself as an entity apart 
from his environment. The mother’s tender- 
ness helps in his first liberty of motion, his 
first free command of his own body. 
’V” OIJ will find that a study of psychology, the 
* reading of even some quite brief and ele- 
mentary book, will help you immensely to under- 
stand your child’s mind and the reasons for in- 
telligent development and direction of his play. 
The health of the child is of first importance, 
of course, and much is written about that; 
but did you ever think of the vast importance 
of the mental and spiritual surroundings of the 
little child? Do you realize how vital it is that 
the baby’s nurse—if you have one—should 
have a cheerful, sweet expression? I knew one 
mother—I used to think she was finicky about 
it—who would let no one come near her baby 
unless with a smile or a happy expression. 
I believe profoundly that it had an indelible 
influence upon the child, who is now a happy, 
sunny little fellow, laughing at bumps and 
bruises, making the best of everything, never 
whining. The habit of being sunny and happy 
can be cultivated, but the cultivation ought to 
begin when first the child opens its eyes upon 
the world. 
14 PLAYING WITH BABY 
Give your little baby some music every day. 
Not a great deal of noisy music, but something 
sweet and pleasing; sometimes with marked 
rhythm, at other times more soft and soothing. 
Singing to the baby is quieting and restful. 
I do not mean singing the baby to sleep. Not 
only is that unnecessary, it is mischievous; for 
the baby should learn to go to sleep without 
singing or rocking. But a cheerful, happy nurse 
or mother who sings about the nursery is 
affecting the child’s future life. Plato lived 
centuries ago, but he knew the value of the first 
three years of childhood. On this very point 
he said: 
“During the first three years the soul of the 
nursling should be made cheerful and kind by 
keeping away from him sorrow and fears and 
pains, and by soothing him with song, the sound 
of the pipe and rhythmic movement.” 
The songs and music seem to bring out the 
best in the baby; to create an atmosphere of 
peace and harmony with its small world. The 
swift development of the sense of hearing and 
likewise of smell is remarkable in a new-born 
child; taste, too, is soon developed. The right 
cultivation of all the senses makes for educa- 
tion from the very outset, and begins to shape 
temperament—character. How can a woman 
give up the first three years of her child to a 
15 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
nurse who could not intelligently respond to 
and make use of the opportunities for character- 
building opening hourly in the life of the little 
one? 
A baby is like a wonderful flower opening. 
No two babies are alike, and every moment is 
precious. Do the best you can, and you may 
make a mess of it; neglect, and you surely will! 
Don’t lose a day, or an hour. Every one holds 
its opportunity to help develop your child for 
what is before him. He did not ask you to 
bring him into the world. III 
SENSE-PLAYS 
ALL of the senses have to be trained. The 
child starts with nothing but a bundle of 
potentialities. Taste, touch, smell, hearing, 
sight—all are there in the normal baby, to be 
sure, but their development depends upon the 
use of them. A narrow and routine experience, 
in restricted environment, will develop these 
senses in a narrow and routine way. A thought- 
ful, purposeful, intelligent course of training, 
beginning at the very beginning and continu- 
ing as long as the child is under your care, will 
widen and perfect all of these senses in a most 
astonishing way. It is hardly too much to 
say that narrow and stupid people are those 
who have “come up somehow” in respect to 
these things; bright, resourceful people, with 
keen senses and alert minds, are those who have 
had opportunity to develop their faculties by 
intelligent exercise. 
You have it within your reach to begin the 
training of these faculties at the very outset 
17 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
of your child’s life. There are definite ways 
of doing it; simple ways right at hand. You 
have no idea how effective they are. One of 
them is the interesting series of “sense-plays.” 
I can only suggest the method; you can vary 
it in a dozen ways. 
CAN you imagine what the world would 
seem like to you if you had no sense save 
that of taste? That is the way it was to you 
once. Taste is the first of the senses to show itself 
in the new-born infant. I have known a baby 
on the third day to refuse cow’s milk without 
sugar, and accept it when it was sweetened. 
A very wee baby knows its mother’s milk 
from bottled milk, and makes a wry face at 
medicine. Touch and smell come much later 
in the baby’s development, so you understand 
why it is that the child wants to put everything 
into its mouth. That is his first way of finding 
out about the things which he discovers in his 
neighborhood. 
Susan E. Blow, one of the wisest students of 
child nature, said she saw a child seventeen 
months old try to put a sweet flower into his 
mouth. One month later he had learned to 
put it to his nose. 
Experiments in physiological psychology show 
that the sense of taste plays a most important 
18 SENSE-PLAYS 
part in both mental and moral development. 
Preyer, in his Infant Mind, says, “Taste is the 
first sense to become discriminative; it is the 
first to yield clear perceptions to which memory 
is attached.” 
Professor Tracy, in The Psychology of Child- 
hood, says that the pleasures and pains of taste 
play a large part in the natural education of 
infancy. Doctor Hall affirms that the mouth 
is the first center of psychic life. 
You need not hurry the development of this 
particular sense in your little baby; at this 
stage it will take care of itself; but later, as 
the child begins to know the meaning of words, 
you can play a game which to him will seem 
intensely interesting, bringing in the words 
“sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,’’ “hot,” and so on. 
When the child begins to prefer one thing 
to another because of preference in taste, you 
will know that this sense is developing nor- 
mally. Then comes the interesting thing to 
watch—the memory of taste-sensation. It is a 
wonderful moment in the child’s development 
when he remembers that once before he liked 
or disliked what you are giving him. 
T~>\ID you suppose that the sense of taste was 
equally keen in all persons? By no means. 
It is easy to show, in older children and grown- 
19 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
ups, that there is a vast difference in individuals 
in this respect. There are very simple games, 
amusing and instructive, which will exhibit this 
clearly. 
For example: On separate dishes or sheets of 
white paper place a small quantity of sugar, 
salt, flour, soda, and other harmless powders. 
Blindfold your group and let each taste and 
try to name the things correctly. 
A rather close game is that of tasting fruits, 
such as raisins, currants, dates, prunes, apri- 
cots, cherries, quince—all dried, of course, and 
in pieces as nearly alike as possible so as to 
eliminate the factor of shape, which belongs 
in the domain of touch. The contestants should 
not be allowed to eat the fruits; only to taste 
them. Again you will be surprised at the num- 
ber of errors. 
At table, ask about the various foods. It 
is astonishing how children as old as sixteen 
will be puzzled about the taste of such 
every-day things as beef, mutton, veal, liver, 
ham. 
Liquids offer an interesting variety for taste- 
games. Care should be taken that nothing be 
offered that will harm mouth, lips, or tongue. 
Vinegar, oil, molasses, lemon, orange, or grape- 
juice will do to start with; later in combinations 
of food there is a wide room for training in 
20 SENSE-PLAYS 
taste-discrimination. In combination dishes, 
such as stew, puddings, or the more elaborate 
kinds of cake, it requires a keen sense of taste 
to recognize ingredients. 
1VTEXT comes the sense of touch. The child’s 
first physical experience and pleasure are 
from the sense of the warmth of the mother’s 
body, the taste of mother’s milk, and the touch 
of her smooth skin. Children must begin by 
holding, handling, stroking, and feeling, tasting 
and smelling; thus beginning to accumulate a 
store of experience which will enable them to 
interpret objects of sight, sound, and sense 
with cpiickness and accuracy. From almost 
his earliest conscious moment the child is edu- 
cating himself by touch, developing certainty 
in the use of his hands, and recognition of the 
things and sensations that come to him through 
this channel. 
“Really, I don’t know what I shall do with 
my little boy; he wants to touch everything,” 
a mother says. “He grabs and handles things 
till I am at my wits’ end. Of course, I have 
punished him, spatted his hands, tied them to- 
gether, and tried so many devices I am ashamed, 
for it does no earthly good. 
“If only I could take a course in kinder- 
21 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
garten or Montessori methods and knew how 
to use their materials.” 
How many mothers are saying and thinking 
this sort of thing! 
My dear mother, doubtless a training in 
child-study, plays, and occupations would help 
you greatly. But your notion of this particular 
situation, and your attitude toward it, are as 
wrong as wrong can be. You have right at 
hand, in your own home, in the kitchen, garden, 
nursery, and living-room—and most of all, in 
this very child and what you feel is a problem 
—all that is essential for your child’s develop- 
ment, along the lines of either Froebel or Mon- 
tessori. And the clue to the training is there, 
right before your eyes, in the very impulses and 
activities that you are trying to suppress! 
First of all, you do not need all the formal 
equipment used in either school. The prin- 
ciple of both systems is precisely the same— 
the use of the child's own activities for his 
education. 
Your child’s desire to handle things is only 
his own effort at self-education through the 
sense of touch. The little fellow who is touch- 
ing everything is perfectly normal; he should 
be given every opportunity to carry out this 
impulse. 
When my own boy was little I let him handle 
22 SENSE-PLAYS 
very carefully my most precious treasures on 
mantel and bureau, but after he had held them, 
touching them all over, I explained that they 
were mine, presents from dear ones, and were 
never to be played with or handled carelessly. 
Even mother and chambermaid, I showed him, 
had to be careful. He always seemed to under- 
stand. 
Now for the touch-game. Where is your 
piece-bag? 
Get out pieces of silk, cotton, linen, velvet, 
satin, wool, and so on. Show him one or two, 
at first with eyes open, then with eyes shut— 
make a sort of “hide-and-seek” play of it. 
Add more materials, making the play harder; 
it can be made still more exciting with more 
children, perhaps choosing sides and giving 
victory to the side that is most efficient. Try 
articles of clothing, eyes open and shut; dif- 
ferent things on the table, cups, saucers, knives, 
forks, spoons, etc. These seem very simple to 
us, but they are not so simple to little folks. 
You can play the game with fruits, then vege- 
tables. Harder yet are the leaves of trees, 
such as oak, maple, pine, chestnut. 
Did I hear you say you feared the child 
might break things? Show me the thing that 
is so precious that you wouldn’t sacrifice it to 
your child’s education. I’d like to see it, and 
23 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
you. But the fact is that this is precisely the 
way to teach him not to break things. 
WHETHER smell develops earlier than 
taste or not, it is apparent surprisingly 
early. What is it, do you think, that enables 
the baby within a very short time after birth 
to detect the difference between its mother’s 
breast and the nurse’s cheek, between the 
mother and a stranger? Amazingly soon he dis- 
plays pleasure or displeasure in the presence 
of agreeable or disagreeable odors; he puts the 
fragrant flower into his mouth rather than to 
his nose, because he has not come to distinguish 
between them; but it is the pleasant odor that 
attracts him. 
The sense of smell is often as keen in children 
as in animals; it is only in after life that it 
dulls through lack of necessary use—all of the 
senses lose their keenness in the rush and hurry 
of our modern life. The woodsman keeps his 
senses trained in high degree. 
I knew one little boy only two years old who 
could distinguish, by the sense of smell alone, 
clothing and other articles belonging to various 
members of the family. He would sniff at them 
like a little dog, and identify the owner without 
fail. He was too little to identify them cer- 
tainly in any other way. 
24 SENSE-PLAYS 
Did you ever stop in the midst of a noisy 
city street and try to distinguish all the odors 
besetting you right then and there? The smell 
of a damp place in the street, of gasolene, coal 
smoke, the passing load of hay or tar or lum- 
ber, the wet mortar in a new building, the whiff 
from the drug-store or the florist’s shop? 
Look at that nurse dragging the reluctant 
child along the street; she could transform the 
whole progress into an eager game by chal- 
lenging the child to recognize and name each 
odor as they passed along. Did you think 
a nose was valuable only as adornment for 
the middle of your child’s face? 
The habit of observing and discriminating 
once formed is the first and most important 
step to attention, concentration, association, 
and memory. How can you develop this sense 
of smell? 
Blindfold the children—you can play the 
game with grown people, too. Try it with a few 
well-known flowers; you’ll be surprised to find 
how many persons cannot recognize the odor 
of the commonest flowers without seeing them. 
Then try some extracts, orris root, celery seed, 
coffee, sage, cinnamon, lemon; there is endless 
material. Vegetables and fruits afford another 
game. Every vegetable has its own smell— 
fresh tomatoes, onions, cucumbers. . . . 
25 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
Do not try too many at once, as the sense 
of smell is easily fatigued. 
AS for hearing—Preyer says that, “Every 
child, when just born, is completely deaf, 
and sometimes several days elapse before the 
tympanum, with the auditory ossicle, is capable 
of conducting external impressions of sound 
properly to the brain, which is as yet by no 
means sufficiently developed for hearing. Even 
when these first days have passed the hearing 
must be called bad. A difficulty of hearing 
continues to exist normally for a long time.” 
This, he goes on to say, is of great benefit to a 
child, for if he heard as well as an adult he 
would be too much disturbed to get the nec- 
essary rest. 
Babies a few hours after birth do move their 
eyelids when a loud noise is made near them, 
but it makes no great impression on the brain. 
Babies can stand, and sleep through, more noise 
than you would believe it possible for them to 
endure. Hospital nurses now tell the family 
to go right on with their ordinary ways, when 
a new baby is in the home, and it will soon 
grow accustomed to the noises. Herein lies 
the absurdity, and the great mistake, of the 
tactics of many over-solicitous mothers, in 
26 SENSE-PLAYS 
compelling the whole family to “hush” and 
tiptoe about because “baby is sleeping.” To 
begin with, it is absolutely unnecessary; be- 
sides that, it is the beginning of making a fussy, 
nervous child, who later on will have to be 
coddled and especially protected from the nor- 
mal sounds of the world. Haven’t you known 
lots of hard-working fathers who come home 
to rest, and have to tiptoe and whisper round 
the house? Babies ought to sleep, to be sure, 
and not to be noisily wakened, but they can 
be trained to sleep in a normal household with- 
out everything standing still. 
As baby grows older you can observe the 
growth of its power to hear and discriminate 
between sounds, trying the same word, spoken 
by several members of the family, noting the 
reaction, and then going on to experiment with 
musical tones. No child whose hearing is 
normal is at the beginning absolutely un- 
musical. Many children seem unmusical be- 
cause they have had very little experience with 
musical tones. Nobody bothers about it. 
The opportunity should be given very early 
to distinguish tones. A musical ear depends a 
lot upon practice. See if your baby has a 
memory for successions of tones as in simple 
melodies. Children sing often before they 
talk if a chance is given them to hear music 
27 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
and singing is encouraged. If this opportunity 
and practice of hearing and trying musical 
tones is not given him, he will probably be 
more or less “tone-deaf,” just as he may be 
color-blind because he has no chance to exercise 
his color sense. 
Froebel urges mothers to sing much them- 
selves and to encourage their children to sing. 
It is important that we should not overdo these 
exercises and thus over-stimulate and over- 
excite a small child. A wise mother can easily 
tell when a child has had enough. Froebel 
suggests that the best way to cultivate the 
hearing of little children is to direct their at- 
tention to the sounds of nature. It is said that 
Jenny Lind began her own training in singing 
by trying to imitate birds. 
It seems simple and almost ridiculous to 
tell a mother to lead her child to notice the 
dog’s bark, rooster’s crow, lamb’s bleat, and 
all the rest, but some mothers say, “Well, I 
am not musical myself, so I cannot teach my 
child.” You can begin in this simple way. You 
certainly can hear the bees hum, the cat purr, 
the cricket chirp! Those are musical tones. 
Didn’t you ever listen yourself to the different 
sounds the wind makes? What about the 
sound of water running in the basin or tub; 
hot water, cold water, brooks, rivers, ocean 
28 SENSE-PLAYS 
waves, and the rain falling? They all make 
different sounds. Talk about all these things, 
make stories of them, hunt up poems and read 
them aloud. Sit near a babbling brook and 
read Tennyson’s “Brook” to the children— 
will they ever forget it? 
There are interesting and delightful sense- 
games that will help develop the children’s 
hearing. They are lots of fun, too. Blindfold 
the child and ask him to identify different 
sounds and locate them. Strike different things 
in the room with a pencil and see if he can tell 
you what you are striking. Is the sound high 
or low? Whose voice is that, and where is the 
speaker? How far off can he hear the clock, 
or a watch? Which ear hears best? Is this 
rustle paper or silk? Am I tapping on glass or 
tin or wood or stone? Exactly what did I say 
then—“if,” or “is,” or “it”? You can invent 
and elaborate without limit. 
ARE you sure your child’s sight is normal? 
Have you had his eyes examined by a 
competent specialist? Do you realize that the 
sense of sight has to be trained just as much as 
any other faculty or ability? 
In thousands upon thousands of cases, chil- 
dren are regarded as “dull,” “inattentive,” 
29 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
and what-not other dreadful things in school, 
and get into all sorts of unhappiness, when the 
only thing in the world the matter with them 
is that they cannot see well. Think this over, 
as you look at the child across the table while 
you are reading this. Have you done for him 
or her all that you should in the matter of care 
of eyes? You didn’t neglect to have the teeth 
attended to—or did you wait for a toothache 
to drive you and the child to a good dentist? 
Some do, to be sure. 
The impressions that come to a baby in its 
earliest days of seeing the world about him 
are very important; therefore we should take 
pains to have the environment pleasing, ar- 
tistic, and restful. Whatever he sees about 
him constantly makes its mark inevitably upon 
his mind; later these combine in the whole 
body of memory-images, and form the ma- 
terial of thoughts that go far to make up 
character. 
Something new and startling when seen by a 
small child is perhaps quickly conveyed by the 
sense of sight to the brain and referred for 
comparison to some older memory-image; pos- 
sibly the astonishment is modified by the 
thought: “Yes, I have seen something like that 
before. I need not fear it; I can explain it.” 
These memory-images are most important 
30 SENSE-PLAYS 
and influential. Therefore we should be ex- 
ceedingly careful of the sight of the growing 
infant. Notice what is about him: Are the 
colors soft and pleasant? Are the pictures 
good? Are the toys and playthings artistic? 
I knew one small boy of four who had been 
brought up in the midst of really beautiful 
surroundings, but with only the simplest dolls 
and toys, who shrank from and never would 
play with a grotesque colored doll with a 
hideous face, which some one gave to him, 
thinking it funny. It might seem funny and 
inoffensive to a grown-up, but not at all to a 
child of three or four. Remember that such 
a child has not enough of memory-impressions 
of faces, people, and races to regard a hideous 
face as a matter of course, much less as & joke. 
The simplest, most lovely dolls and toys are 
none too good for the society of a child. He is 
learning through his eyes and being impressed 
for all his future life by what he sees. Through 
his sight now may be awakened pity, generosity, 
unselfishness. All the impressions he is getting 
now are writing on a clean page, so to speak, 
and we must take care what is writing there. 
Is there anything more interesting than the 
wide-eyed astonishment of a child at the sight 
of a new thing—a ball bounding, a toy dropping 
to the ground, a bird flying! Remember that 
31 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
these are absolutely new things to him, though 
to us they are commonplace. To what better 
can we devote ourselves than the following up 
of these discoveries, helping the child to ob- 
serve accurately, explaining the reasons, so far 
as he can understand them? Imagine yourself 
in an absolutely new world, full of things and 
motions and colors that you never saw before, 
without any one to tell you about them. 
From the beginning have soft worsted balls 
of the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, 
near the child, to let him play with them. Hang 
them in succession on the side of his basket or 
crib; first the blue for a week, then the red, 
then the yellow. Notice which he seems to 
prefer. After two or three months with the 
primary colors, try the secondary—purple, 
green, and orange. 
With the older children and even grown 
folks, it is fun to play the “seeing game”— 
requiring quick judgment in the recognition of 
things familiar and unfamiliar, as to size and 
shape, relative shade and color. How much 
can one see in ten seconds of the removal of a 
blindfold? Is that distant scene predominantly 
green or blue? Is that tree yellow or brown 
or red? How many things did you see on that 
table before the handkerchief was put over 
your eyes again, and what were they? Was 
32 SENSE-PLAYS 
that a green, blue, or brown book on the library 
table? Don’t know? Don’t you see what you 
look at? 
ARE you leaving all of this wonderful un- 
** folding of mentality and character to 
chance, the joy and fascination of observing it 
to a nurse? Very exceptional indeed is the 
hired nurse whose mentality and training are 
adequate to make the most of such opportuni- 
ties as these, or to appreciate the wonder that 
is being enacted before her eyes. 
Five wonderful sense-gates are to be opened 
in your child; gates giving upon avenues of 
access for the personality to every bit of human 
experience and activity. IV 
WHEN THE CHILDREN SLEEP 
OLEEP is largely a matter of habit. Every- 
body knows that, but not everybody knows 
how early the habits of sleep are formed, or 
how much pains must be taken to see that 
they are right habits. I have observed that 
people who do not sleep restfully and regularly 
have usually a history of bad habit in the mat- 
ter tracing back to very early times, and almost 
always to foolish or ignorant treatment at the 
hands of their elders. 
“An infant should sleep most of the time,” 
says Doctor Kellogg. He has personally adopted 
a couple of dozen children—more than that, 
for aught I know—and he has a long experience 
to justify him. 
“All the sleep that a child can take before he 
is fifteen is so much energy stored up for later 
life,” I once heard a wise physician say. 
It seems easy; of course, we must see that 
34 WHEN THE CHILDREN SLEEP 
our children get all the sleep they need; they 
must go to bed early, and all that sort of thing. 
Nobody disputes it. But is it so easy? You 
have to plan for it and sacrifice for it, and have 
a definite purpose and reason for it; otherwise, 
first thing you know you have bad habits 
started, and they are very hard to break. Right 
habits about sleep soundly formed in infancy 
and kept up until the child is eighteen will 
make for health all the rest of his life. It is 
more important than any sort of work or 
studies. Deprive a person of adequate sleep 
and you are absolutely sure of a breakdown 
sooner or later. 
T~'\URING the first month of life the normal 
infant usually goes to sleep after every 
feeding, and wakes regularly at the next feeding- 
time. He should be allowed to sleep all he 
will, and never be disturbed for exhibition pur- 
poses. Aunt Miranda may want to see the 
color of his eyes, daddy’s old friend may want 
—or think it is his polite duty to pretend to 
want—to “take a peek at the kiddie”; other 
admiring friends and relatives will be dropping 
in. It isn’t so easy to disappoint them; but 
baby’s rights are superior to all these admira- 
tions, and the routine of his sleep is more im- 
35 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
portant than the feelings of any of the folks. 
Besides that, if you interrupt his sleep you 
will have a cross and nervous baby, which is 
no great joy for anybody to behold! 
Moreover, as I have said before, if the child 
is trained to sleep right through the ordinary 
household noises he will not have to be coddled 
about this later. There is no reason why a child 
should have a sound-proof place to sleep, save 
as it is more restful for any one to sleep where 
it is relatively quiet. The place where he 
sleeps should be dark, and from the very out- 
set he should be trained to love the dark. 
You have to teach children to fear the darkness. 
During the second and third months the 
baby probably will remain awake nearly half 
an hour between feedings. He is beginning 
to take notice in a fairly large way. By the 
time he is a year old a considerable nap morning 
and afternoon will suffice, though children differ 
somewhat in their needs in this regard. But he 
should be in bed by six o’clock. And the day- 
time nap of two hours or more should be kept 
up until he is four or five years old. From six 
to eight years, an hour may suffice, but he 
should be required to lie down and relax, even 
if he does not sleep, perhaps playing quietly 
with some toy. At eight he may go to bed at 
seven, but not until he is ten or twelve should 
36 WHEN THE CHILDREN SLEEP 
he stay up later than eight o’clock. By the 
time he is fourteen, nine o’clock is late enough, 
and not more than a half-hour should be added 
to that before he is sixteen years old. If the 
children protest when you read this to them, 
ask any doctor. Plenty of sleep—nine and a 
half hours at least of it—until he is eighteen. 
'T'O induce sleep in the baby, he must be 
-*• warm, comfortable, and well nourished, and 
quiet for at least a half-hour before bedtime. 
A quiet sponging-off, long, slow strokes down 
his spine, a softly sung lullaby—and positively 
no excitement of any kind. I had a lesson about 
this when my baby was about three months 
old, and I trusted a near and dear relative, 
visiting at my home, to put him to bed. She 
bathed him as I did, but more vigorously; 
sang him a rollicking tune, and then played 
with him till he was thoroughly excited. I saw 
what was going on, but was not quite brave 
enough to interfere; I sat there and for polite- 
ness’ sake allowed her to harm my own baby! 
She put him in his bed with a cheery “I’m 
going now, baby,” and left us to a night such as 
we never had had before, and seldom had again. 
Instead of dropping off to sleep at six o’clock, 
as he usually did, allowing me to dress and dine 
37 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
in peace with my husband, he was wide awake, 
nervous, and excited, and did not sleep for 
several hours. You can train a child to stand 
that, but believe me, he pays for' it afterward 
in worn and weary nerves. Children who break 
down nervously are almost always those who 
have not been trained to go to bed early and 
quietly and sleep through the night. They 
have had too much going on. The principal 
business of childhood has been forgotten or 
neglected. 
FNO not permit children to be excited or 
disturbed just before going to bed. Do 
not talk about anything that will trouble the 
child’s conscience and keep him awake. It is 
immensely important that every person—espe- 
cially every child—should be happy and com- 
posed as he relaxes for sleep. A child should 
never be sent to bed as a punishment. His 
rest should be a welcome thing; he should never 
be taught to dread or hate his bed. 
No thrilling stories should be read or told 
to young children just before bedtime; supper- 
time is the time for that—then it helps them 
to eat slowly. It is not good to take little chil- 
dren to the movies or to plays. These things 
should be very sparingly indulged in, especially 
38 WHEN THE CHILDREN SLEEP 
in the evening. In fact, little children are bet- 
ter without these things at all. If your home 
is so dull and uninteresting that they have to 
go out for these things, whose fault is that? 
Evening parties are not good for little chil- 
dren—two or three little friends in for a simple 
supper, with quiet games and well-chosen stories 
told by some one who knows how to do it, 
furnish all that normal little children ought to 
have in the evening. 
Remember that these little minds are just 
opening to the world. There will be plenty of 
time for them to acquire all the excitement that 
is necessary for them. No sort of entertain- 
ment or even instruction is so important as 
that they shall have regular sleep and plenty 
of it. V 
BABY TALK—AND GOOD CONVERSATION 
TT used to be taken for granted that children 
* had to pass through a period of “baby talk.” 
In fact, I can remember when this lingo was 
all but a recognized language; children were 
deliberately taught to speak it, as if it were a 
necessary stage in education. I suppose that 
there are still backward mothers who imagine 
it an unavoidable thing, as well as others who 
cling selfishly to the idea that “baby talk is so 
cunning!” Some children seem unable for a 
long time to produce certain sounds; in such 
cases a certain amount of “baby talk” is in- 
evitable. But with most children it is just 
as easy, and a great deal better and more sen- 
sible, to teach them to pronounce correctly in 
the first place. 
Never teach a child anything that he must 
later unlearn. The necessary lessons are so 
many, the time in which to learn what we 
40 BABY TALK—AND GOOD CONVERSATION 
must is so short, that it is important to have 
the child start right—especially when it is just 
as easy. If we adults take pains always in the 
presence of or in conversation with the children 
to speak correctly and distinctly, they will 
follow suit. Generally speaking, you can tell 
from a child’s conversation, vocabulary, in- 
flection, and general tone the sort of atmosphere 
in which he lives at home. 
The first serious business of a child in the 
world is to learn the language of the folk among 
whom he is to live. It is a matter of indifference 
to him what language it is; he will learn 
Spanish or Choctaw, Sanskrit or Korean, Greek 
or English—whatever is the tongue in which 
his parents, playmates, and neighbors express 
their wants and their emotions and get results 
from it. He may even invent a language of 
his own. I knew two children, twins, who used 
between themselves a dialect absolutely mean- 
ingless to their parents. The only question is, 
What sort of language shall the child learn? 
'T'HE babbling of the first year seems to 
follow first a logical course in vocal gym- 
nastics. The child finds promptly that he can 
make noises with his throat, tongue, and lips; 
he experiments with them, and retains those 
41 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
that turn out to be useful. A very complete 
record that I kept regarding my own son is very 
interesting now. 
At the age of two months he was saying, 
“Ah,” “Ak,” “Goo,” “Gar,” “Ah-goo,” “Ah- 
gar.” The accomplishment amused him greatly. 
The first were the throat sounds. A month 
later he had gained control of his tongue and 
lips, and was experimenting with m, n, p, b, 
and delighted in the various explosives, com- 
bining them into “B’m,” “P’m,” “M’m,” in 
all sorts of combinations. Then he found the 
“1” sounds—“Le” and “La.” By the end of 
the third month he was selecting. He had 
discovered that certain of these attracted de- 
sirable attention and produced results. He car- 
ried on definite, even if unintelligible, conver- 
sations with his ball, his doll, and the kitten. 
When he was seven months old he said 
“Baby,” clearly meaning himself. The picture 
of the Baby Stuart on the wall was “Baby,” 
too. He found and clung to “K’h” for the 
cat, and “Do”’ for dog. At eight months he 
said “Hark!” distinctly after me, and knew 
what it meant. Then he got the word “app”’ 
for apple, and adopted “Mamma” and “cow” 
quickly upon discovering that these sounds, 
quite accidental in their first pronunciation, 
made a sensation among his elders, and meant 
42 BABY TALK—AND GOOD CONVERSATION 
definite things. A month later he had learned 
that the amazingly interesting creatures play- 
ing in the street were “boy”; that the large 
person who played with him at times was 
“Papa,” and the thing they wouldn’t let him 
eat was a “Pin.” The red things in the glass 
globe were “Whish.” 
"C VEN in these early beginnings the selection 
is a matter of imitation, and thereafter 
the acquisition of definite words comes swiftly 
with practice and increased control over the 
vocal apparatus. Some children are quicker at 
it than others, but the process is the same. 
Some children at the age of a year have only 
half a dozen words; others have quite a vocabu- 
lary. One child I knew at a year old had a vo- 
cabulary of fifty words. There is no need of 
pushing the child to learn his mother-tongue; 
in fact, one should be careful not to over- 
stimulate the little mind. The main thing is to 
give the child correct pronunciation and a good 
vocabulary to imitate. 
A child that is talked to correctly, told stories, 
and read to constantly will acquire a better 
vocabulary and a more pleasing taste in the 
choice of words than one to whom no attention 
is paid in this regard. At two years of age he 
43 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
should have several hundred words at his com- 
mand and be gaining others constantly, at the 
rate of a thousand words a year. It all depends 
upon the conversation that he hears about him. 
He will learn bad and vulgar words as readily as 
good ones. 
You will notice that at the age of two years 
the child is carefully constructing sentences. 
Help him about it, but do not press him—he 
will go fast enough. Sentences incorrectly 
framed should be tactfully corrected; but he 
will be learning far more by example than from 
precept. Very little is the language of children 
modified by instruction in formal grammar. 
A FAMOUS educator called my attention to 
the fact that a store of good adjectives 
and exclamations is a preventive of slang. Ob- 
serving young people, I have tried to make out 
why some of the girls used so much “college 
slang,” while others did not take it up at all. 
I have in mind two contrasting cases of girls 
who were classmates. One invariably used 
beautiful English with a delightful inflection and 
pronunciation. Her mother was well read, 
widely informed, talked well in a gentle voice 
with cultured manner, read a great deal to her 
children, and brought the best books to their 
44 BABY TALK—AND GOOD CONVERSATION 
attention. The slangy girl with the loud voice 
had had no home example in these matters, 
and her training in the use of good English 
had been nil. That is the whole story. 
The same thing applies in the acquisition of 
foreign languages. As I have said, the learning 
of language is a main business of childhood. 
At the age of five, or even earlier, a child can 
begin to learn French, for example. A few 
words and sentences, with perfect pronuncia- 
tion, can be acquired without the slightest 
difficulty. Nowadays one can have in the house 
some of the talking-machine records that give 
the foreign languages correctly, and the little 
children can pick them up with the greatest 
ease. You don’t need a French governess, 
though a good one is a great help in this mat- 
ter. And the use of the foreign tongue vastly 
increases one’s facility with his own, giving 
him a certainty not only in pronunciation, but 
an increased appreciation of shades of tone 
and meaning. 
In this connection I cannot lay too much 
emphasis upon the importance of daily table- 
talk at home—intelligent discussion of matters 
of current interest, and of having the children 
present when worth-while people are guests at 
the house. A home table habitually silent and 
dull turns out silent and dull children, and 
45 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
leaves them to pick up their vocabulary from 
the servants and the street. 
Reading aloud in the home is of the utmost 
value in this connection. Let the children lis- 
ten, and let them do some of the reading, even 
of interesting grown-up books. It gives them 
not only a larger scope of ideas, but self- 
confidence in the use of a rapidly growing 
vocabulary. ' The right use of the mother- 
tongue is a very valuable accomplishment. It 
takes time and pains to acquire it. And it 
begins at the very beginning. VI 
PLAYMATES 
'"THERE is a tide in the affairs of children 
when they run over the home boundaries 
and long to get out among other children. 
The nursery gets too small, the playthings 
commonplace and tiresome. The child craves 
to be out with other children. 
The four walls of thy nursery 
Are now like prison walls to thee. 
The wise mother who has been watching the 
little one’s development from day to day sees 
this coming and invites a neighbor’s child in 
to play—perhaps more than one. Or the child 
is allowed to go to the neighbor’s house. 
Here the problem begins. I have heard 
mothers say: 
“ I don’t know what to do. I hate to have my 
little boy play with So-and-so. His mother and 
47 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
I are great friends, but he is rough and rude, 
or even worse.” 
You know perfectly well that your child 
needs companionship; it is as essential as 
proper food. All educators recognize the im- 
portance of this instinct; it marks a period as 
normal and as inevitable as that of learning 
to talk, or to walk alone. At first the mother, 
the family, and the home relations were suffi- 
cient. Now comes a broader outlook, a long- 
ing to get out and mingle with others. Miss 
Peabody, one of the wisest of teachers, and 
one of the earliest of American kindergartners, 
says: 
“The child’s growth in bodily strength and 
conscious individuality makes him too strong 
a force of will for so narrow a scope of relation 
as is afforded by one family. . . . He needs to 
be brought into relations with equals who have 
other personal characteristics, other relations 
with nature and the human race, than his own 
family. To check this impulse would vex and 
depress him and be an evil.” 
DECAUSE the mother does not see this 
stage clearly, is thoughtless and ignorant, 
she usually thinks her good, tractable child is 
now merely restless and perverse, perhaps run- 
48 PLAYMATES 
ning away from home because of some suddenly 
developed “badness.” It is only a phase of the 
natural longing to reach out to a broader world. 
It must be dealt with wisely. It is not at all 
peculiar to your child. Indeed, if it did not 
come along in the natural order of develop- 
ment, you might well be anxious and look for 
something abnormal in him. 
At just this stage the kindergarten is a life- 
saver to many mothers and children. If this 
is not available you must work out some other 
form of companionship. Perhaps you can get 
a few other mothers in the same case to take 
turns caring for a group playtime in your yards. 
Six or eight children are enough; even four 
will do very well. 
It ought not to be necessary for the child 
to have this companionship every day; you 
can find occupation for him to keep contented 
on the days when it is impracticable for him 
to have playmates in the house or to visit else- 
where. But generally speaking it is wise and 
normal for him to play with other children and 
it is your business to provide for it. 
“To have social relations with his equals in 
age and development is an imperative necessity. 
This alone gives him a standard by which to get a 
true estimate of himself and a natural opportu- 
nity for the growth of justice and unselfishness.” 
49 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
You have heard men say: “Wait till that 
boy gets to college; he will have some of his 
corners rounded off.” That is the way little 
children get their corners rounded off. By 
contact with others they come to see the limits 
of their own rights and capacities, and learn 
the give-and-take that makes up the business 
of living. The practice of justice and unself- 
ishness in joint activities and sports of equals 
is the means by which children learn fair play. 
And that is the essence of democracy. 
CROEBEL, keenest and wisest of the in- 
* terpreters of childhood, was always em- 
phasizing the unity of life. In his Mother- 
Play he speaks of the relation of baby and 
mother, child and home,. the family relation- 
ship, and then reaches out still farther to the 
touching of other lives and contacts with nat- 
ure—animals, birds, flowers, trees; perception 
of sun, moon, and stars; always with the feeling 
of sympathy and realization of the Oneness of 
the whole. 
So shall the touch of other lives 
Help and uplift his own; 
Strong in himself he’ll learn to be, 
Yet glad that human sympathy 
May bind all hearts in one. 
50 PLAYMATES 
Social union is the basis of all culture; the 
highest moral culture will come to our children 
in daily intercourse with their fellows. How 
shall they learn the moral laws and values 
governing their relations with their fellows save 
by the discovery and practice of them? The 
mother who would shield her child from con- 
tact with all but perfect children is of a piece 
with the one in the old ditty: 
Mother, may I go out to swim? 
Yes, my darling daughter— 
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb, 
But don’t go near the water! 
OEFORE the child reaches this stage, his 
own character will have been stamped by 
the influence of your own. His ideas of right 
and wrong will be such as you have helped him 
to acquire. “What mother would like to have 
me do” must serve for the time being as the 
spur and guardian of conduct. A child of four, 
five, or six, if carefully brought up, ought to 
be able to go into any friend’s house and be- 
have himself with credit to his mother. Little 
children make mistakes and do untoward things 
through ignorance; but their intentions will 
be good and their behavior reasonably accept- 
able if they have been rightly controlled and 
51 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
trained at home. By that I mean he will be 
passably unselfish, polite, deferential, and con- 
siderate of others. If he is not, it is his mother’s 
fault. And even if he is rude and boisterous, 
the best way to break him of that is to throw 
him with other children whose manners are 
better. As I heard one little fellow say, years 
ago: 
“Well, Mother, if he is not a nice boy for 
me to play with, maybe I’m a nice boy for 
him to play with.” 
Pascal puts it more solemnly, but to the 
same effect: 
“The understanding and the feelings are 
molded by intercourse; the understanding and 
the feelings are corrupted by intercourse. Thus 
good or bad society improves or corrupts them; 
it is all-important to know how to choose in 
order to improve and not to corrupt them.” 
RANTED that your problem is rather to 
decide whom to let your child play with 
than whether he shall play with anybody. Well, 
you have to make selection about this as about 
other things all along the line. But in your 
selection be careful not to mistake mere polite- 
ness, correct outward “manners,” for right 
character. The most dangerous folk of all 
52 PLAYMATES 
ages often have perfect manners. Some of the 
“nicest” and most polite children are—if you 
only knew it—the most evil in their influence. 
There are worse things than bad manners or 
boisterousness. You have to “watch out” 
every minute. You have to know what your 
child is getting from this, that, and the other 
playmate. Also, you might take some thought 
of what your child is doing by way of influence 
to the others! 
Have the children play under your own ob- 
servation until you are satisfied as to the in- 
fluence of each. Become acquainted with the 
mothers, and learn for yourself the kind of 
atmosphere in which these playmates live. 
Have little picnics and excursions and let the 
children invite the friends with whom they 
play from day to day. This will give you a 
chance to “see them in action.” It may take 
all your social skill and tact to “train in” or 
“train out” an undesirable; but this is a part of 
your job. 
Question your child closely as to what was 
done and said during his day’s play. Never 
let him get away from you. Let him see that 
you are keenly interested in all his doings. The 
test of your relationship with him comes when 
he decides whether to confide to you the things 
that it is so vitally important for you to know 
53 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
at exactly this period of his life. Playmates 
he must have; it will require all your tact 
to help him select helpful ones. The choices 
made in this matter at the very outset may be 
the making or the marring of his whole life. VII 
TRAINING AND BREAKING WILLS 
\ THY is it that “New Year resolutions” 
* ’ are so seldom kept? Why New Year 
resolutions at all? Every day is the beginning 
of a new year, and if you can’t keep the reso- 
lutions that you make on the 3d of May or 
the 9th of September or the 6th of March, 
you can’t keep any better those that you make 
on the 1st of January or at the Jewish New 
Year. Like the works of a watch or “the flowers 
that bloom in the spring, tra-la,” the day of 
the month or the month of the year has noth- 
ing to do with the case. Indeed, the works of 
the watch have more to do with it; for the 
trouble really is in the works, and it goes 
straight back to your beginning of things— 
to the training of your will, from the very hour 
when you first opened your eyes upon the world 
and began to discover the relation to it of your 
own volition. If you can’t make up your mind 
now what you will do and refrain from doing, 
and stick to it, it is because in the beginning 
55 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
nobody taught you self-control; nobody en- 
couraged and guided your individual will and 
initiative; nobody taught you to be master 
of your own personality. Perhaps somebody 
even “broke” your will, and left you without 
capacity for self-directed action; so that now 
you can make and keep resolutions only at the 
command and under the pressure of outside 
authority or extraneous things like figures 
printed on a calendar. 
7WT AYBE it is too late for you to repair this 
*■ mischief in your own character; but be- 
lieve me, if you have control of a little child, 
you can take thought of this matter and avoid 
the errors of omission and commission that wTere 
inflicted with so far-reaching and damaging 
results in your own case. 
“The human will is the greatest power on 
earth”; through its operations comes the con- 
quest of the earth. Every great work of man is 
the product of a resolution, and the effectiveness 
of resolutions depends upon the training and 
development of the will-power of little children. 
The first sign of will-power in an infant is in 
muscular movement. It is by such movements 
solely that the child can manifest his will; 
yet he makes lively movements before he may 
be said really to have a will, and the first in- 
56 TRAINING AND BREAKING WILLS 
voluntary movements of a new-born baby must 
not be confounded with those of a few weeks 
later. Notice the first movement your baby 
makes with evidence of a glimmering of an 
idea. Does he imitate you or any one else? 
He is willing himself to do that. It is a very 
feeble power at first, but that is the very begin- 
ning—recognize and watch it as you would a 
precious bit of radium. 
The will develops rapidly; don’t lose sight 
of it for a moment. It is all-important. 
Imitation is the great factor in developing 
the will. A baby fifteen weeks old or younger 
will pout his lips if you do it or shake his head; 
at nine months he will put dolly to sleep or in 
a bath. 
“It is plain, therefore,” says Preyer, “how 
extraordinarily important it is for the earliest 
education to allow definite sensations, percep- 
tions, and ideas to be experienced by the child, 
to permit him to practise definite imitations, 
and to keep away from him other ideas that 
are unsuitable, pernicious, destructive. On 
the forming of the will depends well-nigh every- 
thing in the earliest education.” 
\\ 7" HAT was your baby imitating yesterday 
* * when you were out all day? Was your 
baby’s will being intelligently guided and de- 
57 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
veloped, or was it being “broken”—in the 
good old-fashioned way? 
I have seen in the park, under the ignorant 
methods of nurses—to say nothing of mothers— 
little children whose wills were slowly being 
broken, and they were in consequence de- 
veloping a most undesirable quality of char- 
acter—obstinacy. Did you ever notice ob- 
stinacy in your three-year-old child and won- 
der when it began, and why it had to be? It 
did not “have to be,” but on some of those 
days when you were away from morning 
till night that little will was being opposed 
without reason, and this characteristic de- 
veloped. Surely you never did that your- 
self! 
Forbidding without intelligible reason and 
giving needless and arbitrary commands gives 
the child this contradictory feeling. You will 
have to watch your nurse, if you have one, 
quite as closely as your child, won’t you? Don’t 
forget that your baby is to imitate her ways. 
Does your nurse use a soft, gentle voice? Does 
she speak correctly, use pleasing expressions of 
tone and countenance? 
Watch as your baby grows, and you will see 
That his whole life, wherever he may be, 
Is a perpetual mimicry. 
58 TRAINING AND BREAKING WILLS 
And watching him, perchance you question why 
Each new activity that meets his eye 
Excites him his own skill to try. 
His is an instinct ignorantly wise. 
Only in doing can he realize 
The thing that’s done beneath his eyes. 
A stranger ’midst the surging life of men 
He to his own life-stature shall attain 
By taking—to give back again. 
H. R. Eliot. 
pROEBEL says, “What the child imitates 
* he is trying to understand.” Imitation 
is interesting and important, because it is the 
dawning of liberty in that child’s soul. His 
idea is faint, but he is groping outward; he 
is slowly finding himself and his power as it 
may be exercised upon the world. 
Now that you realize that imitation is a most 
important element in your child’s education, 
what is your part? Protect him as far as pos- 
sible from seeing or hearing what you would 
not wish him to reproduce; for your own feeble- 
ness of resolution last New Year reflects the 
will-exercise and the imitations of your own 
earliest childhood. VIII 
EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS RIGHT AT HAND 
“FAEAR me! Here I’ve bought all the Mon- 
tessori and kindergarten materials, and 
now that I've got them I haven’t the least idea 
what to do with them.” A terribly conscientious 
mother, who wants so much to give her children 
the benefit of every advantage, every modern 
method, said this to me in a despairing tone 
of voice. “Can’t you tell me just how to use 
these things?” She stood in her amply stocked 
nursery, helpless before a great collection of 
apparatus—enough to supply a school-room; 
not only ignorant of the purpose of each item 
of it, but fearful lest she should “ use it wrongly.” 
“Throw it out of the window,” I said. 
She looked at me as if she thought I was 
crazy. She knew I was a trained kindergartner 
and a student of Montessori, Froebel, Pesta- 
lozzi, and the rest; she had expected, I think, 
that I would be very enthusiastic about this 
60 EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS 
expensive display of the “very latest educa- 
tional material.” 
“Of course I don’t mean that literally,” I 
laughed. “All of these things have their uses; 
they are the fruit of long study on the part of 
educational experts, and I am far from regard- 
ing them with contempt. But I would be glad 
to help you and other mothers to see that you 
don’t need much, if any, of this sort of thing 
in your home. You have a houseful of ma- 
terial and a wonderful opportunity in your 
five-year-old boy and your three-year-old girl 
to exemplify the educational principles that 
underlie all of these things. 
“In your own nursery, sitting-room, dining- 
room, kitchen, and in the ordinary life of your 
home, you have material so much better than 
this for the education of your children that I 
wonder you do not see it. Yes, and the method 
is along exactly the lines that Froebel and 
Montessori have followed.” 
“Why, what in the world do you mean?” 
you remember,” I said, “that last 
' week when we sat together at that table 
at the Red Cross, you told me about ripping 
up that old gown and what fun your little Mary 
had, for a solid hour, hooking and unhooking 
61 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
the strip of hooks-and-eyes that you cut from 
the waist, and snapping and unsnapping the 
other row of snap-hooks from the skirt? How 
she looked up at you with such perfect con- 
tentment and interest? You thought she was 
just having a little harmless fun, and wondered 
how it could keep her occupied for so long a 
time. Montessori has some apparatus of just 
that kind; but the trouble with it is that it is 
detached from any natural purpose. Mary’s 
little fingers were learning a new thing; study- 
ing out a problem in mechanical appliances. 
And she was participating in some of mother’s 
immensely interesting activities. She was get- 
ting exactly the same thing from it that she 
would get from the Montessori device; but 
getting it in a natural relation.” 
“Yes,” the mother said, quickly grasping 
the idea, “and after that she took up the pieces 
of silk and velvet, and felt of them and noticed 
the difference in texture. Montessori makes a 
point of that, and has some material to—” 
“Precisely,” said I. 
When a little child learns to button her waist 
or shoes at home it is just as educative as to 
learn to button together strips of cloth at school. 
Very much better, I think. I have always felt 
this defect in the Froebel “gifts”—that they 
were an artificial substitute for things in natural 
62 EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS 
settings; that the absence of evident useful- 
ness in the “occupations” was a weakness in 
the kindergarten practice, even though Froebel 
worked out these things from a very close study 
of mothers and children in their home relation- 
ships. Pestalozzi saw that weakness and worked 
out his system through the actual, useful oper- 
ations of household activity. 
7WI ONTESSORI, too, has developed her ma- 
* terial in a way to represent the activities 
of normal life, and no doubt it is of great ben- 
efit when rightly used in school; but I am deeply 
convinced that mothers have right at hand in 
their homes, without any special material at 
all, all that is necessary to embody the educa- 
tional principles that Montessori’s materials 
are designed to embody. 
I would not exclude balls, blocks, and a few 
simple playthings; a very few carefully selected 
special materials will help you; but your own 
home is alive with educational devices full of 
vital interest for the children if you direct their 
use along the lines of the youngsters’ natural 
desire to help in the activities of the house- 
hold. 
Let your children dress themselves as soon 
as they possibly can; let them help about the 
63 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
house, set the table, dust, pick up what they 
scatter, prepare some of the vegetables, wipe 
apples, wash cranberries, look over rice, beans, 
split peas—take part in all the work that makes 
the house go smoothly. There could be nothing 
worse for a child, boy or girl, than to get into 
the habit of feeling that the necessary things 
about the house are no affair of his or hers, 
but business of menials. It is terribly demor- 
alizing to character to feel that all your life 
somebody else is going to do the things that 
are necessary for the comfort of your exist- 
ence. 
Liberty is Doctor Montessori’s great watch- 
word, but liberty does not mean the abandon- 
ment of all direction and discipline; it means 
giving the child a chance to work out his own 
ideas, and time to do it, so far as possible with- 
out interruption, and without the interference 
of too much outside authority. And it is per- 
fectly possible tactfully to direct the child’s 
interest to useful occupation for which he will 
have respect because he knows the utility of 
it. All normal children like to help in the 
work of their elders. It is a manifestation of 
their desire to imitate. And the handling of 
useful things and participation in useful busi- 
ness are educational in themselves. 
64 EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS 
NOT in the kitchen, you say. Well, here 
is a case for tact. Couldn’t you interest 
your superior cook in the education of the chil- 
dren, enough for her to let the little girl scrub 
a bunch of carrots, or two or three potatoes, 
for dinner? Or are your children so rude to the 
servants that they won’t have them in the 
kitchen at all? Whose fault is that? Anyway, 
you could bring a few of these things, with a 
basin of water, to the nursery, and let the child 
take them down and see Cook put them in the 
pot to boil. Think of the fun of eating these 
very potatoes at dinner! And the lesson is 
knowing that they “went in hard and came out 
mealy.” 
To learn the uses of things, to adapt means 
to ends, to have part in the real life of the world, 
what is this but education? Read the works on 
education, by Froebel, Pestalozzi, Locke, Rous- 
seau, and the more modern writers, Blow, 
Hughes, Dewey, Montessori, and a score of 
others, and you will find that underlying them 
all is the same thing—education by interested 
activity. Work that one respects and knows 
to be useful and necessary, participation in the 
real life of man, in the home and elsewhere, is 
the great educational process of the race. IX 
HABITS 
f HEARD an extraordinarily talented woman 
A describe certain tests to which she and her 
associates were subjecting little school-children 
in order to ascertain their “mental age”; 
their reaction to their studies; their deficien- 
cies or peculiarities due to racial traits, heredity, 
social, physical, and family environment, and 
so on. They made their tests, it appeared, 
upon children of eight years and upward. To 
the superficial hearing it seemed they thought 
that if they could find out all about children 
from eight years up, they could so modify the 
school curriculum and organize play as to meet 
the difficulties and limitations of the child. 
I say “to the superficial hearing,” because I 
believe thoroughly in what these people are 
doing; this kind of scientific study of child- 
hood, if conducted under proper control by 
competent persons and with due regard for 
66 HABITS 
the interests of the child, is vitally important; 
there has not been half enough of it. Moreover, 
as I took pains to assure myself, this lecturer 
fully appreciated that the period before the 
age of eight is that of most consequence; she 
explained that that age was made the starting- 
point chiefly because they could not get earlier 
access to children under conditions suitable for 
the tests. Indeed, I am not going to discuss 
these tests at all. I use them only as a point 
of departure. What I want always to cry out 
about to mothers is the" awful importance of 
the first years of a child’s life—not merely be- 
fore eight, but before two—yes, before one year 
of age. 
All the time this woman was speaking I was 
thinking of something I heard Col. Francis W. 
Parker say many years ago to a woman who 
asked him, after one of his lectures, at what 
age a mother should begin the education of her 
child. 
“How old is your child?” he asked. 
“Five years,” she replied. 
“You’d better hurry right home, madam,” 
he exclaimed. “You have already lost five 
years!” 
Long, long before a child is eight years old, 
his character and fundamental habits are “set” 
to an astonishing degree. Hereditary tenden- 
67 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
cies, good or evil, family and social atmosphere, 
physical conditions, have wrought their effects 
upon body and mind in a measure and with a 
permanency conditioning all of life afterward. 
So many mothers act as if they thought that 
between a child’s birth and the time it is old 
enough to go to school it is a sort of vegetable, 
or at best a kind of live doll—“so cunning!”— 
to be neglected and trusted to servants, or 
dressed and fussed over and exhibited for the 
amusement of parents and friends! 
Suddenly they wake up to their responsibility 
and begin to scramble round for some way to 
get hold of their own live child, and wonder 
that they have so much trouble with habits 
already formed. And they lay the blame on 
heredity! Let me tell you that not only physical 
habits and tendencies can be wonderfully regu- 
lated in the infancy of a normal child. Bad 
temper, laziness, self-indulgence, disobedience, 
cruelty,cowardice, selfishness,are not hereditary, 
but are wretched mental and moral habits 
taught to children in their infancy by igno- 
rance, neglect, and example. But even if these 
things were hereditary, that fact alone would 
emphasize the need for the most particular 
care in the choice of influences upon the infant. 
Even as I write these words, I have just come 
back from a woman’s club where a woman re- 
68 HABITS 
buked me for not being more active in the 
suffrage cause and for allowing myself to be so 
much absorbed in my home duties. Well, I 
knew there were two sides to that, but a few 
minutes later I heard her telling another woman 
that she had not seen her two-year-old baby 
for five days, and she added, helplessly: 
“At what age should one begin to teach a 
child obedience?” 
I wanted so much to “butt in” and say to 
her, “If your child hasn’t learned obedience 
by this time, you never can teach him.” 
A NOTHER woman said to me: “My little 
girl is so disorderly! I do not know why. 
She doesn’t get it from me; I am neat, myself.” 
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “For 
the very reason that you are instinctively or- 
derly haven’t you picked up after her? Wouldn’t 
it have been better if you had denied yourself 
a little bit, for her sake in the long run, had 
had a little more patience, and trained her 
to pick up some of the things herself? Now 
that she is old enough to keep her room in 
order, you expect her suddenly to be neat. 
If the bad habit is formed, you will have to 
begin ’way back at the beginning and drill her 
in the practice of neatness.” 
69 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
We had a good talk, back and forth, and 
the counsel we worked out together was in sub- 
stance this: 
Never let an opportunity slip to have her pick 
up the things in her room and keep it in order; 
have her help you keep other rooms in order; 
every time anything is out of place have her 
put it where it belongs till she gets a sense 
of orderliness. 
Some time play a game by twisting things 
around in a room—see how many things she 
notices and places straight. Let her help ar- 
range books and magazines properly. Play 
another game with books, papers, magazines, 
letters, and other articles all on one table; 
have her place these where they belong. Per- 
haps she can help you arrange your desk. Set- 
ting the dining-table is an education in orderli- 
ness; have her set it, over and over again, 
until she does it just right. Let her set cup- 
boards and closets in order. Always have her 
leave her clothes at night in an orderly pile 
on chair or hung up on hooks. 
The good-will of the child is absolutely nec- 
essary. If you find that you are nagging the 
child and making her nervous or irritable about 
her bad habit, stop it at once and begin on 
another tack. Keep the child in a happy frame 
of mind always, if it is possible. Try not to 
70 HABITS 
say “Don’t”; emphasize the right. Be positive 
rather than negative. Have you a bad habit 
of saying “Don’t do this” or “No” when you 
might say “Yes”? See how long it takes you to 
correct it. 
I have seen a child respond quickly to the 
question: “Was it straightforward and decent 
to do so-and-so? Was it fair and square?” Ap- 
peal to the justness and fairness of a child by 
letting her pick up what she drops rather than 
have older people—even a nurse-—wait on her. 
It is wholly demoralizing for a child to be waited 
on constantly, by a nurse or anybody else. 
Build up the self-respect of your child; this 
is most important, and you should work over 
it constantly 
SOMETIMES a story aptly told will cor- 
rect a bad habit. Avoid being too senti- 
mental over a bad habit. Appeal to character 
and strength of purpose rather than to emo- 
tion or to sentimental reasons. And it is most 
demoralizing to you and to your child, to be 
constantly threatening a punishment. Watch 
for the causes of the bad habits; you will gen- 
erally find them. 
I do not pretend to know the precise balance 
between heredity, environment and training 
71 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
in the making of character; but I do know 
that unless and until you have done all you can 
yourself to make the environment—of physical 
and mental and personality surroundings—the 
best possible for your particular child, from 
the very first possible moment of influence, 
you have no right to make “heredity” an ex- 
cuse. A wise old man I used to know said there 
were two kinds of things about which a person 
never should worry: 
(1) Things you cannot help. 
(2) Things you can help. 
I know by experience that much can be done 
to overcome bad tendencies, to encourage and 
develop good ones. It is not a thing to be 
done haphazard; it requires the most devoted 
and self-sacrificing study. And the more danger 
there may be of interference by “hereditary 
tendency,” or physical handicap, the more 
painstaking must be the effort. Anybody could 
bring up to perfect manhood or womanhood a 
child predestined to perfection! 
Do not be afraid of a bad habit. Make use 
of it; let it guide you and help you understand. 
Look at it calmly, from the child’s point of 
view, with sympathy and good sense. Take 
him by the hand and lead him out. But first 
of all, you may have to overcome some bad 
habits of your own! 
72 X 
YOUNG LIARS—AND THEIR PARENTS 
1\TEARLY all children, sooner or later, pass 
' through a period of lying and stealing; so 
do not be unduly worried when your good little 
girl or boy tells you a pretty bad lie or is discov- 
ered in a theft. It is not a thing to be treated 
lightly; neither is it occasion for hysteria or 
gloom. It is an important occasion for wisdom, 
tact, sympathy, and a due sense of proportion. 
Above all, don’t pretend to your child that this 
is the first thing of the kind that ever happened 
in your family! You can’t cure his lie by telling 
a solemn one yourself. 
Look for the cause (for there surely is one) 
and correct the fault lest it become a habit. 
Was the lie told because he was afraid to tell 
the truth? That is the commonest cause of 
lying. Try being more sympathetic and less 
severe, so he will not fear to tell you whatever 
has happened, no matter how bad. Talk it 
73 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
over carefully afterward rather than to punish; 
show him the right. 
Sometimes a vivid imagination may be the 
source of lying. I knew one little boy who in- 
sisted for several days he had a “fine big 
giraffe in his back yard.” He told all sorts of 
stories about its wonderful habits, so that one 
day I said we would go and visit it. He seemed 
pleased at first and trotted ahead, but soon 
came running back, saying it had run away— 
and with a very crestfallen look on his face. 
I knew, of course, he had been “lying,” but I 
knew also that a few weeks before he had seen 
a circus parade for the first time and was greatly 
impressed with the tall giraffe and thought it 
would be the most wonderful animal he could 
possess. Other boys had dogs, cats, rabbits, 
pigeons. Why shouldn’t he have a giraffe? 
Of course, the great difficulty was really pos- 
sessing one. The next best thing was to imagine 
he had one. I could not think of punishing 
him for living in his air-castle; I realized that 
for a whole year I myself had been living in a 
“Castle in Spain” of my own till it crashed 
about my ears and left me quite as crestfallen 
as was this little boy when we visited his private 
zoo and found it empty. 
What did I do? A long talk about giraffes— 
where they live and how hard they are to raise 
74 YOUNG LIARS—AND THEIR PARENTS 
and keep—showed him how impossible his 
dream was, and then we talked about never 
telling another person a story which we could 
not prove to them was true. It was a lesson 
quickly learned. Now he is a much older and 
wiser lad and one absolutely to be trusted; 
it was a passing phase of vivid imagination and 
vanity to have something better than the other 
boys. Some parents would have whipped the 
child. 
AND when it comes to the question of lying, 
it isn’t all done on the children’s end of the 
conversation, let me tell you. Parents’ lies to 
children begin at the very beginning. Instead 
of teaching him to control himself and be satis- 
fied when he has had enough, you say to the 
child, “There isn’t any more.” Don’t you, now? 
Why should the child not lie, as well as you? 
He has a better excuse, because you have set 
him the example, and he doesn’t know any 
better. He does not know the facts, he does 
not see things clearly, with eyes of experience. 
And he lives in a world where the real and the 
imaginary are divided by an invisible line. 
I remember two very aristocratic persons up 
in the Berkshires, at whose house I was visiting, 
who promised their little boy one day—I heard 
them say it—if he would be “good” all the 
75 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
morning that they would take him for a ride 
in the afternoon. He kept his part of the bri- 
bery, but they violated theirs and rode off with- 
out him. As the door closed upon his parents 
he turned to me and said, with pardonable 
heat and only rhetorical exaggeration: 
“There go the two biggest liars in the State 
of Massachusetts.” 
I did not dispute him. I felt about it just as 
he did. 
Try to tell the truth to your child for an 
hour to-morrow, then for a day, then for a week. 
It may not be easy right away to quit empty 
threatening, bribing, and misrepresenting. It 
may take a long time for you to convince your 
child that you are not the unreliable person 
that he has come to think you. Such impres- 
sions die hard. But it is worth while. I vent- 
ure to say that most of the perjury in our 
courts is committed by persons whose parents 
in one way and another taught them to lie. 
AS for honesty in matters of property, how 
k should a little child understand the refine- 
ments of property relations? He has to be taught 
this, like anything else. Nobody is born with 
a keen sense of meum and tuum. Help your 
child to understand, for example, that the 
76 YOUNG LIARS—AND THEIR PARENTS 
quarter or nickel or penny in his little chubby 
palm stands for some work that he or somebody 
else has done. Help him to consider how he 
came by it; whether it was given to him for 
love by somebody who earned it, or whether he 
himself got it in honest exchange for something 
that was honestly worth what he got for it. 
Help him to understand that honesty consists 
largely, if not entirely, in being sure that, in 
return for anything of value that you acquire, 
you give a real equivalent in work or value; 
that any sharp or crooked practice by which 
he tries (whether he succeeds or not) to get 
something, whether of materials or labor, for 
less than it is worth to the other party, is dis- 
honest. I would go so far as to say that stealing 
consists in the desire to get something for 
nothing; to acquire for yourself, without the 
consent of the owner, something that is not 
really yours. A very little child can understand 
that. 
This is a hard test, I know, but it applies. 
And I often wonder how certain men I know, 
engaged all day long in certain kinds of busi- 
ness, could with a straight face explain this 
principle of honesty to their children. And 
yet, what right have we to judge the children 
by any harsher test than that under which we 
live in our own daily conduct? 
77 XI 
PUNISHMENTS 
A A OST of tlie punishments children receive 
* ' * should fall upon their parents. “It hurts 
me, Johnnie, much more than it does you" 
may be all very well as a joke, but really it 
ought to hurt the parent much more. Some- 
where, perhaps far back in the training of that 
child, there were mistakes by the parents— 
mistakes from which the child is suffering and 
for which or in consequence of which the child 
is punished. 
If parents had knowledge of the true office 
of 'punishment, punishments would be fewer 
and better applied. The child soon learns cer- 
tain laws himself. “The way of the transgressor 
is hard”—if he does certain things, certain 
consequences follow. He sees the justice of 
that. Cannot the mother teach the child the 
great lesson of life—that no cm or wrongdoing 
can be committed that does not bring its own 
78 PUNISHMENTS 
punishment? As far as possible, let the deed 
do its own punishing; the child will see the force 
of the lesson. Do not punish a child out of all 
proportion to the “crime” he has committed; 
relate the punishment to the crime. 
For example, if he has carelessly upset your 
work-basket, throwing the contents—spools, 
pins, needles, hooks-and-eyes, buttons, and a 
thousand other odds and ends—upon the floor, 
do not scold and lock him in a closet, or make 
him sit in a chair—what have such things to 
do with his offense? Rather have him pick up 
every pin and button and put them all in the 
basket neatly. It will take time, and it is quite 
punishment enough. That is what you would 
have to do if you tipped over the basket your- 
self. If you say to him, “Now, isn’t that a 
shame, Willie? It will take quite a while to 
pick all those things up again; but I know you 
can do it,” it will help him to look twice the 
next time before he knocks over anything. 
If you had sent him to bed or kept him with- 
out his supper or dessert, it would have had 
nothing whatever to do with the mischief, and 
the child would have felt resentful, and that is 
almost a certain sign that your punishment is 
not the right one. Ask yourself, too, just at this 
point, why the child knocked over the basket. 
If he is clumsy and careless, you must help him 
79 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
to grow more careful in his movements. There 
are many ways of doing this by games and 
plays, music, dancing, and rhythm work, but 
that is another part of the task of a mother in 
developing a perfect child. 
A VERY wicked thing that many mothers 
do is to say: “Wait till your father comes 
home; I shall tell him what you have done and 
he will punish you.” There is not one word to 
be said in defense of this very common prac- 
tice. It is bad through and through—bad in 
principle, operation, and effect; bad for father, 
mother, and child, each and all of them. It is 
bad at the time, and the results are very long- 
lived. 
If the child has done something which he 
should not have done, while under his mother’s 
care, the mother should always punish. If she 
waits for “father,” she not only loses her con- 
trol over the child—a fatal mistake—but she 
makes the child dread his father’s coming, in- 
stead of looking forward with pleasure to his 
return. I know one mother, regarded as a 
most fascinating and charming woman, who 
is mentally and morally so lazy that she can- 
not bear to punish her child, but always “waits 
for father.” The consequence is that the son, 
80 PUNISHMENTS 
as he has grown up, has come to be afraid of his 
father, and when he needed his counsel and 
guidance feared him too much for them ever 
to get into close confidence. 
TYTEVER, never, never punish in anger. Never 
' punish in a spirit of revenge. Remember 
always that you are the stronger, and that only 
a coward takes advantage of his physical ad- 
vantage over a weaker person. And when the 
punishment, reasonably related to the “crime,” 
has been completed, see to it that the spirit of 
confidence and good relation is restored. A 
sulking parent is a pitiful sight! 
Love, not fear, should be the motive and 
law of punishment. Look for the reason for 
the wrongdoing. It may be your own fault 
that your child has done thus and so. You 
may be able to overcome the bad habit or 
weakness. There is nothing so important in 
your home as the training of your child. Sew- 
ing and mending and every other activity of the 
household are secondary. This is a human 
life, a human soul, of whose nurture you are the 
custodian. 
Bribes and rewards for good conduct lower 
the spiritual effect in the child’s mind. He 
does not learn self-control, but expects material 
81 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
rewards for every good deed. Never bribe a 
child. He is going to be good because it is right. 
He will unconsciously learn to choose the good 
for the satisfaction it gives his own soul; thus 
he learns self-control—the greatest lesson of 
all, and the substance and purpose of all real 
education. XII 
CURIOSITY IN CHILDREN 
“ IT OW shall I cure my child of curiosity?” 
* * a woman asked me the other day. “Such 
an inquisitive, investigating child I never saw. 
I can’t have her prying into everything. How 
can I break her of it?” 
“Just as you would break a fish of swimming 
or a bird of singing.” 
“How do you cure a fish of swimming?” 
“Kill it. You might as well.” 
“Do you mean that curiosity is a good thing? 
A natural thing?” 
“Certainly I do. I would as soon put out 
a child’s eyes, or stop up its ears, or cut off 
its fingers, as try to discourage its curiosity. 
It ought rather to be encouraged and wisely 
directed.” 
Try to imagine yourself placed in a totally 
new and strange environment, where most of 
the objects were far above the level of your eyes, 
83 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
or hidden from you or out of your reach. Im- 
agine, too, that in order to know how to behave, 
how to get the good out of your surroundings, 
how to get along generally, it was necessary 
for you to understand the purposes of things 
and actions about you; that you were unable 
to read the printed books and newspapers and 
signs that told the natives the why and how 
of things; that those natives were of age and 
intelligence superior to yourself, and that the 
only ways in which you could learn the things 
you needed to know were either to ask endless 
questions or to reach up and handle things and 
try experiments for yourself. 
Now imagine also that in that strange en- 
vironment the natives regarded your questions 
as a nuisance, snatched away from you every- 
thing that looked interesting and worth finding 
out about, punished you for trying to make 
discoveries on your own account, and yet at the 
same time expected you to act as if you had 
always lived there and knew the values and 
relations and ownership of things and all the 
reasons for the ways and customs of the place! 
Absurd, isn’t it? And yet that is exactly the 
way in which thousands of grown-up people 
act toward the little folks who have been 
dragged into the world without being asked 
whether they wanted to come, and who are 
84 CURIOSITY IN CHILDREN 
trying as best they can to understand things 
and people in the place in which they find 
themselves. 
YOU have seen a kitten in a new room, 
sniffing about the corners and the furni- 
ture; she wants to know what sort of a place 
it is, whether it is a safe place for kittens to 
remain in, whether she’d better not run right 
away from there. Or, if she is to stay, she wants 
to understand all the ins-and-outs of it. It 
is the animal’s instinctive effort to discover 
the attractions and uses and dangers of its 
environment. 
There is something of the same sort in your 
little child’s curiosity about the things amid 
which it finds itself. But there is, in the child, 
we may assume, something more, something 
higher—an intellectual hunger, a desire to come 
into acquaintance with all the wonders and 
mysteries of the life about it. It is the be- 
ginning of education. Surely you didn’t suppose 
that a child’s education was a matter of books 
and school-teaching? That is the least and most 
superficial of it. Who are you that you should 
take the responsibility of checking the inquiry 
of your child, or anybody’s child, about the 
world? Have you entirely forgotten your own 
childhood? Or did some lazy or officious per- 
85 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
son smother your inquisitiveness so that now 
you are too stupid to see what it is that your 
own child is doing? There are plenty of such 
people, but I didn’t think it of you! 
One student of child nature says somewhat 
ponderously that “curiosity leads to objective 
knowledge, but is also a stimulus to the ac- 
quisition of subjective knowledge by imitation.” 
“Why does that big boy do so-and-so?” asks 
the small boy, seeing the larger boy, whom he 
hugely admires because he is larger, doing some 
as yet inexplicable thing. 
You explain, and he forthwith tries to do it 
himself. So he learns the reason, the process, 
and the results, and you don’t have to explain 
that again. The knowledge, at first acquired 
objectively, has become subjective. 
as you are, old as you may ever get to 
be, that is the way you learn yourself 
every day, if you are good for anything. Child 
or adult, we proceed from the known to the un- 
known. At the outset the child’s knowledge is 
nil; he is an absolute stranger to the most com- 
monplace things. You must not assume that 
he ought to know anything. The only way for 
him to learn is by asking questions, handling, 
and experimenting. Every new thing intro- 
duced into a familiar environment is a stimulus 
86 CURIOSITY IN CHILDREN 
to his passion for learning about things, to his 
curiosity. I know one bright-eyed boy who 
became so familiar with the things about his 
home that it became a family joke—you couldn’t 
move or displace the smallest thing or introduce 
a new one, however trivial, without his instantly 
noticing it and demanding the reason: “Where 
did you get it, Mother, and what is it for?” 
If he is a really live and observing child, 
it is instinctive with him to try to relate each 
new thing, each new experience, to the knowl- 
edge he already has. Curiosity is to the mind 
what appetite is to the body—the intellect 
lives by what it feeds on. Show me a child 
without insatiable curiosity and I will advise 
you to see what is the matter with it, for it will 
be a sure sign of physical torpor or mental de- 
ficiency. 
I hear somebody scoff, and say that 
*—' this is “some of that new-fangled child- 
training fad”? Indeed? Hear, then, what John 
Locke wrote nearly two hundred and fifty years 
ago (1690) in his Thoughts Concerning Education: 
“Curiosity in children is but an appetite 
after knowledge, and therefore ought to be en- 
couraged in them, not only as a good sign, 
but as a great instrument nature has provided 
to remove that ignorance they were born with, 
87 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
and which without this busy inquisitiveness, will 
make them dull and useless creatures.” 
Of course, there is need for common sense, 
for a wise management of the business. A 
child can be taught not to interrupt inconsider- 
ately the conversation of others; but I hope 
you are not one of those who believe a child 
should be “seen and not heard.” There never 
was a wickeder or more deadly falsehood. 
Locke says so wisely: 
“Mark what ’tis his mind aims at in the 
question, and not what words he expresses it 
in. And when you have informed and satisfied 
him in that, you will see how his thoughts en- 
large themselves, and how by fit answers he 
may be led on farther than perhaps you could 
imagine.” And he suggests that children often 
abandon themselves to being silly and insipid 
because their curiosity has been “balked” and 
their “inquiries neglected.” 
Never, never, never give false or deluding 
answers to children. They quickly perceive 
the falsehood. That is one of the most effective 
ways to breed liars. 
Are you with your own child enough to know 
the workings of his little mind? Or is some 
hired servant of dubious intelligence forming 
indelibly the impressions that he is to take 
through life? 
88 XIII 
MAKING A FEARLESS CHILD 
WHEN my own boy was born I determined 
to do what I could to bring him up as 
a fearless child—not reckless or irresponsible, 
or even incautious; but poised and self-controlled 
and free from the kind of unreasoning timidity 
that many children exhibit. 
Experience as a teacher with scores of chil- 
dren, timid, afraid of the dark, of animals, of 
insects, of strangers, and with even grown folk 
who suffered from real and imaginary fears, 
made me almost afraid myself to forecast what 
I had undertaken; but I felt deeply that no 
evil to be combated in child-training needed 
more to be overcome. I resolved to make a 
study of its manifestations and to prevent my 
child’s suffering from it if I could. 
Conversations with many persons about ti- 
midity in children has taught me that parents 
seem to think fearlessness is a gift of the gods, 
89 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
that parents have no duty of training their 
children not to be afraid. 
Temperaments differ; some children, no 
doubt, are by nature more composed and self- 
reliant than others; but let me tell you that 
I have yet to see the child whom I had any 
real opportunity to study whose predominant 
characteristics in this and other respects I 
could not trace quite definitely to home in- 
fluence and training—or neglect. 
Psychologists seem to agree that the child 
is born with the instinct of fear. Professor 
James holds that lust, anger, and fear are the 
three most unquenchable emotions to which 
human nature is susceptible. In the progress 
from brute to man, the frequency of occasions 
for fear seems to diminish, and there are, per- 
haps, people who go from cradle to grave sub- 
stantially without it. I determined to do what 
I could to abate for my child the causes of 
its development, assuming him born with the 
instinct. 
ENVIRONMENT was of first importance. 
This I made as quiet, orderly, and pleas- 
ant as possible; free from abruptness, shocks, 
and suddenness. When changes were made in 
his attendants or surroundings, in his earliest 
90 MAKING A FEARLESS CHILD 
infancy, it was done with as little startling cir- 
cumstance as planning could contrive. 
When only an hour old he was held by the 
nurse quite near a bright light, at which he 
gazed with evident pleasure and interest. When 
he was four hours old an electric bell within 
a few feet of where he lay rang loudly. He 
raised his head a trifle, as if he heard, but he 
appeared in no way startled. 
I never allowed any one to come near him 
who did not love him, and no one was permitted 
to grab and kiss him suddenly, or, above all, 
to toss him in the air. I went to him always 
with a smiling face, and, no matter what might 
have happened, strove to have my own coun- 
tenance exhibit no fear, only calmness and 
confidence. Even when myself decidedly star- 
tled by some fall or other mishap, I steadfastly 
avoided alarming him by expressions of con- 
sternation or unusual accents of voice. 
Often it was exceedingly difficult to appear 
composed and as if all was right when the oc- 
currence was either ludicrous or possibly fraught 
with danger. Once, when he was less than six 
months old, I was bathing him in a small tin 
foot-tub on the floor, and left him for a moment. 
Hearing a small outcry, I glanced back through 
the doorway, to see him with the tub tipped 
over, lying like a high - backed mud - turtle, 
91 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
with his head sticking out beyond the edge, 
contemplating the puddle by which he was 
surrounded. 
He yelled for a moment when I picked him 
up, but my smiling face and firm grasp seemed 
to reassure him immediately, and the next day 
he showed no fear of his bath. Yet in many 
ways he displayed a keen association of place 
and incident, and I was confident he had not 
forgotten. 
I was with him almost constantly myself, but 
when I had to leave him now and then, he 
never showed the slightest fear or timidity upon 
being left with some one else, or even alone. 
One point was always made clear to those 
who came near him: that they should look 
cheerful and, above all, use a moderate tone of 
voice. As he grew older he seemed to have 
supreme confidence in everything and every- 
body. Yet he had acquired a fine discrimina- 
tion and caution as to things really dangerous, 
such as the hot stove, the stairs, the open win- 
dow. We never had a gate at the stair-head; 
but he never fell downstairs, although he went 
up and down after he was a year old. 
had no terrors for him. This 
was a point of keenest interest to me, for 
I had seen so many children “afraid of the 
92 MAKING A FEARLESS CHILD 
dark” that I wished earnestly to make it for 
him both pleasant and welcome. From the 
first, when it was time for him to go to sleep, 
he was laid in his own little basket in a room 
by himself, though within our hearing. I never 
left a light in his room after he was put to bed 
at night (at six o’clock promptly), and after 
nursing him in the night I always laid him back 
in his basket without delay, often with his 
eyes wide open in the dark. His only comment 
was a contented “goo-goo.” 
He was a very active child and missed very 
little that went on about him. Everything 
was a delight and everybody a friend. 
Before he was three years old he would beg 
me to stay down-stairs while he started up to 
bed alone, going up into a dark hall and darker 
room; and sometimes I would even find him 
hidden in the dark closet, whither his merry 
little laugh drew my search for him. He loved 
the light and was happy playing in the sun- 
shine, but he also seemed to enjoy thoroughly 
the “nice dark,” as we called it. For a while 
he used to play that the dark was the coal- 
mine and he the busy miner. 
He loved all kinds of animals and insects, and 
I tried to instil discrimination with regard to 
them without giving him groundless or painful 
fears. He had the sincerest love for everything 
93 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
beautiful, and if he had any kind of shrinking, 
it was from an ugly or grotesque picture or 
object. Yet this was a dislike rather than a 
fear. 
I told the story, substantially as it is told 
here, many years ago in the Kindergarten Review 
(January, 1903). Now that the child is almost 
a man, I find interest in this concluding para- 
graph of what I wrote then: 
“He is only a little fellow, and there is much 
ahead of him to suffer and endure, but he has 
courage and self-reliance, and such a straight- 
forward trust in everybody and everything, and 
such good common sense withal, that I feel 
he has made a good beginning toward over- 
coming any instincts of fear with which he 
may have been born.” 
I am prepared to testify that the method 
has justified itself beyond my fondest hopes. XIV 
OBEDIENCE, AND SELF-CONTROL 
7WT ILITARY training is in the air these days, 
and one naturally thinks of obedience as 
the essence of it. I have been wondering about 
the young men in the various training-camps 
—what sort of mental preparation they have 
had for the kind of discipline to which they 
must now adapt themselves. For it is undoubt- 
edly true that obedience has been out of fashion 
of late. Not long ago I heard a man say that 
what the American youth needed was “to learn 
to obey without thinking.” Indeed? Isn’t that 
one of the things we find fault with in the Ger- 
man system? Do we really want that sort of 
thing as the basis of American conduct? If 
we are to have a nation of folk who “obey with- 
out thinking,” who is to give the orders? What 
sort of authority are we to install ourselves that 
can be trusted with the power conferred by such 
an attitude on the part of the mass of the people! 
95 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
No—a thousand times no! What we want 
in America is a discipline of another sort; the 
obedience that we should cultivate is not un- 
thinking, but definitely intelligent. Even our 
soldiers, exactly obedient for the time being for 
the purposes of unified action to a common 
end, would not be worthy of the name “Amer- 
ican” if their obedience were of the blind, un- 
thinking kind that some of our militarists think 
they believe in. 
Some day the military kind of discipline will 
cease to be necessary. Individual initiative, 
action, and self-government will again become 
the normal operation of our citizens. It is of 
the obedience that we need and should cultivate 
permanently for the purposes of ordinary life 
that I would speak. 
is regarded by many as the 
chief virtue of childhood. Granting that, 
it must not be forgotten that there is little virtue 
in obedience for its own sake. The purpose of 
it is, or ought to be, at bottom, the gaining of 
self-control. Obedience to outside authority 
through fear, without the consent of the mind, 
is a miserable thing; really injurious to all 
concerned. Teaching to a child the right kind 
of obedience is one of the most delicate and 
96 OBEDIENCE, AND SELF-CONTROL 
difficult tasks the parent has to perform. It 
calls first for self-control on his own part. 
Since the demand for obedience involves re- 
strictions upon natural impulses, it imposes 
habits of action in accordance with the interests 
of others—one’s friends, family, neighbors, the 
community as a whole. After all, law, in the 
best sense, is simply the expression of the judg- 
ment of the community as to what each must 
do or sacrifice in the control of his own desires 
and impulses for the sake of the peace and 
welfare of all the rest. It is in preparation for 
living under law in this sense that we require 
obedience of our children before they are able 
to realize the reasons for it. 
Authority in the first instance is personal. 
The child meets it first in father, mother, nurse, 
teacher. From the very outset of his life, he 
must accept the judgment of these, in opposi- 
tion to or modification of his own. Do you 
see, then, how important it is that this personal 
authority should be reasonable, wise, consider- 
ate, consistent, self-controlled? Even in its 
smallest exercise it affects the whole after-life 
of the child. Your insistence upon obedience 
must be based upon fundamental principles of 
universal or at least general application. Er- 
ratic, arbitrary requirements, which are not 
intelligible to the child, create a sense of in- 
97 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
justice and do only harm. Certainly, there are 
times when, for the child’s own sake, instant 
obedience must be had without thought or 
question, but as soon as practicable the reason 
for it should be made plain to him. If you 
establish in his mind early the assurance that 
your commands are habitually reasonable, he 
will more and more accept those which at the 
moment he does not understand. 
NOTHING is much worse or more common 
in the training of children than bribing 
them to obey—unless it is getting obedience 
through fear, by threats. The obedience given 
for pay of some kind, or because of fear of 
punishment, is a pitiful thing. Children should 
be trained to do right for its own sake,' because 
they know it is right. The other course appeals 
to the lowest motives and should never be re- 
sorted to. The way in which parent or teacher 
exercises authority has the profoundest effects 
upon the life of the child. The effort should be 
always to accomplish at the earliest possible 
moment the substitution of self-control for out- 
side authority. 
“The principal business of parents and teach- 
er,” a very wise man said to me once, “is to 
fit the child as soon as possible to get along 
98 OBEDIENCE, AND SELF-CONTROL 
without them.” The purpose of obedience is 
to give the child as quickly as possible the kind 
of self-imposed authority that will make obedi- 
ence, in the sense of subservience to others, 
unnecessary. 
You cannot begin too early in the life of the 
child to enforce this kind of obedience. A mere 
baby can learn not to touch certain things, not 
to do certain things; to respect the rights and 
possessions of others. In a very short time he 
will learn not to meddle with father’s papers, 
mother’s work-basket. It is easy, too, to con- 
trol his physical functions, by requiring a fixed 
regularity in his habits. Remember always 
that these things are for his sake rather than 
for yours. 
Kirkpatrick, one of the wisest of child- 
students, in his Fundamentals of Child-Study 
says that “obedience is a temporary and im- 
mature virtue, which becomes mature and 
lasting only when it grows into free self-control, 
by appropriating outer laws and making them 
inner standards of conduct.” 
Froebel says that “between educator and 
pupil, between request and obedience, there 
should invisibly rule a third something to which 
educator and pupil are equally subject. This 
something is the Right, the Best.” 
99 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
HTHE clear knowledge, soon felt by the child, 
that so-and-so that you require of him is 
right, that it is best for him to do it, will auto- 
matically inspire obedience. This is training 
for conscience and will, and its effects are pro- 
found and lifelong. 
No law is self-enforcing. The common sense 
of the community must accept it, or it falls 
into disuse. And the enforcement must be 
fair, reasonable, and consistent; it must ap- 
peal to the average citizen’s sense of justice, 
utility, and fair play. So it must be in the 
management of children. You must not ask of 
the child what you would not and do not do your- 
self, or what does not or at least ought not to 
appeal to him as right and wise and fair. 
Obedience under such conditions prepares him 
for his life as a part of the nation. In such 
obedience he finds the truest freedom. 
The soldier’s obedience, if it is to be in any 
right sense “American,” is his own voluntary 
submission to the common purpose. On no 
other ground can military discipline be justi- 
fied. And for the purposes of normal life, the 
obedience that we want is that of free men and 
women, gladly subordinating their own desires 
and impulses to the common welfare in willing 
and conscious compliance with the authority 
long ago established within themselves. 
100 XV 
DIRT AND HAPPINESS 
“ DUT on his overalls and let him play in 
* the dirt all day long. Let him get just 
as dirty as possible and play as long as he likes 
without interruption.” 
This was a reply that I heard a wise doctor 
—a specialist in child-care—make to a mother 
who asked for advice about her nervous child. 
I heard him say it in one form or another several 
times to different mothers who asked: 
“What shall I give or do for my nervous boy 
or girl?” 
“Give them dirt—‘back to the soil’—plenty 
of it. Let them dig, dig, dig; make mud pies, 
build or play with pebbles and stones, and do 
not nag! Do not bother them about their 
clothes; let them forget themselves and every 
one else for a time in playing in real earth.” 
How I do pity the dressed-up child who 
parades in the park with the nurse, who never 
101 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
has a real good, hearty playtime out of doors 
in the dirt! Out of doors is the place for children 
to play, just as much and as long as possible. 
“Oh dear, if I only had a good play-room!” 
I have heard this so often from mothers. 
Yes, a play-room is nice to have, but why 
not make a great effort to have a place to play 
out of doors? Rain or shine, send the children 
out. The rain will not hurt them. Fix them 
up for it, and when they come in soaking give 
them a good rub-down, their supper, and bed. 
You will have little worry then about their 
eating and sleeping. 
Of course they are noisy in the house and 
break things. So would you be if you played 
golf or tennis or rode horseback or went to 
war in the house. 
Child’s play is just as important and real 
and as good sport for the child as any of the 
things I have just mentioned are to grown-ups. 
Perhaps you never thought of that? You know 
how a day in the real country air, playing golf, 
takes the kinks out of father, and how often 
he would like to do it—how he “needs it ter- 
ribly.” Well, a child needs it a great deal more. 
A \ 7TTH us grown-ups play is for fun, for 
' * sport or exercise; with a child it is his 
real business—play is his serious affair and of 
102 DIRT AND HAPPINESS 
great educational value. Watch any child play- 
ing and you will see the effort and concentration 
put into it to achieve the end. He is putting 
the whole of himself into what he is playing and 
gets greater returns than we; therefore it is 
most important that we should give him every 
possible opportunity for plenty of right playing. 
Play builds up the child; it is part of nat- 
ure’s method of growth and education for the 
business of living. But if we restrict that play 
to a walk up the avenue with nurse and a quiet 
little play in the nursery, we are guaranteeing 
a nervous or anemic child. 
Can you imagine such a thing as a trip to 
the nearest available vacant lot or dirt-pile, 
day after day? Yes, it would be an effort. 
Perhaps in your “circle of society” it would not 
be a stylish thing to do. Your child would have 
to come home very dirty, but, oh! the results 
in red cheeks, appetite, enthusiasm, and quieted 
nerves! 
Tired nerves do not show in little people at 
first; at least not always to busy nurses and 
mothers. They are “naughty”—obstinate, 
whiny, irritable, listless, bilious — any one of 
these—and you never lay it to the fact that 
the child has been dressed up too much, walked 
or driven too much, and never allowed a single 
day to make mud pies. 
103 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
How do you know that your little girl is 
never worried because her week’s batch of mud 
pies is never done, or the little boy that the 
cave he wanted to dig has never been dug? 
These are matters of racial instinct out of the 
distant past, and every normal boy and girl 
ought to play this way, working out these 
primitive ideas. 
WHEN you dress yourself and children 
up and spend an afternoon walking about 
when you should be out in a snow-storm or 
digging in dirt at the foot of some old tree, you 
are selling the children’s birthright for very 
poor pottage—to say nothing of what you are 
missing for yourself. 
One of our famous educators has said, “With- 
out play the child will not grow up at all.” 
Of course he will not; that is why we try so 
hard to have playgrounds for our poor tenement- 
house children, but bless you, our wealthy chil- 
dren need them quite as much. 
The child grows every day through the im- 
pulses that direct his activities. Watch your 
child and see what these impulses are, what he 
wants to do, what he most frequently proposes 
to play. Does he want to play “burglar and 
cop” more than anything else? Perhaps this 
104 DIRT AND HAPPINESS 
phase of life has come near him on his daily 
walks, or he has heard this sort of life talked 
about more than anything else. Study to give 
him a more wholesome impulse to his play. 
Back to the soil again. See if you cannot 
get him to create some form of play less stimu- 
lating than “cop and robber,” which would 
make a sensitive child nervous, possibly keep 
him awake or give him bad dreams at night. 
Have you a small bit of ground? Give him 
a place to dig and plant; let him build a small 
fence about it of stones or sticks. Garden tools, 
hammer and nails with a few old boards, will 
work wonders with a restless child. Wouldn’t 
you much rather spend a few days every week 
out in some vacant lot with your child than 
have him in bed or a nervous wreck later on in 
life? The brain, muscles, and bones are all 
being developed through the play. How can 
you think anything else so important? 
Yes, I know very well you have sewing, 
board meetings, and any amount of things 
waiting for you, but some of the sewing you 
will not need if you keep the children in over- 
alls and yourself in a short khaki skirt so you 
can play with them. 
Do you suppose by any chance your own 
nerves would feel better for the back-to-the- 
soil movement with the children? Ask your 
105 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
family doctor what he would think of your 
making a batch of real mud pies for your tired 
nerves. I venture to predict he would say, 
“Go to it, and make a whole batch of bread 
and cake besides.” XVI 
DOLLS—AND TIIE GIRL 
“'TREACHER, take dolly home?” The wist- 
ful eyes of the little five-year-old girl in 
the kindergarten pleaded for that dolly. The 
scene will never leave my memory. 
“No, dear, dolly belongs in the kindergarten; 
leave her here; you may have her again to- 
morrow.” 
But the little girl, a poor, tiny scrap of hur 
manity, hugged the doll, saying insistently, 
mournfully, pleadingly, “No dolly home, no 
dolly home, teacher,” till I could withstand her 
no longer, and told her to wait until the others 
had gone. I could not give that child a doll 
without giving them to all the twenty other 
children. 
What was I to do? Ought I to take that 
precious doll away from her, when it seemed 
to fill a long-felt want with her, as nothing 
else ever had done in the two weeks the child 
107 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
had been with us? She came from a wretched 
home and had seemed to us rather stupid, list- 
less, and unresponsive. We kept hoping every 
day that something would awaken her. 
Music, songs, games, blocks—all were alike 
to her; she looked on with stolid eyes and ex- 
pressionless face; but would take no part, give 
no sign of response—until to-day, when we 
brought out the dolls! 
She folded that dolly in her arms the minute 
it was given her. When we all sang the lullaby 
and rocked the dollies to sleep, she seemed to 
sing and rock, too; the first time she had shown 
the slightest impulse to join in with the others. 
Yes, she had imagination, and a mind to re- 
spond with the moment we found the right 
stimulus! 
ALL day she clung to that doll, so contentedly 
happy that I let her hold it long after the 
others had given up theirs, glad that I had 
found at last the door to her little heart. Yes, 
I let her take it home, too, telling her to bring 
it back in the morning, for, of course, it would 
want to come back with her to the kinder- 
garten ! 
She brought it back every day for a week, 
and then I gave it to her for her very own, 
find replaced it with another in the supply. 
108 DOLLS —AND THE GIRL 
To us it was just a doll; to her it was—what? 
Some of you women whose minds go back to 
your childhood will think you know what that 
doll was to her; but I doubt whether you will 
unless in your childhood your whole life was 
starved for something to love and care for. 
Through that battered old doll that little 
child found her place in the kindergarten and 
began to show her real self, her real possibilities 
of character; to work and play and be happy 
with the others. This it was that awakened her 
imagination, changed her from a little, half- 
animal thing into a live child. For the first 
time in her starved little life she found some- 
thing worth living for, even in the environ- 
ment which imprisoned her soul in the place 
that served her as “home.” 
WE grown-ups forget so easily what life 
was to us when we were children. How 
few really sympathize with the lives of the 
children! To us a doll is just a doll, a thing. 
It is so hard for us to realize the place that the 
doll occupies in the life of the normal little girl. 
To her there is tremendous reality in her de- 
votion to her dolly, in rocking it to sleep, put- 
ting it to bed, dressing and undressing it, mak- 
ing clothes for it, and playing at cooking. It 
is all just as normal and natural as growing. 
109 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
It helps to develop the motherly instinct latent 
in every healthy girl and so vitally necessary 
for the woman that is to be. Married or un- 
married, a woman is only half a woman with- 
out a strong and well-developed heart full of 
mother-love. 
Some girls, to be sure, do not seem to care 
much about dolls, even though there is no 
tendency in the home to discourage the dolly 
stage of childhood. Such girls are rare. Some- 
times the same instinct shows itself in devotion 
to animals—cats, dogs, or horses. It is the same 
instinct, merely in another form. Little boys 
have that love, too, though usually it does not 
last so long. Do not discourage it. If the boy 
wants to play that he is a little father, while 
his sister plays that she is a little mother, 
don’t make the mistake of discouraging or 
laughing at it. It is a wholly healthy sign. 
Little children must have concrete objects to 
love. They cannot grasp abstractions. 
“Mother,” I heard a little boy of six say to 
one of my neighbors, “I think Cousin Mary is 
going to make a good housekeeper—she makes 
up her dolly’s bed so be-au-ti-fully.” His mother 
explained to me that he had overheard her 
telling her chambermaid just how she should 
make up the beds. 
The seeds of good housekeeping are often 
110 DOLLS —AND THE GIRL 
sown in the play-room with the care of dolls, 
the conduct of miniature tea-parties, and the 
other imitations of serious domestic life. The 
children mean business. The dolls really share 
their joys and sorrows. The little girl has the 
same sense of protective relation with her doll 
because it is small that the grown-up mother 
has with her baby. It is a far more real thing 
than we stupid adults can realize. She lives 
in a realm of her own with her doll, telling it 
stories, conducting it over the house and 
grounds, explaining things to it, quite as if it 
were alive. Is there nothing to confirm this 
out of your own experience? 
A SIMPLE, reasonably good-looking doll is 
much better than a dressy, complicated 
mechanical doll, and will be loved long after 
the expensive squawking one has been laid 
aside. It will be loved when it is battered, 
grimy, and apparently worn out. Don’t you 
remember some one doll, some ugly, noseless, 
moth-eaten-looking old thing, that you loved 
more than all the others? I believe you do! 
It was Charles Kingsley who wrote: 
I once had a sweet little doll, dears— 
The prettiest doll in the world. 
Her face was so red and so white, dears, 
And her hair was so charmingly curled;— 
111 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
and then went on to tell how the doll was lost 
on the heath one day and sought for for more 
than a week; till he found it with the paint 
all washed off and the hair bedraggled and 
uncurled— 
Yet for old sakes, she is still, dears, 
The prettiest doll in the world. 
A man wrote that, and what he said is typical 
of the feeling of all normal little girls for their 
dolls. 
“Take away the doll,” says Kate Douglas 
Wiggin, “and you erase from the heart and 
head feelings, images, poetry, aspiration, ex- 
perience, ready for application to real life.” 
I shall never forget a thing I saw once at a 
social settlement when we were trimming a 
Christmas tree: An apparently stolid old maid 
grabbed a doll and hugged it to her heart. 
There was a tragic look in her eyes as she 
whispered: 
“Isn’t it a lovely one? Do you know, I never 
had a doll in my whole life!” 
Starved, simply starved, for the experience 
of having something to love and cherish. The 
look in the forty-year-old woman’s eyes has 
haunted my memory to this day. And don’t 
112 DOLLS —AND THE GIRL 
you forget that somehow the love comes back 
from the doll to the little girl with the love- 
hungry heart and the big imagination. When 
that part of life is left out, it leaves a gap that 
in most instances never gets filled. XVII 
THE FIRST YEAR OF SCHOOL 
T° s° “ over the top” was a big thing for 
-*■ older brother; our hearts stood still as we 
imagined the lad out in the dreadful open where 
the bullets were singing. But he was twenty- 
one; he had met a great many calls for courage, 
and the comrades were all there to cheer him 
on. I doubt whether it takes a bigger courage, 
or is more of a strain of adventure into the 
Unknown, than was that first day when he 
left the shelter of the home-roof to go to school. 
We older folk have forgotten, most of us, the 
terrors of that day as we walked into a brand- 
new world, full of strangenesses and perils be- 
yond our imagining. For almost every child, 
this is the first real step out into the struggle 
of life. Fortunate is that child who steps from 
one atmosphere of love at home into another 
at school. I often think that the proof of a 
real teacher is the spirit in which he or she 
welcomes the child coming to school for the 
114 THE FIRST YEAR OF SCHOOL 
very first time, and makes him at home at 
once. 
A baby up to this time, he has been sheltered, 
kissed when he bumped his head; naptime and 
playmates have been arranged for him. He 
has been the center of his whole world of affairs. 
Now he must go out and adjust himself to a life 
in which he is only one of many; in which his 
personal wishes and tastes will be little consid- 
ered ; his idiosyncrasies regarded as excrescences 
to be lopped off without ceremony or delay. 
How helpless the little fellow feels! The 
routine is new and strange; he does not know 
where anything ist or who anybody is. He is 
lonely at recess. A few of the other children 
may be acquaintances, but there will be boys 
there to bully him if they dare, fight him if 
they think it practicable, put him in his place 
generally. That very first day he may have 
to battle for his most primitive rights. Many 
a mother has met the first tragic shock of 
her life in seeing her precious infant come home 
from the first day at school with a bloody 
nose and the beginnings of a detestation for 
life in general! 
COR a sensitive child to go for the first time 
* into a group of kindergarten children is a far 
more appalling experience than we realize. The 
115 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
greatest sympathy should be displayed by both 
parent and teacher until the child has become 
accustomed to his new surroundings. Mothers 
too often push and teachers pull the child into 
school activities before he is mentally ready 
for it. I have seen a child in kindergarten 
sit for several weeks, just looking on; and 
then, suddenly, without warning, jump up 
on the circle and take part in a game. 
Think what a struggle was going on in that 
little soul, trying to find courage to make the 
plunge! 
When mother and little son or daughter have 
been very close at home, talking much together, 
discussing and explaining everything very inti- 
mately, it is a bewildering thing for the child 
suddenly to find himself being talked to as 
one of a large group. I remember one little 
fellow, whose intercourse with his mother had 
been very close indeed, and to whom she had 
spoken always in a very low, clear, distinct 
way, who for a long time could not understand 
at all what the teacher was saying in her loud, 
rather raucous voice. He could not seem to 
realize that what she was saying out into the 
general air of the school-room was meant for 
him. The teacher thought he was stupid. He 
finally became adjusted to this unaccustomed 
experience, found his place in the crowd, and 
116 THE FIRST YEAR OF SCHOOL 
demonstrated that he was one of the brightest 
children in the school. 
'T'HE individuality of a child should be re- 
spected at school as well as at home; before 
you can respect it effectively, Friend Teacher, 
you must find out what it is. And you must be- 
gin upon his first appearance within your juris- 
diction to assume that he has an individuality 
and that it is your business to find out about 
it. If you regard all these children coming 
to you anew as identical in any respect, to be 
treated alike in your routine, you’d better go 
and get a job in a shoe-store—you never were 
meant to be a teacher. 
Dr. John Dewey emphasizes the fact that 
school life should grow out of the natural activi- 
ties of the child; the transition should be made 
as gently as possible. Happy the parents who 
have found the first teacher such as can win the 
whole of the child; happy such a teacher— 
the gift is God-given. 
To this end the parents—mother, anyway— 
will make early opportunity to get acquainted 
with this first teacher; to help her with her 
difficult task of understanding the mind of 
each child and the atmosphere in which it has 
grown; of winning the love and confidence of 
117 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
each. A dislike of the teacher, born in these 
first hours, not only is hard to overcome, but 
starts the child off handicapped for all his life 
in school and may sour his temper toward the 
whole world. A right relationship at the out- 
set between mother and teacher will go far 
to smooth over these first hard days, so mo- 
mentous in the life of the child. 
OCHOOLS open in the fall when Nature is at 
her best; the children have had two months 
or more of freedom in the out-of-doors. In the 
average school the transition to what is too 
often but a prison is sudden and drastic. Little 
wonder that it takes some time to get even the 
older pupils down to the routine—what must 
it be for the little boy or girl who never before 
has known routine? The wise teacher realizes 
this, and to the greatest possible extent bridges 
over the change by making use of the out-of- 
door experience. 
I never shall forget my first visit to Doctor 
Dewey’s school in Chicago, where I found the 
children doing just this—applying their studies 
to work out-of-doors in the yard; measuring 
areas, computing the length, angles, and curves 
of roadways; studying the growth of the plants 
in the plots and window-boxes; reporting the 
cubic space in the rooms at home; vitally con- 
118 THE FIRST YEAR OF SCHOOL 
necting their school work with the life they 
lived. 
The physical repression which characterizes 
most schools has a certain utility, no doubt; 
the child must adapt himself to it; but in the 
first five days and weeks of school experience 
he is going through what is for him a tremendous 
change in the habit of his whole life. This 
must be realized in school if the child is to be 
happy; it must be borne in mind when he 
comes home from school. 
To the parent all this is a more or less com- 
monplace thing; it is in the order of events that 
the child should go to school; only the wise 
ones take thought of the fact that to him it is 
a matter very far from commonplace. The 
mother must watch carefully not only the 
mental and moral reactions of this first tre- 
mendous experience in her child; she must look 
—not over-anxiously, but vigilantly—for the 
physical effects of the unwonted strain upon 
mind and nerves. She must see that he has 
the physical exercise that he needs; the free, 
careless play. She must see that his tasks are 
not beyond his strength—it is a dreadful mis- 
take to allow a child to be pushed into a class 
too advanced for him. Many children have 
been injured for life—the victims of selfish 
and foolish pride in their parents. 
119 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
I think the best test is this: Is the child 
happy in school? If he is not, after a reason- 
able interval for adjustment to the new en- 
vironment, something is wrong, and you’d 
better find out what it is before irreparable 
mischief has been done. XVIII 
FRIEND TEACHER 
“ I'NO you find Mary’s teacher congenial?” I 
asked a mother of my acquaintance. 
“Congenial? Whatever do you mean? Why 
should I?” She almost snapped her answer at 
me. From her tone I judged that she knew 
well enough what I meant, and she went on: 
“I do not know Mary’s teacher at all. She 
lives over on the other side of town, across 
the tracks somewhere. I do not know her 
family or anything about her.” 
This answer was typical. I was putting the 
same question to many mothers. There were 
exceptions, of course. 
“One never meets the ordinary school-teach- 
ers, you know; they are mostly poor girls who 
do not go about much.” This sort of answer. 
Now, the women who thus scornfully or 
petulantly or indifferently dismissed my ques- 
tion as absurd or of little consequence spend 
121 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
—or used to spend before the war—hours, days, 
weeks, looking up tailors, dressmakers, mil- 
liners to make gowns and hats for themselves. 
I will not speak of the time and care spent on 
pet dogs; and what I am saying does not apply 
so much to the women—and there are many 
of them—who are able to have governesses and 
tutors for their children, and who select these 
with great care. I am thinking of those whose 
children go to the public schools, or to the ordi- 
nary sort of private schools, and who seem to 
think that all is done when Mary or John is 
safely located there, with due provision for 
transportation back and forth. 
lVTEXT to the influences at home, those at 
' school are most important; indeed, I 
would go so far as to say they are more so. 
The school is the child’s world; in it he is 
made to a great extent in physical and mental 
character; habits of thought and action formed 
there go with him through life. The teacher is 
his model and inspiration to a degree which 
you ought to realize if you will think back 
to your own childhood. 
How much do you really know about what 
goes on in the school-room, day after day, 
month after month, in the life of your own child? 
122 FRIEND TEACHER 
What is the ratip between the time and de- 
votion you spend upon raiment and recreation 
and upon the study of the influences exerted 
upon your child? How many times this past 
winter have you visited the school to see what 
was going on, to confer with the teachers who 
are impressing their personality upon your 
children? Have you by any chance ever in- 
vited one of them to your house, to your table? 
Why not? 
I know you don’t have to; all honor to the 
thousands upon thousands of devoted school- 
teachers who year in and year out supplement 
the good work of no less faithful parents, and 
counteract the bad influence of slipshod and 
negligent parents, all without real touch with 
either, and with little or no personal knowledge 
of the home from which the children came. 
They are wonderful people—these teachers. 
But I can tell you, if you don’t know it, that 
they will rejoice to see you at the school. If 
your intervention is tactful, intelligent, and 
constructive, they will welcome you and co- 
operate with you without grudge or reserve. 
Whether they do or not, it is your right and 
your duty to know in what sort of an atmosphere, 
physical, mental, moral, your child is spending 
these all-important days of his life. 
123 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
T'AID you wonder, last winter, why your child 
constantly was “picking up colds,” throw- 
ing off one attack only to begin another? With- 
out going into the question of infection and 
the need of examination and isolation of ailing 
children, to which intelligent school authori- 
ties are giving attention increasingly, what 
about the physical conditions in the school- 
room where your child spends so large a por- 
tion of his days? 
I found that my small boy one winter sat in 
a corner, very close to the steam radiator. 
When the room became too warm and he was 
almost baked, they lowered a window right 
over his head. Being in a perspiration, with 
a chill wind blowing right over him, he naturally 
was ready for the dire consequences. I never 
should have discovered the trouble if I had 
not visited the school one day and seen the 
system in operation. 
Sometimes the lights are bad and the child 
suffers from eye-strain; or perhaps he is too 
far from the blackboard and cannot see readily. 
Often children with perfectly good eyesight 
and normal intelligence are thought dull and 
inattentive because they cannot see, and are 
afraid to say so, even if they themselves realize 
what is the trouble. 
Aside from the matter of the class-room itself, 
124 FRIEND TEACHER 
in which you ought to take great interest, just 
as you would in your child’s bedroom or nursery, 
there are the playground, cloak-room, and the 
toilet arrangements. Are they clean and light 
and wholesome? What do you know about 
these? They may all be models—I hope they 
are, and that you have nothing to worry about. 
If they are not just as they should be, you can 
make a protest to the teacher or to the school 
authorities. It may be necessary for you to 
stir about and get other parents to join you 
if the conditions are very bad. No, it isn’t 
easy. Anybody could do it if the parent business 
was a thing for lazy folks. It will take several 
visits for you to find out just how things are. 
AND then there is the question of the teach- 
ing itself, the subjects taught, and the at- 
titude of the teacher toward the children. 
“Oh, the teacher knows a great deal more 
about those things than I do,” I hear you say. 
Doubtless, but aren’t you interested? Don’t 
you want to see just how your son or daugh- 
ter is being taught, how their little minds re- 
spond to the teacher’s, and how much they are 
really assimilating? You will understand the 
children’s home-work, and what they are try- 
ing to do, if you visit the classes and get into 
125 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
real understanding and confidence with the 
teacher. 
Above everything else, and really before 
everything else, try to make a friend of the 
teacher. He or she is very near your child— 
next to you. The teacher can be just so much 
more helpful to your child, and to you in your 
own relations and work with the child, if he 
or she knows a good deal about the home, and 
about you. 
A Sunday night supper in your home, for 
example, might open up a whole new world to 
all of you. You may need each other, certainly 
your child needs you both, and with your child 
as the point of contact, you will find a delightful 
basis of work together. And you might find 
that you were congenial in ways you have not 
dreamed of. XIX 
MIRTH, THE HOUSEHOLD TONIC 
TT is a dreadful thing when a child who has 
* laughed his way past his eighth birthday 
begins to lose his happiness in school. What 
can he get in school to pay for his loss of that 
laugh? The wisdom of Solomon isn’t worth it! 
Herbert Spencer said: “Where young people 
are taught as they ought to be, they are quite 
as happy in school as at play; seldom less de- 
lighted, nay, often more, with the well-directed 
exercise of their mental energies than with that 
of their physical powers.” 
Let who will be born with a golden spoon 
in his mouth—that is a matter of judicious 
selection of parents after proper consultation 
with the commercial agencies. For my part, 
if I had the power of choice, I should not care 
so much about the kind of spoon that was to 
be in my mouth as about the smile that was 
to be about it and the laughter that was to 
127 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
come out of it. Let those who can be wise; 
I would be jolly. “A merry heart,” says the 
Proverb, “doeth good like a medicine”—so 
much for what it does for others; for one’s 
self it “hath a continual feast.” 
I know a table at which sit people so good 
that their mere presence is a benediction; but 
their meal-time is a season of silence seldom 
broken, and one comes from it with a sense 
of having fed exclusively upon gloom. If in 
your home circle there is one, child or adult, 
of a cheerful temperament, who sees always the 
sunny side of things, or, better still, the funny 
side of things, bless the good fairies who laughed 
over his cradle and the Providence that brought 
him under your roof. 
And try, oh, try, even if it does not come 
naturally to you, to encourage that sunny dis- 
position; see that it is not suppressed, treasure 
every bit of mirth and give full value to every 
smile. It is by no accident that a baby’s laugh 
rings in the heart like a silver bell—haven’t 
you seen a whole railroad station full of tired 
old grouches turn round, look at one another, 
and smile in spite of themselves as a little 
child’s happy giggle rang out over the dour and 
wrangling noises of the place? Haven’t you 
seen a man or a woman with a real smile wade 
right through an obstacle that had defied all 
128 MIRTH, THE HOUSEHOLD TONIC 
the attacks of wisdom and anger and wealth? 
“The voice with the smile wins.” Indeed it 
does! 
AUNTY DOLEFUL visits her sick neighbor 
and tells her all the woes and ills and wick- 
ednesses of the village; how the ill woman’s 
children have been misbehaving while she has 
been sick; how they have been exposed to 
measles and punished in school, and how much 
worse the invalid looks than when she saw her 
before. The poor victim of her well-meant 
visit is weary and pale by the time she goes, 
and the family wonders why she is worse that 
night, and dreads another visit from the good 
old woman who spreads spiritual pestilence 
after her like a typhoid carrier. 
And then comes one—mayhap esteemed a 
frivolous person without weight or stability— 
chuckling her way into the house and up the 
stairs, laden with cheerful tidings and happy 
thoughts; the doctor can skip a visit and the 
nurse go out for a walk. Such a one is good 
medicine; her presence in a sick-room is like 
a breeze of fresh air, better than hothouse roses. 
Such a disposition is a gift of the gods in- 
deed; it is seldom made to order, because, until 
it is too late and one’s temperament gets a 
fatal twist toward the solemn side, one does 
129 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
not realize the need of the other thing. But I 
have good educational authority for the belief 
that a lot can be done by environment and 
training. There is hope for us serious-minded 
people who wisely see that the rose has* thorns 
—if only we make it a life business even while 
seeing the thorns to emphasize the fact of the 
rose. 
7WI AYBE if we had had a mother, or a nurse, 
with a cheerful face and a sunny smile 
about our cradle we should have had a different 
outlook upon life. It is more important than 
the ornamental things that we got later on 
under the name of education. It is well that 
a child should learn to speak French; but the 
language of the smile is one that talks in every 
tongue on earth, and needs no interpreter 
whether in Greenland or Tierra del Fuego. 
You recognize that cheery tone, even if the 
man is speaking in a dialect of Siamese. 
What sort of person is fixing the first impres- 
sions of your child? She may be honest and 
careful and stiffly competent; but what sort of 
moods is she making the atmosphere of the 
child’s most impressionable years? 
I believe a sense of humor and a sense of 
proportion are pretty much one and the same 
thing, and what is wisdom, after all, but a sense 
130 MIRTH, THE HOUSEHOLD TONIC 
of proportion, a keen judgment of the real 
importance and relation of things? Usually a 
keen sense of humor and a keen spiritual in- 
sight go together—it is an equipment that keeps 
us balanced and carries us over hard places. 
Sometimes to us old kill-joys the laughter of 
the young people seems silly and irresponsible, 
and possibly there are times when a word of 
Ultimate Wisdom is absolutely required; but, 
believe me, nine times out of ten the impulse 
to say it is the impulse of a Chronic Wetblanket. 
The benefit of the doubt should go always in 
favor of joining in the laugh. “Of such,” said 
One who may have been a bit weary of the 
company of the Solemn, “is the Kingdom of 
Heaven.” And so saying He gathered to Him- 
self the little children who were right at hand, 
in their business of being happy. XX 
THE ATMOSPHERE OF LOVE AND AFFECTION 
HP WO young girls, sisters, that I know very 
-*■ well—one of them to be married in a few 
weeks—were talking in my hearing about how 
they would treat their children. One of them 
said: 
“Well, I know one thing that I shall do if 
I don’t do anything else—I shall make them 
feel that they are welcome; that I am glad 
they have come to me.” 
I was very much impressed by this saying, 
for I know well the atmosphere of the home 
in which they have grown up. To me, the 
remark was the reaction of a tragedy. 
That home is one of comparative wealth; 
every creature comfort that one could reason- 
ably desire has been available. The father and 
mother are “nice people,” cultured as regards 
education, of perfect manners toward the out- 
side world. These girls have been to college; 
132 ATMOSPHERE OF LOVE AND AFFECTION 
everything that one is supposed to have in 
that walk of life has been theirs. These parents 
would be vastly astonished if you were to sug- 
gest that anything has been wrong with their 
home. I doubt whether either of them would 
have sensed the significance of the remark of 
their elder daughter. 
Yet that remark was a perfect fruit of the 
kind of home in which these girls have grown 
up. I think it is no wonder that this young 
woman vowed her service of affection to the 
children she hoped to have. For all her girlhood 
had been bare of the things she had in mind. 
I have been in that home a good many times; 
never once have I seen between parents and 
children in that home the slightest outward 
sign of the affection that all would have pro- 
fessed if it had occurred to them to profess it. 
TF it had occurred to them. That is the crux 
A of the matter. I wonder if it is to the Puri- 
tans that we owe our reticence in this regard. 
Sometimes it seems as if we of the Puritan 
blood thought there was a kind of indecency 
in any show of emotion. When we see it in 
others we suffer a sort of embarrassment, and 
deem it “vulgar,” “common,” “banal.” It 
simply is “not done by well-bred people.” And 
133 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
so we go on through life, starving in our inmost 
souls; in our heart of hearts envying those who 
are not suppressed as we have been. Only in 
the face of dire illness or death do we dare to 
release ourselves from the inhibition. It is 
“good form” to exhibit grief at the death of 
one we love; but how often in her life did we 
show the feeling that justifies the grief? I 
heard a very witty lecturer say: 
“After she is dead we take flowers to her 
grave and say, with the sobs we would have 
died rather than let her hear while she was 
alive, ‘Here, dearest, smell these!”’ 
A woman who is slaving her best years away 
in the care of an invalid mother told me once 
that she would give a great deal to be able to 
put her arm around her mother and show her 
the affection that she felt— 
“But I just can’t do it. It never has been 
done in my family. From the very beginning 
it has been deemed ‘silly,* ‘undignified.’ I 
cannot remember my mother ever showing me 
the slightest physical sign of affection; or even 
kissing me unless I was going away somewhere 
on a train, to be gone a good while. Even then 
it was a kind of polite ceremony. * And yet, 
sometimes I think she would be grateful if I 
would do it now. But I just can’t.” 
Probably you will say that this is an extreme 
134 ATMOSPHERE OF LOVE AND AFFECTION 
case. I hope it is; but there are very many 
more of such than perhaps you realize. 
1\T0W, it all goes back—’way back to the 
* ' very beginning. I know it is very rarely 
that a mother—or a father, either—does not 
show affection to the baby and the very little 
child. But somewhere that comes to an end. 
I shall never forget once hearing a father say 
to his fourteen-year-old boy when he returned 
from an absence and offered to kiss him: 
“There, there! You needn’t kiss me any 
more. You’re too old for that now.” 
Something passed over that boy’s face. . . . 
I almost bit my tongue to keep from telling 
that father what a fool he was; that he was 
throwing away something very precious, and 
never in all his life would find it again! I was 
witness to the fact that thereafter that boy 
was—entirely polite and dignified with his 
father. 
It is not always so, particularly among those 
peoples who have not been brought up in the 
Puritan tradition. My grandmother used to 
tell of seeing in a French railroad station two 
men fervently kissing each other and exclaim- 
ing, almost tearfully: 
“Good-by, my father!” 
135 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
“Good-by, my son! My dear, dear son! I 
will see you again this afternoon!” 
Well, there is a middle ground. But affec- 
tion lives by what it feeds on. You cannot 
ordinarily begin it with a bang. It is a subtle 
thing. If you have little children you can see 
that it does not end. A son is never too old 
to kiss his father—if he feels like it. The great 
thing is to see that he doesn’t stop feeling like 
it! I don’t take much stock in the idea that 
it is one’s “duty” to love one’s parents, or 
anybody else. Love doesn’t go by rules. It 
is a live thing, a spirit; the Bible says that 
spirit, like the wind, “bloweth where it 
listeth.” 
1\J0, if you would have love in your home, 
* ' you must keep the atmosphere such that 
love can grow there; you must make it a place 
into which the spirit will “list” to blow. Take 
note right now. Do your daughters know be- 
yond any possible question that they are wel- 
come—that you are glad they came to you? 
Do they hesitate to kiss you—just for no reason 
at all except that they love you and want you 
to know it? Do you hesitate to show affection 
to them—even when they are not “going away 
on a railroad train to be gone a good while”? 
Why? .What is the matter? Whose fault is 
136 ATMOSPHERE OF LOVE AND AFFECTION 
it? Always they have been taking their cue 
from yon. It is in accordance with a law of 
nature that a stream does not rise higher than 
its source! 
And you, father, what day was it that you 
stepped on or froze to death that living plant 
of your son’s affection for you? I think you 
would die for him; I know you have been 
sacrificing for him all these years; but why 
are you so stingy with the greatest gift of all? 
The soul of a home, I think, is measured by 
the love and unity of spirit that abide there. 
When those are absent, the home is just a shell, 
an imitation; a mere roost and breeding-place 
for human animals. As soon as you step into 
such a house you feel that something is missing. 
And as soon as you step into the other kind 
of home you feel the presence of something 
indefinable, ineffable, precious, that makes you 
want to stay there always. In that place each 
member is loved and appreciated, and “wanted 
around”—and knows it! 
What wouldn’t you give to have that kind 
of spirit in your own home? Well, there’s 
plenty of it to be had. Here you are, all alive 
and under the same roof. And to-day is a new 
day. XXI 
FATHER, THIS IS FOR YOU 
TISTEN, you father, with boys of your own! 
Do you remember the time, when you 
were maybe six or seven years old—perhaps a 
little older—when suddenly all the old “make- 
believe” plays and games palled upon you? 
A great bloom of premature worldly wisdom 
settled down on you and spoiled the whole 
universe. You came to know that there wasn’t 
any Santa Claus, that the “Pleasant Land of 
Counterpane” was only an old bed-spread, 
that the stick on which you had ridden so far 
and so delightfully was not a horse, that the 
chairs were not a railroad train or a ship, that 
the designs on the carpet would not do any 
more for seashore, or houses, or railroad tracks; 
that the spools were not soldiers—in short, 
that the whole fabric of the “ pretend-world ” 
had all of a sudden gone out from under you? 
And you found a word that you used a good 
138 FATHER, THIS IS FOR YOU 
deal upon your little sister when she proposed, 
“Let’s make believe.” 
“Don’t be silly,” you said, again and again, 
and you turned away, hands in pockets, weary 
and blase with the weight of the wisdom pos- 
sessed by those who Understand. You didn’t 
want to be any of the dear, delightful make- 
believe things that used to be so much fun; 
you were impatient with the littler folk who 
still dwelt in the Eden where Knowledge had 
not yet intruded. 
You turned quite away from these simple 
forms of amusement, and for many days tried 
to find something to take in your life the place 
formerly filled by these dramatic pretendings. 
You might condescend to drop back now and 
then with some of the younger children, when 
you absolutely could not get any more sophis- 
ticated playmates, but actually you were 
through with these childish things; yes, really, 
you had put them off forever, though you did 
not yet quite realize it. 
r\0 you remember standing one day, and 
perhaps a good many days, with three or 
four others of the same advanced years, trying 
to think up something to do; how one old 
game after another would be suggested and 
139 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
fall flat, utterly tasteless and insipid—couldn’t 
be “put over” at all? If some one said, “Let’s 
play horse,” you said, “Oh, rats!” “Well, 
let’s play we are a long train of cars,” or “Let’s 
play we are a circus.” Nothing doing; you, 
and the rest, too, were through with all that 
sort of thing. And yet nothing you could think 
of would quite fill the bill. Pretty serious 
situation. Very dangerous situation. Right 
there things begin—things that might just as 
well be prevented. Things that many times 
aren’t prevented, or even noticed, until it is 
too late. 
Precisely there is the place for father to 
step in. Wise is he who recognizes his duty 
and his opportunity. This is the time when 
father generally notices, if he notices at all, 
that his son has suddenly begun to be 
“naughty.” Overnight the little lad has ceased 
to be a baby. 
Turn your mind back, you solemn and stiff- 
faced old tyrant! Can’t you see yourself, ’way 
back there in the almost forgotten time, stand- 
ing on the street corner with the other boys, 
wondering what to do with yourselves? You 
threw a stone or a snowball, or you called some- 
thing impudent at a passer-by, or frightened 
a little girl who was going peacefully along 
about her business. 
140 FATHER, THIS IS FOR YOU 
The next day you yearned for something a 
little more exciting, and one of the boys— 
maybe it was you—suggested some daring 
piece of mischief or cruelty; something for- 
bidden. And unless there was on hand some 
pretty wise man, you got well advanced in 
deviltry before you were taken in hand. Maybe 
some of you never were taken in hand. In 
your mind’s eye follow back and see if you 
can’t discover right there on that street corner, 
on that particular day, the beginnings of things 
that you would give worlds to have your own 
boy escape. Others of that group, . . . where 
are they now? 
DOYS at this stage—and, remember, it is 
a perfectly natural, inevitable stage in 
the history of every normal boy—are restless, 
unable to originate their own entertainment; 
they blow hither and yon with every whiff of 
impulse; quite usually they get to fighting, 
teasing one another, and provoking one an- 
other to irresponsible mischief. Some educa- 
tors call it the “Big Injun” stage; others de- 
scribe it as the “anarchistic” period, the “period 
of individualism,” when the dawning critical 
faculty is much stronger than the constructive 
tendency. The power of social organization 
141 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
is not yet strong enough to overcome it. This 
is the time when the strength of the home and 
family and neighborhood influence meets its 
first real test. 
You were fortunate if at that time in your 
own life you had big snow-storms, skating on 
the river, swimming-holes in summer, perhaps 
a big brother to lead you out of the time of 
make-believe into the reality games. Thrice 
blessed were you if a wise father took you in 
hand right then! 
Are you a big brother to your small boy? 
Why not? He is not lazy or wilfully perverse. 
He would much prefer to do something “aw- 
fully nice.” He doesn’t know how. He needs 
guidance, leadership. If he doesn’t get it, he 
is first idle, then mischievous. His little brain 
is active, his nerves are restless; he has steam 
on, all ready to do something big, but he 
doesn’t know where to find the right track to 
run on. 
This is the time, too, when girls find their 
dolls “stuffed with sawdust,” and turn to 
something we wish they wouldn’t do. It’s a 
big problem, one of the biggest, relatively, that 
these little people ever will confront. They 
need help. And it takes thought to figure out 
how to help them. 
142 FATHER, THIS IS FOR YOU 
TT won’t do to say, “Go and play by yourself, 
* and find something nice and quiet to do.” 
That is just driving the youngster straight 
into misdoing of some kind. The best sort of 
children are the ones that go fastest. 
They are groping for reality, for truth, for 
the facts of things, to take the place of the make- 
believe that hitherto has satisfied them; things 
worth while to do and to see. They are not 
babies any more. They have begun to grow up. 
Take the lad out with you and introduce him 
to the real world. My! How he values every 
minute you spend with him! Teach him to 
row and swim; take him to places where he 
can see real things being made. Factories of 
all kinds are deeply fascinating; take him to 
see them making ships and engines, automo- 
biles, shoes, tools—all the things that he knows 
about. 
He feels like being rough and noisy; teach 
him to play baseball and football; have a 
turning-bar or a trapeze or a medicine-ball or 
a punching-bag in the house, and show him 
how to use them. It will be good for you to 
lose some of your precious dignity—and your 
waist-line at the same time! 
Pretty soon he will get his stride and again 
find his own amusement. But just now you, 
who at least affect to be so much wiser, can 
143 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
get yourself afresh a place in your boy’s respect 
and affection that you never will lose. If you 
waste the opportunity you may never catch 
up with him again. Play is his world of “busi- 
ness”; it is all-important that he should not 
lose faith in it. Without it he cannot go on 
and become a well-rounded man. You’d better 
get into this business while the getting in is 
good. Pretty soon it will be too late. XXII 
STORY-TELLING FOR THE CHILDREN 
TN his Defense of Poesie Sir Philip Sydney has 
* this fascinating bit—how it rings with the 
old-time spirit of the story-teller, and the most 
modern of pedagogy, too: 
Forsooth he cometh to you with a tale, which holdeth 
children from play, and old men from the chimney- 
corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning 
of the mind from wickedness to virtue, even as the child 
is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding 
them in such other as have a pleasant taste. 
Educators began a good while ago to realize 
the value of story-telling in education. It is 
used now in all sorts of class-work in the schools. 
You know yourself how effectively a well-told 
story points the moral of the sermon—even 
for adults—you yourself will remember the 
story and the lesson of it long after you have 
forgotten the trend of the address itself. 
145 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
The psychology is the same with stories told 
to children; but few parents seem to realize 
how much they can do with their own children 
through the use of carefully chosen stories. 
Reading is all very well, and essential in its 
place and for its purpose, but it never quite 
takes the place of the tale told by word of mouth, 
looking the child straight in the eye while you 
talk. Try both ways with a small child, and 
see for yourself which way he likes best. 
Long before the child is at school—as soon 
as he can understand at all—he should have 
stories told to him by his parents at home. 
You, father and mother, are missing a great 
deal if you do not do it. Don’t you remember 
the delight with which, years and years ago, 
you heard father begin, “A long time ago 
when I was a little boy,” or your mother say, 
“Once upon a time when I was a little girl 
with my hair in pigtails”? Weren’t you all at- 
tention right away, and do you suppose mother 
and father haven’t remembered all these years 
your eager little face and your eyes big with 
expectation? 
Of course, some people are born story-tellers, 
and some are not, but every mother can do 
good work in this line if she makes the effort. 
Children have a natural craving for the dra- 
matic; to this craving the telling of tales is 
146 STORY-TELLING FOR THE CHILDREN 
one answer. If you don’t supply it, something 
of permanent and essential value is left out 
of the children’s lives, even if you and they are 
not conscious of the lack. 
There are oceans of good stories. Get the 
best. This is not to say that personal experi- 
ences of your own and other people’s are not 
to be used; a tale with a personality in it known 
to the child is often more interesting and effec- 
tive than any other; but this business of story- 
telling is not a thing to be done haphazard. 
You need to put your mind on it and hunt for 
the stories that will be most to the point and 
most worth remembering. 
“Mother Goose” stories are the first to be 
told. They are full of dramatic action, and 
most of them are very ancient. For hundreds 
—perhaps thousands—of years they have been 
the delight of generation after generation of 
little folk. Can you remember the delight with 
which you first heard of the Three Bears, Jack 
and the Beanstalk, Red Riding-hood, and all 
the rest? 
Some of these stories may be too dramatic 
for very little or very nervous children. Re- 
member that it is all pretty real to them. If 
so, wait a little, and use other stories not quite 
so vivid. Some children like one characteristic 
of a story, some another; but there are enough 
147 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
stories, various enough, to suit all tastes. Ex- 
perience will show you just what your children 
require in the way of stories, and how they 
will accept them. If you begin with them 
when they are very young, with these simple 
tales, you can work up to the hero-tales. And 
all the time you will be learning the better to 
understand your children’s minds, and giving 
them a fund of fine, clean stories that they will 
never forget, but pass on in turn to their 
children. 
The librarian in any library will gladly help 
you to find stories to tell. Hunt till you find 
them, in classical or Oriental literature, myths, 
legends, fairy-tales, hero-tales, stories from his- 
tory, lives of the saints, travel and adventure; 
there are hundreds of them waiting for you 
to appropriate them. You will never regret 
the time that you devote to the search. 
Choose your stories carefully. Keep them 
near the child’s level of interest and under- 
standing. Do not try too many, and remember 
that children love to have the same story told 
over and over again. Avoid the very sensa- 
tional, the morbid and gloomy. Many a child 
has gone to bed shivering with fear after hear- 
ing a story terribly real to him, of direful things 
that he visualized in the dark. 
The problem is somewhat complicated where 
148 STORY-TELLING FOR THE CHILDREN 
you have at the same time children of different 
ages. The wise mother will study that prob- 
lem and adapt some of the stories to the com- 
mon denominator, so to speak, of interest and 
appreciation. 
Try to begin with a sentence that commands 
attention. Take a lesson from Hans Christian 
Andersen—see how he catches the interest right 
off: 
“There were once twenty-five tin soldiers, 
who were all brothers, for they had been made 
out of the same old tin spoon.” 
“There was once an emperor, who had a 
horse, shod with gold.” 
Rudyard Kipling makes wonderfully apt be- 
ginnings in his “Just So Stories”: 
“In the high and far-off times, O Best- 
Beloved, the Elephant had no trunk.” 
“Whichever way I turn,” said the Weather- 
cock on a high steeple, “no one is satisfied.” 
So begins one of Edwin Barrows’s fascinating 
stories in Fireside Tales. 
Who could help listening, after beginnings 
like these? 
Do not tell your stories too fast. Speak 
slowly and distinctly, and pause to let the 
dramatic situations and the points you wish to 
emphasize sink in. Do not use too many de- 
tails, and do not stop to explain too much; 
149 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
that breaks the thread of the narrative; and 
don’t do much preaching or moralizing—if you 
have selected the right story and told it well, 
the moral will take care of itself. Children are 
quick to put the glove on if it fits. 
You will usually find it much easier to correct 
a bad habit in a child by means of the right 
story, well told, at the right time, than by 
any amount of punishment or scolding. And, 
by the same token, you can cultivate mental 
traits and activities by arousing new interests 
through stories that awaken the desire to imitate 
and dramatize. The sense of humor is often 
awakened and developed through stories; so 
is the whole series of benevolent emotions— 
helpfulness, sympathy, courage, fidelity, self- 
sacrifice, true patriotism. 
It is a good idea to have children try to 
illustrate stories that you have told them with 
pencil and crayon, clay, or by cutting out paper 
figures. You can even turn it into a game, or 
impromptu dramatics, and your tales will have 
aroused new interest in animals, birds, his- 
torical characters, and give fresh zest to visits 
to the zoo and the museum, and to the reading 
they do by themselves. It is a fertile field, 
but it has to be cultivated with judgment and 
industry, like any other. 
150 XXIII 
POETRY IN THE HOME 
WHEN my little boy, aged nine, was im- 
prisoned in the hospital, recovering from 
an operation for appendicitis, I read to him 
Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King.” It never failed 
to quiet him in those restless hours of pain and 
thirst. I believe we would have fewer cases of 
nervous prostration if we stopped oftener to 
read good poetry. There is a wonderful rest- 
fulness in the absorption of the beauty and 
feeling of the best English poetry. I wish I 
could impress you with an idea of what poetry 
can contribute to the atmosphere of the home. 
But it is pretty hard to begin it all of a sudden. 
The love of poetry is a thing to cultivate. The 
time to begin, really, is when the child is born 
—yes, every bit as soon as that. Only so can 
you make it a part of his very being. 
As I have said before in this book, give the 
baby every day some music. The first weeks 
151 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
the waking hours will be very few, but a few 
moments of beautiful music, a lullaby, paves 
the way for the poetry later on. He may not 
understand a word sung to him at first, but 
amazingly early he catches the rhythm of it. 
As soon as the baby can understand anything 
he can be saturated with the beautiful lullabies 
of Tennyson, Stevenson, Field, and many others: 
“Sweet and Low,” “The Rock-a-bye Lady from 
Hushaby Street,” “Sleep, Baby, Sleep,” “Love- 
ly Moon,” and a score of others. 
The value of early impressions is emphasized 
in the verses by Father Tabb: 
Sing it, mother! sing it low, 
Deem it not an idle lay. 
In the heart ’twill ebb and flow 
All the livelong way. 
Sing it, mother! softly sing, 
While he slumbers on thy knee; 
All that after-years may bring 
Shall flow back to thee. 
Whittier says: “I well remember how, at an 
early age, the solemn roll of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ 
moved and fascinated me with a sense of majesty 
and power, felt rather than understood. The 
poem spoke to me like the wind in the pines 
or the waves on the beach, awakening faint 
152 POETRY IN THE HOME 
echoes and responses and vaguely prophesying 
wonders yet to be revealed.” 
'T'HE baby will not be a year old when he en- 
joys Mother Goose rhymes. Mother Goose 
—the classic—how could we ever grow up with- 
out her jingles? I have heard people sniff at 
Mother Goose rhymes as “senseless.” How 
little they know of early classic poetry! These 
“jingles” have been collected from all nations; 
they are taken from early French, English, 
and Italian collections of children’s songs, and 
many of them date back even earlier than that: 
some say they came even from ancient Egypt. 
They are old folk-lore jingles near the child- 
heart of the race. They appeal to something 
universal: “Ride a cock-horse to Banbury 
Cross,” “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,” 
“Ding dong, bell, pussy’s in the well,” “Little 
Jack Horner sat in a corner,” “Little Miss 
Muffet sat on a tuffet”—is there anything bet- 
ter for babies over a year? 
As they get a little older there are the dear 
old Kate Greenaway rhymes and pictures. A 
pretty English edition of Under the Window is 
beautiful in its colored pictures. How the chil- 
dren love the three old ladies and their cats! 
They are so full of action: 
153 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
School is over. Oh, what fun! 
Lessons finished, play begun. 
Or this one: 
Little Miss Patty and Master Paul 
Have found two snails on the garden wall. 
Let the child have them, over and over. Get 
a good edition with well-printed, colored pict- 
ures. Then follow with poems from Stevenson, 
Kipling, and Field. Hunt for poems suited to 
the age of your child. You will find them 
everywhere. Choose only the best. Celia 
Thaxter, Helen Hunt Jackson, Alice Gray, 
Mary Howitt, Lucy Larcom, Adelaide Procter, 
Mrs. Browning, and Mrs. Sigourney, all are 
women who have given us beautiful nature- 
poems which can be read to children. 
“The Water Bloom,” by Celia Thaxter, a 
story of the rainbow, is very near a young child. 
How the children love: 
Across the lonely beach I flit, 
One little sandpiper and I. 
Verses like this inevitably widen the horizon 
of a child’s first visit to the seashore. “A Child’s 
Thought of God,” by Mrs. Browning, is a 
beautiful bit of verse. 
154 POETRY IN THE HOME 
AS the child grows older and demands hero- 
tales in prose give him the good old ones 
from English and Scottish ballads. These can 
be read long before the child can read them 
himself. “When mother reads aloud, the past 
seems real as every day.” 
Lowell, Longfellow, Leigh Hunt, Whittier, 
Shelley, Browning, Bayard Taylor, and Macau- 
lay all contribute to this period. There are 
war songs and history told in poetry. Boys 
love Scott’s “Marmion” and “Lady of the 
Lake.” “Song of Creation,” by Addison, and 
“ The Forest Hymn,” by William Cullen Bryant, 
appeal to boys and girls in the adolescent period. 
“Each and All,” by Emerson, also is fine. 
There are wonderful books of collections of 
poems for children now. The Golden Staircase 
is one of the best; Poems Every Child Should 
Know is another good one. 
As the child grows older the maturer poems 
of all of these writers will appeal to him, if 
you have wisely laid the foundations. By the 
time he has passed the period of the hero-tales 
a real love for poetry ought to be established. 
Miss Clara W. Hunt, head of the Children’s 
Department of the Brooklyn Public Library, 
says in her excellent book, What Shall We Read 
to the Children? “There are only three rules 
necessary to follow if you would delight your 
155 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
soul with watching your children’s poetry taste 
grow with their growth. These are: 
Begin early, 
Read poetry every day. 
Read the right poem at the right time.” 
You can’t do this thing, or any other good 
thing, offhand, in odd minutes. You have to 
put your mind on it; if you are unwilling to 
do that you have no business with children. XXIV 
LET THE CHILDREN TELL STORIES 
LJAVEN’T you often heard grown people 
* * say: “Oh. if only I could tell a good 
story! I hear lots of them, but I can’t remember 
them, and even if I could, I haven’t the courage 
or the vocabulary. So I just sit like a wooden 
Indian, and people think I don’t know any- 
thing”? 
When somebody says that to me, I always 
wonder whether her mother was too busy to 
stop and hear what the little girl wanted to 
tell her. Very likely her mother was herself 
a good story-teller, but a poor listener, and 
didn’t appreciate the opportunity when the 
child said: 
“Oh, mother, listen! I want to tell you 
something.” 
It is all very well for parents to tell fairy- 
stories and other interesting things to the chil- 
dren; that is a good thing to do; parents don’t 
157 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
do enough of it. But there is equal importance 
in the desire of the children to do some story- 
telling on their own account. I refer especially 
to little children—under ten years of age. If 
you suppress, or do not positively encourage, 
their impulse to tell what is in their minds, you 
are killing a thing that is of great educational 
importance. Before they learn to read or write, 
they are full of ideas that they want to express; 
they imagine real stories—as real to them as 
yours—and they need the chance to tell them. 
No matter if they are not interesting to you, 
they are very interesting to them, and the act 
of relating them is in itself a valuable activity. 
The art of clearly expressing something that 
you have seen or thought or imagined, so that 
the person to whom you are telling it sees it 
as you do, is one of the essential results of 
education; sometimes I think it is the most 
important result of education. It would be 
difficult to exaggerate the value of encouraging 
the child to get the idea clearly in mind and 
find the right words in which to phrase it. 
yOU will be as polite to your own child as 
*■ to a stranger. You are careful not to ap- 
pear bored when a caller is relating something 
that you do not find very interesting. Never 
158 LET THE CHILDREN TELL STORIES 
appear bored to your child. The little lad may 
be telling you only about a bit of a scrape he 
got into, or about a bird or a cat that he saw. 
Help him to tell it; exhibit interest, ask ques- 
tions, explain and add, and when father comes 
home encourage the child to tell it again to 
him—not necessarily as a great event, but as 
one of the happenings of the day in this vastly 
interesting world in which the child is finding 
himself. 
Perhaps you have been away from home for 
half a day. It is a little trouble, but quite worth 
while, for you to say: 
“Now I will tell you where I went and what 
I saw, and then you shall tell me what you have 
been doing and seeing while I have been gone.” 
Make it all real and vital; be careful to tell 
it in simple words and expressions, and then 
help him to tell as clearly all the things that 
have happened in his little life. 
I know a family in which the mother is an 
invalid, seldom getting out of the house. When 
any member of the family comes home from 
down-town, there is always a cheery, interesting 
account of what she saw and where she went. 
It is a light of interest in that poor mother’s 
life—a dreary life it is at best—but best of all, 
it helps to preserve the unity of the family. 
And I think that the remarkable ability of 
159 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
every member of that family to write interest- 
ing letters (and some more pretentious com- 
positions, too) is largely owing to the fact that 
from earliest childhood they have been en- 
couraged to relate to one another the interesting 
happenings of their lives. 
\ 7ERY little children often want to tell a 
* “fairy-story.” Some of them are very 
quaint and interesting. Long before my own 
boy could write, I used to have him dictate 
these stories to me so that I could write them 
down. That in itself provoked in him an eager- 
ness to learn to write; his lessons in writing 
were for him a tremendously useful thing; he 
worked over them with desperate intentness, so 
that he could quickly acquire this necessary 
ability. From that day to this he has been a 
writer of stories. 
Through this means you can encourage truth- 
fulness. For example, Mary has related to you 
a fearful and wonderful yarn about some im- 
possible occurrence which she narrates as a 
fact in her own experience. 
“Now, of course this is only a fairy-story, 
Mary, isn’t it? Not true, of course. It is 
very interesting; but let us have now a true 
story—something that really happened.” Very 
160 LET THE CHILDREN TELL STORIES 
easy to slip over into the field of actuality, 
without repressing the little girl’s vivid im- 
agination, or rebuffing her eagerness to be her- 
self a teller of fascinating tales. The two things 
go hand in hand with little children. Let her 
make her fairy-story as grotesque and impos- 
sible as she pleases, but help her to distinguish 
between those that are fanciful and those that 
are true. When she tells the latter kind, help 
her to make them exactly accurate. 
Our Puritan forefathers no doubt had many 
admirable traits (though I think we over- 
estimate them), but they did a lot of damage to 
the imaginations of their children. 
TF you exchange stories with your children, 
*■ and write theirs down for future reference, 
you will find yourself with a most entertaining 
collection of literature. One mother I know 
had a charming little Christmas story that her 
son told her when he was only seven years old. 
She wrote it down because he said to her: 
“Oh, mother, I wish I had a stenographer, 
like father has. I think of so many stories, 
and I write so slowly that they are gone before 
I can get around to writing them.” 
Now he is a leading magazine writer, and 
one of his best-known stories is that Christmas 
161 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
story that he told his mother when he was 
seven years old. 
This child before you is a living, developing 
plant in the home garden. Every bit of pains 
that you take goes into the process of develop- 
ment. Nothing is wasted; the little thing that 
you do to-day, like hearing with interest and 
taking down the simple story that he wants 
to tell you, bears fruit, perhaps long afterward, 
in ways that you cannot foresee. Through this 
co-operation you can cultivate a taste for the 
best literature, leading him on from his own 
little stories to those of the great story-tellers 
of the race. And it is an invaluable means of 
self-development. 
Do not be afraid of this gift of imagination. 
Be careful not to repress it with literalism. 
Doctor Seguin, the great French-American 
physician and specialist in the training of 
idiot children, describes imagination as “more 
than a decorative attribute of leisure; it is a 
power in the sense that from images perceived 
and stored it builds sublime ideals.” He says 
that if he had to choose he would rather have 
his children ignorant of letters than unimagi- 
native. And the way to encourage imagination 
is to let the children express the products of 
it freely and without fear. 
162 XXV 
EVERY CHILD HIS OWN DRAMATIST 
OUT of the memories of the past comes one 
of a time, only dimly remembered now, 
when my older brother and I played, acted, if 
you please, and with never-ceasing enjoyment, 
that ancient comedy: 
Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief! 
Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef. 
Naturally, being the younger, I had to be 
the thief. To his castle—meaning his bedroom 
—I would sneak ever and again and purloin 
his piece of beef, which remains in my mind in 
the soggy form of a more or less wet wash- 
cloth. Ever and again he would' retrieve it, 
only to have the indefatigable Taffy raid the 
place at the first opportunity, and then the 
rescue would have to be dramatized over again. 
Children at that age, or any other, have no 
special desire for wash-cloths, and it is difficult 
163 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
to imagine a child committing this particular 
form of burglary for its own sake. It was the 
dramatization of a fascinating theme. For 
hours and hours that inelegant “piece of beef” 
changed hands, and I am sure that in the ex- 
citement of the game we were finding satisfac- 
tion for a very real need of our lives. 
At that time, so far as I know, nobody had 
become interested in the “play spirit”; there 
was no literature of child-study—in this coun- 
try, anyway; the kindergarten had no footing 
here; nobody talked of the “dramatic instinct 
in children”—whatever we did in that direc- 
tion was spontaneous. And millions of children 
all over the world were at this game of drama- 
tizing the stories that interested them, as they 
have been all through the countless centuries 
since the beginning. 
TT filled a special need for us. We were chil- 
* dren of a clergyman living in a country 
village. Even if there had been moving-picture 
theaters we probably would not have been 
permitted to go to them; our recreation was 
found in school, church, Sunday-school, mis- 
sionary and temperance meetings, and an oc- 
casional Redpath lecture. Anything in the way 
of drama we had to make for ourselves, and 
164 EVERY CHILD HIS OWN DRAMATIST 
it never occurred to us or to our parents that we 
were encroaching upon the gilded domain of the 
wicked theater. 
Since that day the kindergarten has arrived, 
and the play spirit has been formally recognized 
as a vital factor in the normal development 
of the human being. The kindergarten is built 
upon the foundation of the dramatic instinct; 
its whole educational theory is expressed in 
the conscious and directed acting out of the oc- 
cupations of real life and the imaginative ad- 
ventures of the stories. The farmer, the baker, 
the miller, the blacksmith, the Three Bears, 
Red Riding-hood, Cinderella, are all of the 
material of the kindergarten process. Wise 
teachers carry it on in the older grades, often 
conducting plays original with the children. 
It makes life more real, and brings the great 
stories and their moral values home to the 
children as no amount of formal reading could. 
SOME day we shall all realize how harmful 
has been this present-day craze of the 
“movies” and the theater for the children. 
Entirely aside from the question of the direct 
effect of the cheap and injurious stuff that 
makes up the larger part of the moving-pictures, 
we shall realize that we neglected a very im- 
165 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
portant factor in education when we substi- 
tuted artificial things for the work of the chil- 
dren themselves; fed them with ready-made 
excitement instead of encouraging them to 
dramatize for themselves. It is well enough 
to take them once or twice a year to see a really 
good play or a fine exhibit of moving-pictures, 
but the ordinary run of stuff that so many chil- 
dren see night after night is injurious in itself 
and tends to deaden a spontaneity that is of 
vital importance to them. A child under ten 
years should not go to the theater at all; he 
should be a good deal older than that before 
any form of theater is a frequent thing for him. 
Yes, I know it is easy to give the child a 
nickel and let him have this excitement. But 
what would you think if you found him con- 
stantly reading the sort of stuff that the movies 
put forth? Wfiat is there about it that dis- 
tinguishes it from the reading of which you 
would not approve? 
TTOME plays will satisfy the children and 
* * be all that they need of this sort of thing 
if they are not surfeited with the highly spiced 
professional plays. It is your business to keep 
their tastes simple. The normal child’s center 
is the home, and when you find' a child who 
must go out of his home for entertainment, 
166 EVERY CHILD HIS OWN DRAMATIST 
there is something the matter with him or 
with the home. The time to seize and utilize 
the dramatic instinct is now, when he is trying 
to act out the life about him. The whole world 
is fairyland for him. 
Any little child of kindergarten age can act 
the postman, letter-carrier, chauffeur, motor- 
man, carpenter, pianist; can dramatize a game 
of tennis or baseball. The family and the 
neighbors’ children can get a lot of fun out 
of representing a picture, the audience trying 
to guess what it is. Pantomime charades are 
fine training in imagination and observation; 
it is of great benefit to study out the character- 
istic details of a personage, an animal, a state 
of mind which the actors wish to represent. 
I have seen a child convulse an audience with 
a spontaneous representation of a woman at the 
telephone, a train-conductor, a doctor, a school- 
teacher, a hostess. The play can be more 
elaborate with older children. 
Joseph Lee, in his Play in Education, says: 
“The reason children impersonate so many and 
such various things—trees, the wind, the fire- 
engine, father, mother, doctor, dog, cat—is that 
all the world seems to them alive. Their dra- 
matic play is social in sense; they are true 
citizens of the world; every object that in- 
terests them is their friend and playmate,” 
167 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
In this group action, at school and at home, 
the child is acquiring a moral value that cannot 
possibly be given to him through witnessing 
theatrical performances or moving-pictures. 
There it is all done for him; there is no in- 
spiration of the imagination, no cultivation of 
the constructive genius, no training in social 
activity, obligation, self-sacrifice. He feels these 
things when he does the acting for himself; 
he learns to adapt himself to others, to wait 
his turn, to co-operate, to share with his fellows 
the work of invention, adaptation, competition 
in accurate setting forth of an idea. 
It may seem to you that this is all very fine 
spun and theoretical, but I assure you that it 
is of the utmost importance. The pains that 
you take now to guide the dramatic instinct 
of your children will bring forth fruit amazingly. XXVI 
THE COLLECTING “BUG” 
“OUCH rubbish as that boy brings in! I 
don’t know what to do with it or with 
him. First it was spools—every empty spool 
he found went into his army of spools; then it 
was rocks. And it has been every kind of stuff 
you can imagine. I simply cannot keep his 
pockets cleared out or his rqom in order. Just 
now it is postage-stamps. Are all boys like 
that or is my boy training to be a junk-dealer?” 
How many times we have heard mothers in 
mock despair for the orderliness of their houses 
ask this question! 
Of course all boys are like that—all normal 
boys. This passion for collecting things seems 
to be a racial instinct, perhaps even an 
animal instinct. Your child may be passing 
through the evolution-stage of the squirrel, or 
the crow that gathers in her nest bits of colored 
glass and crockery. Nobody really knows the 
169 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
origin or meaning of the tendency, but collect 
the child must, and if we are wise mothers we 
will meet the thing half-way and give the lad 
a cabinet or closet in which to preserve his 
treasures. 
Don’t think of such a thing as scorning or 
throwing away those treasures. As time goes 
on he will do his own throwing away. It may 
even be that the collection will prove to be 
valuable on its own account. Adapt yourself 
to this development, as you would to any other, 
and use it for your boy’s education. Help him 
to do it with purpose and intelligence; the 
mere drill in orderliness of arrangement, label- 
ing, etc., is worth all it costs. 
Where would be our museums if some one 
had not had the passion for collecting? Civil- 
ization places high value upon the vast build- 
ings full of objects, machinery, works of art, 
manuscripts, relics of primitive ages, specimens 
of animal and vegetable life and mineral forms 
gathered by men who once, no doubt, drove 
their mothers distracted by their habit of 
cluttering up the house with all manner of 
stuff. 
'T'HIS curious collecting “bug” appears very 
• early in the normal childhood, and is most 
interesting to watch as it develops from crude 
170 THE COLLECTING “BUG” 
beginnings into perfection in the wonderful col- 
lections of ceramics, tapestries, paintings, books, 
treasured for and given to the public by the 
J. P. Morgans of grown-up days. 
A little girl I used to know could not resist 
the desire to pick up every bit of bright paper 
that she saw lying about, even if it were a cigar- 
band thrown aside by a passer-by. She was 
only three years old, and soon we made her 
happy by a box of colored kindergarten paper; 
but I knew that it was not quite the same as 
adventuring along the streets, collecting these 
things for herself. Little boys pick up sticks 
and stones, round pebbles, fascinating shells, 
and lichens, lucky-stones, and what-not, and 
presently the same thing comes out again when 
they are studying geology and other sciences. 
Never discourage this tendency in your chil- 
dren; get yourself interested in it, talk with 
them about their collections, help them to add 
to them in an intelligent way. Even if the 
form it takes seems hopelessly silly, the best 
way to turn it into other channels is to go 
along with it and lead it into a more useful 
sort of activity. 
One boy I know collected corks; it seemed 
a useless kind of enterprise, except that he 
always could supply the family with a good 
cork to replace a broken one. But that boy 
171 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
could tell at a glance whether a cork came from 
southern Europe, North Africa, Spain, or Por- 
tugal, the age of the tree from which it was cut, 
and the time of year. Out of that grew an in- 
terest in the geography of the countries con- 
cerned, and the last I heard of him he was 
traveling about the world as a buyer of cork. 
'T'HE collecting instinct needs guidance not 
-*■ only in order to make the best use of it, 
but to prevent its taking the form of mere 
hoarding for its own sake. There is a point at 
which the desire to collect money, the per- 
fectly proper and eminently commendable be- 
ginnings of thrift, runs off toward miserliness, 
that meanest of human vices. But this is a 
rare thing in children, and usually when it ap- 
pears it can be accounted for by some discover- 
able influence in the environment which ought 
to be corrected or banished. 
Various elements enter into the love for col- 
lecting, and all of them are useful: Comparison 
and judgment of quality, size, form, color, 
variety, purity, utility, age, perfection of work- 
manship; the appreciation of these cultivates 
accuracy of observation, discrimination in at- 
tributes, sense of form and color, criticism of 
technique. There is a legitimate pride in own- 
172 THE COLLECTING “BUG” 
ership and in the growth and relative complete- 
ness of the collection. 
A FRIEND of mine has a wonderful col- 
lection of theater programs, begun by 
his father in the sixties. It seemed a trivial 
business, no doubt, when it was begun, but it 
hardly needs argument to prove that here is 
represented in large measure the history of the 
drama in the United States. Another friend, 
a political writer, has a series of badges and 
admission tickets used at all of the great na- 
tional political conventions in the United States 
during the past generation. What a story they 
tell to one who studies them with intelligence! 
Along with them is a lot of others, medals 
issued in connection with special celebrations, 
expositions, opening of great buildings, dedica- 
tion of monuments, visits of distinguished 
foreign commissions, etc. Some of these will 
be priceless historic treasures in the years to 
come. 
Collections of bird skins and eggs, butterflies, 
fossils, snake skins, plants, crystals, mineral 
specimens, and shells—all offer opportunity for 
out-of-door activities of the most wholesome 
sort, as well as keen mental activity, and a 
child cannot go far in this kind of enterprise 
173 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
without being obliged to open books that other- 
wise would be unknown to him. Then, too, 
if he goes far with it, he gets into correspondence 
for purposes of comparison and exchange; he 
makes acquaintance with the scientists, who 
are always glad to welcome the new-comer in 
the field. 
Incidentally, he may bring about the return 
of youth and mental alertness to his father and 
mother, if they are not hopelessly ossified! XXVII 
OUT-OF-DOOR LESSONS 
SCHOOL is out, lessons are over, vacation is 
here. But are lessons over? All summer 
long the children are going to be learning some 
kind of lessons from somebody. That is the 
children’s business; every hour of the day they 
are learning something. You cannot decide 
whether they shall learn or not; but you can 
decide, to a considerable extent, what they shall 
learn and from whom. Now is your chance, 
fathers and mothers, to take the teacher’s place 
and to enjoy your own children. 
Do not for the world tell them that you are 
going to give them lessons; the fact is that you 
will learn as much as they do. But here is 
summer, and the great out-of-doors, and the 
children ready to go with you to the heart of 
nature. Best if it is in the guise of fun. Un- 
told delights await you, together, if you have 
the wit to devise the way and the wisdom to 
make the most of the opportunity. 
175 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
Let every day hold its delightful story, game, 
or excursion for and with your children. The 
excursion may not go farther than your own 
back yard, where you have discovered a colony 
of ants. Did you never study the doings of 
ants? There is no foreign land more interesting, 
no people, primitive or civilized, from whom 
you can derive more interesting information. 
When I was a girl I made the acquaintance of 
Sir John Lubbock’s fascinating book, Ants, 
Bees, and Wasps, and these busy people have 
been my friends ever since. There are a dozen 
books more modern, with wonderful illustra- 
tions, photographs from life, to carry the story 
up to date, but I venture to say none of them 
gives more pleasure than that book gave to me. 
Get this book, or one of the recent ones, from 
any bookstore or the library, and read from 
it to the children; help them to identify the 
kind of ants that live just outside your door 
or maybe walk over your pantry shelves. You 
will find several kinds of ants in the yard, and 
each has its own peculiarities. Maybe you 
can get the big brother to read up on the sub- 
ject and fill himself full of information that will 
make him the wiseacre of the family—he will 
love the function; it comes naturally to him. 
Every avenue opens up another, and each 
affords resources of unfailing interest. The 
176 OUT-OF-DOOR LESSONS 
story and life of the ant colony will awaken 
interest in the life and behavior of other in- 
sects in the garden. You will have to open 
your eyes and your mind; but it is worth 
while, for it helps the children to keep theirs 
open, too, and every field of interest for them 
fits them the better for wide-awake living in 
the after-years. 
WHAT about that butterfly that just flit- 
ted by? From what sort of caterpillar 
did it come, and was that very caterpillar the 
one that ate all the leaves from some precious 
plant in the garden? You do not know? But 
think of all the work you put into that garden 
that spring when the scare about shortage of 
food was at its height. How many kinds of 
injurious caterpillars have you had to contend 
with in the garden last spring, and into what 
sort of butterflies did they develop? Have you 
a “Butterfly Book”? There are several good 
ones. The study of the butterflies carries you 
back at once to the question of the caterpillars 
and the cocoons; where they are to be found, 
what they look like, and whether you ought to 
hunt them out and destroy them for the sake 
of your garden and the neighbors’. 
What about the birds that flit in the trees 
177 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
overhead, and those that sang in the spring 
and are gone now farther north? What was 
their relation to these butterflies? Perhaps 
your family cat ate the very bird that would 
have destroyed these very caterpillars. You 
can watch the birds that are there now and 
see what sort of insects they eat. 
Do you and your children know all the trees 
and shrubs in sight from your own porch? 
Do you know what kind of insects carry from 
flower to flower the pollen which fertilizes each? 
Do you know the plants that grow wild in 
your own door-yard? Once I laid a medium- 
sized handkerchief on the grass and counted 
—I dare not say how many—different varieties 
of plants within the space it covered. You 
don’t have to know, at first, the name of each; 
it is of educational value simply to notice the 
differences; but it is worth while to get a field 
botany and learn to analyze the simple blossoms 
—it is much easier than you might suppose. 
There is a whole world of life that perhaps you 
never dreamed of before, within the space of 
any square foot of your door-yard. 
SOME fine evening spread a sheet out on 
the grass and set a light in the middle of 
it. Near the light put a dish of syrup or mo- 
178 OUT-OF-DOOR LESSONS 
lasses or a wet lump of sugar. You will receive 
a visitation of moths and other insects that 
you never have seen before. Perhaps even 
the wondrously beautiful pale blue-green Luna 
moth, belle of the evening, will deign to flit in 
to see what it is all about. 
Do not let the children kill the insects, unless 
you know them to be harmful. But under any 
electric light in the morning you will find a 
multitude of creatures that have been attracted 
by the light and killed by the heat or by flying 
headlong against the glass. 
From these you can make the beginnings of 
a collection of the insects of your vicinity. At 
any bookstore you can get a handbook which 
will show you how to manage such a collection. 
For this purpose it is legitimate to kill speci- 
mens, and the children will soon acquire a great 
interest in making the collection complete, with 
exhibits showing each stage of development. 
And they will come to know which kinds are 
harmful to man, to animals, and to useful 
vegetation. From their own collections they 
will turn with eagerness to the collections in 
the public museums, comparing and aspiring 
to extend the scope of their study. 
There are many books within the reach of a 
very modest purse which will help you in these 
studies and in wider ones, of earthworms, frogs, 
179 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
moths and butterflies, trees, mushrooms, ferns, 
birds of the woods and waters. There are 
books about the clouds—didn’t you ever notice 
the different kinds of clouds and what gives 
them their differing forms and colors? And 
the stars at night—a whole skyful of them, wait- 
ing there night after night for you and your 
children to make friends with them. 
Do not be discouraged or think all this a 
thing only for people schooled in natural his- 
tory. One single book, to be found in the nearest 
bookstore, and one single evening spent in read- 
ing it, will give you a start and there will be 
no end to it if you are open-minded and if 
you really care to utilize these summer days 
with the children. For example, try the small 
pocket edition of Nature Studies in Field and 
Wood, by Chester A. Reed. It will make you 
realize how blind you are and how easy it is 
to see. 
If you are too tired, or too busy, or too in- 
different, you can let the children run wild 
and seek their own devices this summer. Never 
fear, they will be learning—something! XXVIII 
TABLE-TALK 
A BOY of seventeen and a girl of fifteen, 
** children of certain neighbors of ours, 
gave us a delightful evening, and all uncon- 
sciously, for all they did was to participate 
naturally and spontaneously in the general con- 
versation at dinner at their house. We had not 
met these children before, for both were away 
at school. On our way home that evening my 
husband said: 
“Did you notice how well those youngsters 
talked? They might well have been grown 
people, taking their part so ably and so natu- 
rally, without the slightest suggestion of for- 
wardness or precocity. Generally, children at 
dinner with grown-ups are either a nuisance 
by reason of impertinent or nonsensical inter- 
ruptions or make you uncomfortable by sitting 
like wooden images under some enforced ban 
of silence. That boy’s stories were as pat and 
181 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
as well told as any the grown-ups had, and his 
vocabulary is quite remarkable. ” 
Next day I met the mother of those children, 
and she quite glowed with pride and pleasure 
as I told her how we had enjoyed the company 
of her young people, and repeated what my 
husband had said. 
“They have always taken part with us in 
our table-talk,” she said. “I owe the inspira- 
tion of it to my wise old mother, who, as I know 
now, deliberately began it with me and my 
brothers and sisters. 
“I did not understand the philosophy of it 
until one day, when my boy was a little fellow, 
I ‘hushed’ him at the table, and said: ‘You 
mustn’t talk now, son. Let the older people 
talk. You know, “Children should be seen, 
not heard.”’ My mother said, very gently: 
‘Please let him talk, my dear. I love to hear 
him, and it is a very necessary part of his edu- 
cation.’ Afterward, when we were alone, she 
explained: 
“‘When I was a little girl, I was always 
“hushed up” at table. My father, one of the 
best men, in many ways, that ever lived, had 
been brought up in the old tradition, and we 
children were expected to sit through the meals, 
as he had done himself, in silence. We were 
not allowed to argue or venture any opinions 
182 TABLE-TALK 
of our own; such ideas as we ever ventured 
to express were pooh-poohed or otherwise dis- 
couraged. There never was any “table-talk” 
at our house that amounted to anything— 
only trivial neighborhood gossip or veiled al- 
lusions in language designedly over our heads. 
We were afraid to talk. To us meal-time was 
a dull and dreary occasion, of about as much 
intellectual value to us as feeding-time to ani- 
mals. I came even so early to believe that the 
old maxim, “Children should be seen, not 
heard,” was a false and wicked one, and I re- 
solved that it never should rule in my home or 
be used to justify the suppression of my 
children.’” 
“ I NEVER had thought of it before,” this 
-*■ mother said, “but I remembered then how 
my mother had encouraged us to talk at table, 
and I saw why meal-time had been for us always 
a delightful time of exchange of ideas, in which 
even the little children had their part. And I 
remembered, too, and understood why it was, 
that mother, though she loved to hear us chat- 
ter, seldom spoke herself unless spoken to. 
“From that day my husband and I deliber- 
ately changed our course with Billy, and when 
Dorothy was old enough to talk we did the 
same with her. We encouraged them to think 
183 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
things out for themselves and to express their 
ideas. 
“Grown folks do not realize that knowledge 
is only half possessed unless one can express 
it and discuss it. The children had breakfast 
with us, and talked as freely as we did. Of 
course they had to learn to be polite, not to 
interrupt, and to remember that it is well to 
listen to older and wiser folks; but what they 
had to say was treated with respect, and when 
their ideas appeared mistaken we tried to cor- 
rect them without leaving them with a sense 
of humiliation. 
“At luncheon I was always at home with 
them if possible. I asked them what they had 
been doing all the morning at school or at play, 
showed myself interested, talked over what 
had happened, and told them what I had done 
and seen in my grown-up world, making it as 
simple and interesting for them as I could.” 
“ \ \ THILE they were so young as to need 
» ' early supper, I always sat with them, 
read aloud some good story or poem, and 
talked it over with them, or told them about 
something of current interest that I read in 
books or newspapers. I would discuss events 
in the big outside world with some ‘prominent 
184 TABLE-TALK 
citizen’—why not with my own children, who 
meant so much more to me? 
“When the children were old enough to be 
up at dinner with us, at first after they had 
had their own supper, and later when they ate 
with us, they were as much a part of the oc- 
casion as either their father or I. They listened 
eagerly as father told what he had done and 
seen and heard during the day, and made such 
remarks as occurred to them, with perfect free- 
dom. The fact is, however, that they were 
glad to keep still while father told of the thrill- 
ing happenings of the world. They never 
dreamed that anything unusual was being done 
with them or for them. They would be very 
much astonished, I imagine, even now, to know 
that any one saw anything remarkable in their 
conduct or conversation. It has all been so 
perfectly natural and spontaneous. My hus- 
band and I have greatly enjoyed our children. 
They never have bored us. I think parents 
lose a great deal when they do not have the 
free conversation of their own children. Why 
are they so blind?” 
T HAVE seen so many children of the other 
* kind, brought up in the other way, whose 
lives never really touch those of their parents. 
185 MOTHER-LOVE’ IN ACTION 
Think of the case—fortunately not so common 
as we sometimes think; relatively few families 
can afford to have nurses at all, even if they 
wanted them—in which a trained baby-nurse 
comes and takes possession, remaining in charge 
of the child’s whole life for perhaps three or 
four years—a splendid guardian of his physical 
welfare, no doubt. At four or five comes a 
French or German governess, first-class in the 
language, of course. By the time the child 
graduates from these he may go to boarding- 
school or college; and so from earliest days he 
has been, all but constantly, in the society of 
people other than his parents. 
There are instances, perhaps very many of 
them, in which the child gets from some nurse 
or governess or tutor a personal influence and 
inspiration far beyond any that could be given 
by either his mother or his father. In such cases, 
of course, the result justifies the means. But 
how vastly more frequent are the instances in 
which children, in families whose wealth would 
enable them to command the best of educational 
skill, have had during all their most impres- 
sionable years, through all the waking hours 
of day after day, week after week, month after 
month, the companionship and conversation of 
relatively illiterate, dull-witted, commonplace 
persons—to say nothing of those fearfully nu- 
186 TABLE-TALK 
merous instances in which the influences were 
positively evil. 
You see the results of this sort of thing in 
the feeble attempts at conversation on the part 
of scores of college youths and debutantes; 
they have been through the forms of edu- 
cation, but it has given them only a veneer 
because in their own homes no foundation of 
general intelligence and responsiveness was 
laid; they were shut out from real mental ac- 
tivity; the conversation they heard habitually 
was commonplace and superficial, if not abso- 
lutely injurious. Later on they marry and 
give ghastly dinners, where the subjects of 
conversation continue to be cheap personal gos- 
sip and frivolous nonsense of the quality to 
which they were accustomed in their childhood 
because they associated habitually with shallow 
and mediocre people. 
''"THE best conversation you can have in 
* your house is none too good for your 
children. The pains you take to have at your 
table interesting and inspiring people for the 
entertainment and inspiration of your guests 
are well enough so far as they go; there should 
be no sparing effort to that end. But far more 
important it is that the expanding minds of 
187 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
the young people for whose guidance and de- 
velopment you have made yourself responsible 
should be given the benefit of the best you have 
yourselves and the best and most inspiring 
audiences you can bring to them. There is no 
better opportunity for the exercise of this duty 
and privilege than at your own home table. The 
past, present, and future of a home can be 
judged almost absolutely by the quality and 
temper of its table-talk. XXIX 
GOOD MANNERS VS. GOOD BREEDING 
yOU understand that there is a difference. 
1 A subtle difference, to be sure, but a 
difference. One may have very fine manners 
without good breeding. Good breeding auto- 
matically produces essentially good manners. 
Manners have to do with precise rules of con- 
duct, motions, genuflections, particular post- 
ures, phrases, conventional expressions. Man- 
ners change with the times. A thing which 
is “polite” to do to-day would have seemed 
grotesque ten years ago; will seem absurd ten, 
or even five, years hence. The latest thing 
in handshaking would have seemed—and would 
have been—ridiculous when I was a girl. I 
think it is ridiculous now! When I was a little 
girl, it was required that a child use invariably 
the words “Ma’am” and “Sir” in speaking to 
any adult person whom he or she was supposed 
to respect—even father and mother. Now it 
189 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
is required to say, “Yes, Mother,” “Yes, 
Father.” Just now it is “the thing” for a child 
to address Father as “Daddy.” In my child- 
hood “Daddy” was a vulgar word. Father was 
“Papa.” Mother was “Mamma” or “Mama.” 
I am not finding fault with any of these 
words of then or of now; only calling attention 
to the fact that they belong in the field of 
fashion. There is nothing essential about any 
of them. 
When my own boy was a baby, he called 
his father for a time by the same affectionate 
nickname that I used. A very pompous old 
lady who visited us was much disturbed by 
what seemed to her the “disrespect” of this 
familiarity on the part of the little boy, in- 
sisting that then was the time for him to 
“learn to respect his father.” I think she meant 
that he ought to regard his father with a cer- 
tain awe and be in a way afraid to address him 
in so familiar a fashion. The father received 
the suggestion with derision. He said: 
“Don’t worry. I’ll get all the respect from 
that youngster that is coming to me. There 
isn’t going to be any ‘Alphonse and Gaston’ 
business between son and me.” 
Within a very short time the child began to 
call him “Father” of his own accord. That 
was nearly twenty years ago. My husband 
190 GOOD MANNERS FS. GOOD BREEDING 
was right, I think. Anyway, if all boys re- 
spected their fathers as thoroughly as my boy 
does, there would be a better relationship than 
I note in many instances falling under my 
observation. 
OOD breeding produces good manners. If 
every one were unselfish, tactful in the 
best sense, considerate of others, thoughtful of 
their comfort and pleasure before his own, 
there would be less pother about manners. I 
sometimes think that “manners” constitute a 
sort of veneer, designed to cover up something. 
How often we instinctively suspect hypocrisy 
behind the most perfect behavior! And how 
quickly we forgive and overlook lapses of 
“manner” in those whom we see to be unselfish 
and considerate! 
Really good manners are the reflection of es- 
sentially good breeding. They are founded in 
reason and good sense, and the reason and good 
sense have to do with one’s attitude toward 
one’s fellows. When that attitude is cold and 
selfish, the manners, however perfect in form, 
chill the heart and nullify every instinct to 
get together. I have in mind certain children 
whose outward manners are perfect, but whom 
I know to be the embodiment of selfishness. 
I know some little gamins over on the East 
191 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
Side of New York who are more comfortable 
companions. I have seen the modern child 
come into the room, courtesy a la mode to her 
elders, bob up every time an adult moves from 
a chair, carry out to the letter every detail of 
her French governess’s instructions—and be all 
the time a hateful, selfish, ill-mannered, in- 
considerate little brat; poor, ill-bred little 
thing! 
Mow’ in every such case there is something 
' wrong, some trouble somewhere. I have 
no fault to find with the “manners” that have 
been so painstakingly taught to her, except 
that they are so utterly superficial. You could 
teach them to a monkey. The child is not to 
blame. It is no trick at all to teach a child 
to think of others, to try to make them happy 
and so be happy herself. Only you have to 
do it intentionally. And you have to set the 
example. You have to be it and do it yourself. 
Jonathan Swift, the great English satirist, 
writing more than two hundred years ago, said: 
“Whoso makes the fewest persons uneasy 
is the best bred in the company. . . . Pride, 
ill-nature, and want of sense are the three great 
sources of ill-manners. . . . We must suit our 
manners to our superiors, our equals, and to 
those below us.” 
192 GOOD MANNERS VS. GOOD BREEDING 
Have you seen children whose “parlor man- 
ners” were impeccable, but who were coarse and 
impudent to the servants? I wonder if Swift 
meant it altogether as satire when he said that 
“the common forms of good manners were in- 
tended for regulating the conduct of those who 
have weak understanding,” and that “these 
people have fallen into a needless and endless 
way of multiplying ceremonies.” 
We need to be very careful in teaching chil- 
dren not to “multiply ceremonies” to the con- 
fusion of their minds; not to teach them a lot 
of useless and meaningless forms, at the ex- 
pense of the realities of human intercourse. 
'"PHIS is a very practical matter. Take, for 
instance, the subject of punctuality, basic 
in really good manners. A very witty man 
said to me once: 
“Punctuality is the thief of time. I believe 
I have wasted years of my life being on time 
at things, and waiting around for bad-mannered 
people who are always late because they don’t 
care about the feelings or convenience of any 
one but themselves.” 
Well-bred men and women are punctual. 
Ill-bred men and women waste other people’s 
time. Sometimes they do it very politely, and 
193 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
imagine that scrupulous apologies atone for 
their selfishness. I found this about promptness 
in an old book on Good Manners: 
“If you duly observe time for the service of 
another, it doubles the obligation; if upon 
your own account, it would be manifest folly 
as well as ingratitude, to neglect it. If both 
are concerned, to make your equal or inferior 
attend on you to his ora disadvantage is pride 
and injustice.” 
Forms and ceremonies of politeness differ in 
different places and countries and circles of 
society. To be en regie one has to study and 
keep up with the mode. It is all very well; 
I would not be understood as speaking against 
a certain effort for one’s self and instruction of 
one’s children, to know and practise the niceties 
of manner that tend to make one at ease in 
any society. But I would call attention to the 
fact that at the bottom of good manners that are 
anything but superficial veneer, lie character, 
real virtues, common sense, self-poise, and self- 
control; most of all, a personal modesty and 
suppression of egotism—unselfishness, and con- 
sideration of others. 
You may land in a place where you cannot 
speak a word that will be understood or know 
one single custom of the people. But an in- 
stinct to be considerate and helpful will get 
194 GOOD MANNERS VS. GOOD BREEDING 
you a long way about the world. A smile and 
a happy disposition are convertible into the 
human currency of every land. 
Teach your children what you will of out- 
ward manners, but remember that good breed- 
ing is a thing of the heart. While you are 
painstakingly compelling them to bow and 
scrape and bob up and down in the fashion 
that happens to be au fait this year, what are 
they acquiring from the Real You in the way 
of the breeding that produces habitual, in- 
stinctive attitudes toward their fellows? XXX 
FRETTERS AND WHINERS 
JOHN WESLEY wrote once: “I no more 
dare to fret than I dare curse and swear.” 
Later he explained that his wonderful mother, 
Susannah Wesley, would not allow fretting or 
whining in her house. She taught her children, 
from the first, to “cry softly,” and counted it 
a sin to fret. 
Fretters and whiners did not live and die 
in the days of John and Charles Wesley. We 
have them with us yet; not children only, 
but men and women, and I don’t know which 
is worst. I don’t wonder that Susannah Wesley 
chased the thing out of her house as if it were 
a pest. It is a pest. 
It begins at the beginning. I know a child 
who always whines. I regarded her as simply 
a whining child, who had been suffered to ac- 
quire the whining habit—until one day her 
mother called me on the telephone, and then 
196 FRETTERS AND WHINERS 
I knew. The tone of voice, the whine, to the 
life! No, it was not hereditary, it was imita- 
tion, pure and simple, done to perfection, and 
acquired as a habit to last the poor child till 
her dying day, till her last breath flickered out 
in a fretful, expiring whine. 
For my part, that whine over the telephone 
sours the day for me. I hang up the receiver 
and say to myself: 
“Oh, if that woman only would use a cheerful 
voice! It would help so much!” 
I don’t suppose she knows she is a whiner 
and has made her little girl a whiner, too. 
Are you sure that you are not a fretter and 
whiner, yourself? Did you learn it from your 
mother? Are you teaching it to your children? 
They are great imitators; that is the way they 
get most of their mental, moral, and physical 
habits—from the grown people to whom they 
look for example. 
Even if you don’t whine and fret with your 
voice, do you do it with your face? Is it full 
of wrinkles, sour and cross-looking, as if you 
lived on a diet of pickles? See such a face, 
and you can be pretty sure it is the show-win- 
dow of a fretter, and that when the mouth 
opens and a noise comes out, it will be a 
whine. 
197 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
AT bottom, the thing starts with a negative 
point of view. Such people always say 
“no” and “but.” It is a fine day, but it rained 
yesterday, and probably will rain to-morrow. 
Bessie is a lovely girl, but her father is so homely, 
and she will look like him when she is an old 
woman. Yes, you may go out to play, but 
I know you will tear your dress, etc., etc. You 
know the type; never out of sight of the cloudy 
side of life. 
You can’t cure it in your child until you 
have cured it in yourself. Look out and look 
up, and smile! A smile is legal tender in every 
corner of the world. You may not speak a 
word of Chinese or Eskimo or Yiddish, or 
whatever, but your smile will unlock hearts in 
any spot on earth. Especially with children, 
and more especially in your own home. 
Smile when the baby tumbles down—it’s so 
much better than a panic-stricken, woebegone 
face and too sympathetic voice. With a smile 
and a pat and a kiss the child will stop crying 
and run about his play again. Try this from 
the very beginning; don’t begin by letting 
him fret and cry every time he is hurt or can’t 
have his own way. Laugh it off and suggest 
something else. 
One reason children fret is because they are 
not kept busy. Teach them to keep themselves 
198 FRETTERS AND WHINERS 
busy; suggest things for them to do or make 
for some one else. “Sunshine and Service” 
are the watchwords. 
T HAVE in mind one lovely mother whose life 
* for almost the whole period of my acquaint- 
ance with her has been one almost unbroken 
succession of bereavements; one cruel shock 
and sorrow after another. She is a woman of 
keenest perception and intense feeling; but 
never in my whole friendship with her have 
I heard her whine, or fret, or complain. Always 
she has a cheery smile and encouraging word 
for others. 
Her face is a benediction; instead of being 
full of little “worry-wrinkles” and “crow’s- 
feet” about the eyes, the few lines of her face 
serve to emphasize her strength and sweetness 
of character. She has told me repeatedly that 
she had to fight for this poise that seems to 
hold her so free from worry. Her continual 
service for others is the largest part of it, I am 
sure, and she has brought her children up with 
the idea that to be sunny and cheerful is the 
only way to live and to get the sweetness out 
of life; that they must always think of some- 
thing they can do for some one else. And they 
do it. In the town where they live the family 
199 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
name is a synonym for helpfulness and public 
spirit. 
The minute you go into that home you sense 
the atmosphere of love and thoughtfulness. It 
shows, in a home where this spirit lives, not 
in gifts, but in cheery words and thoughtful 
little acts. It may be only a flower or a book 
or kindly motion at the right moment, but, 
oh, how it warms the cockles of your old heart 
when the little children of their own accord 
bring you something with a smile! 
TS there anything lovelier than a child’s smile? 
* Cultivate and encourage it as you would an 
orchid. Believe me, a selfish child is a manu- 
factured thing; manufactured positively by ex- 
ample or neglect, or taught selfishness by the 
necessity of self-defense, of “looking out for 
Number One” in a selfish household. And the 
child who does not smile is an advertisement 
of bad surroundings and bad influences, usu- 
ally right at home. 
Is it too much to ask even a very little child 
to pick a few flowers to carry with you to a 
sick friend, or to do some other self-forgetful 
act, every day? Yes, you have to think of the 
things to do at first, but the habit is easy to 
teach and easy to learn, and the little child re- 
200 FRETTERS AND WHINERS 
sponds to it eagerly. The Boy Scout takes up 
with avidity his duty “to do a kind act every 
day.” The little child takes to it as a duck to 
water. But he will not think much of your 
words if your own acts belie them; nor will he 
be interested if you show yourself indifferent. 
Get him to dictate to you a letter to his old 
grandparents; or, if he is old enough, to write 
a note, draw a picture, pick flowers, help you 
make a glass of jelly, make a basket, do some- 
thing—anything, every day for somebody else. 
You will find before you know it that you 
have stopped the whining; there is no time 
for it and you are all looking at life through 
sunny spectacles. The thing will radiate through 
the whole house. XXXI 
TRAVELING WITH CHILDREN 
mother, look! What’s that? Why do 
they have it there? Look at that funny 
man! Mother, can’t I have something to eat? 
Mother, what did you say to the conductor? 
And what did he say to you? Why did he 
say that? Mother, what is the next station? 
Oh, dear, I’m so tired! Mother, when do we 
get there?” 
And so on, until everybody within earshot 
is tired to death of it and wonders what sort 
of a mother has such troublesome children. 
Haven’t you heard it a score of times? And 
not always in the day coaches, by any means. 
Time and again we have sat behind mothers 
and children traveling, pitied the weary, ques- 
tion-beset mother or the nagged or neglected 
children; heard them answered patiently or 
impatiently or not at all; seen them slapped 
or shaken, or bribed with candy or bananas, fed 
202 TRAVELING WITH CHILDREN 
with ham sandwiches; and wished them in 
Kamchatka or Kalamazoo. 
In all my years of traveling I have seen few 
mothers or nurses on trains making really in- 
telligent attempts to shorten the journey for 
the little folks—much less to utilize the hours 
for any affirmative purpose. Usually they treat 
the children as an unmitigated nuisance, and 
either neglect them altogether or help them 
to make the trip a burden to themselves and 
all their fellow-travelers. Sometimes there is 
a doll or a teddy-bear, less often a book; most 
infrequently a definite evidence of thoughtful 
preparation to make the travel a pleasure to 
the child. I never can get used to seeing parents 
act as if they thought themselves more im- 
portant than their children; as if the cornstalk 
were more important than the corn forming 
on the ear. 
TRAVELING is a weary business for most 
people—you get tired yourself. But you can 
reason it out for yourself; you have a time- 
table which shows you the names of the stations; 
you know something about the country through 
which you pass; you have brought along a 
novel, a magazine or two, your knitting; you 
can doze with your thoughts for company. 
Even for you the trip is likely to be more or 
203 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
less of a bore. Think what it must be for a 
little child. 
Children cannot sustain their interest for 
very long. They cannot run about in the car 
very much; they are confined for hours to the 
narrow space of the car seat. Their nerves 
tire of the roar of the train, their eyes weary 
of the passing scenery—very likely it is mo- 
notonous scenery even for you. Did you sup- 
pose they got hot and tired and restless and 
cross on purpose? Or do you feel that your 
comfort is the main thing and that the children 
are a sort of penance, sent along to try your 
patience or punish you for your sins? I wonder 
why the good Lord inflicts children on people 
who see them with such eyes! 
T KNOW you were busy with the thousand 
* details of packing, getting your clothes and 
hats ready, and all that sort of thing; but 
surely this little chap you were going to take 
with you was as important as any hat or any 
trunk. And as for the impression you make 
on your fellow-travelers, it’s quite likely they 
will form their opinion of you more by your 
attitude toward the child you have with you 
than by what you have on your head or your 
back. 
Try to plan in advance for the child—if for 
204 TRAVELING WITH CHILDREN 
no better reason than your own comfort on the 
trip. Try to see it with his eyes. If the jour- 
ney is going to be a weary one for you, what 
will it be for him? Or, better still, how will 
you utilize this travel to broaden his vision, 
extend his field of interest, give him a new 
fund of information? 
Suppose you have a three-hour trip to make. 
Divide it up roughly into half-hour periods 
and provide something for each half-hour. A 
child of ten or under cannot sustain interest 
in anything much longer than that. But if you 
provide intelligently for variety of interest, you 
will be surprised to see, as the time goes on, 
how the periods of attention lengthen out. 
In the first half-hour you can look about 
the car, explaining the various things in sight. 
You understand about the windows, fixtures, 
ventilators, lights, heating arrangements; the 
direction in which the train is to go. Or are 
you one of those unobservant folk who travel 
without seeing anything? I hope not, for the 
child’s sake. 
For another half-hour have a good picture 
book—a fresh one; you can look it over to- 
gether first, and then leave the child to enjoy 
it by himself for a while. This will give you a 
breathing-spell for yourself. 
205 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
TATER on you can have a season of looking 
out of the window, explaining the various 
things that you see; the signal-towers that you 
pass, with the watchful men who keep the track 
and the switches clear for your safety. This 
will afford you a splendid opportunity to im- 
press upon the child how much you both owe 
to the faithful and efficient men who work to- 
gether, each in his own place and way, to carry 
you safely to your journey’s end. Perhaps you 
never thought of that yourself! 
A good story-book helps a lot. I have trav- 
eled hundreds of miles with my own little lad 
listening intently, his head tucked close to my 
arm, while I read to him. Maybe you don’t en- 
joy reading aloud to children. I’m sorry for you. 
Pencil and pad, colored crayons, a small 
puzzle to put together, a word-game (cut large 
letters from magazines or newspapers for this, 
or you can buy them ready-made); blunt scis- 
sors for cutting out pictures or advertisements; 
a piece of string to play cat’s-cradle; knitting of 
horse-reins; squares of paper to fold into boats 
and hats and boxes—the possibilities along 
this line are endless, and if you put your mind 
on it in advance, you can have on hand de- 
vices to furnish interest for a trip across the 
continent. 
206 TRAVELING WITH CHILDREN 
FAON’T entertain him all the time. That 
is almost as bad as not entertaining him 
at all. Your place is to step in just as his in- 
terest flags and start him afresh. I remember 
once that we had a whole fleet of paper boats 
sailing across the seat and the window-sill. 
The conductor and trainman both stopped to 
see, and I heard one of them say: 
“Why don’t more mothers use a little sense 
and do something to amuse their kids, instead 
of feeding them with bananas?” 
Have a thermos bottle, if you can, with water 
or good lemonade, and let him have a drink 
pretty frequently. Traveling is thirsty busi- 
ness, and you cannot depend on always having 
good water. It’s amazing how a little cooling 
drink abates fatigue. 
You have no idea, if you haven’t tried, how 
a very simple equipment, of paper, pencil, 
crayons, scissors, and a magazine full of pictures 
and advertisements, together with observant 
eyes, nimble fingers, and a reasonable amount 
of common sense, patience, and imagination 
enough to put yourself in the child’s place will 
make a railroad journey with a child not only 
tolerable, but a pleasure. Your fellow-passen- 
gers will sit there, even if they do not rise up, 
and call you blessed. And think what it means 
for the child! 
207 XXXII 
“avenues of escape” 
“ MOW there are many avenues of escape 
from the ordinary self, and each of them 
helps, in its own way, to foster the growth of 
the soul.”—The Creed of Buddha. 
Over the telephone one of the sweetest voices* 
that I ever heard said to me: 
“Won’t you please come over and sit with 
me this evening? I am so lonesome; you know, 
I cannot get away from myself!” 
Such an attractive woman she is, well read, 
a maker of lasting friends; traveled, the mother 
of children, and unwilling to be left alone; a 
woman devoid of resources within and of ave- 
nues of escape from herself. For this is a chronic 
state with her. So I went to her. And as I en- 
tered her beautiful home, replete with comforts 
and luxuries, cluttered with books and beau- 
tiful pictures, a desk full of letters and papers, 
I tried to discover what might be the cause of 
208 “AVENUES OF ESCAPE’’ 
this state of mind. In fact, I talked about it 
with her. 
She said that always she had had this feeling, 
even in childhood. She could not remember 
ever liking to be alone. 
“Perhaps,” I ventured, “you may have had 
too good a mother.” 
“What do you mean? How could one have 
too good a mother? Mine certainly was de- 
voted; she slaved for me from morning till 
night, and devoted every moment to giving 
me a good time. Don’t I remember the jolly 
parties she used to get up for me? I never was 
half grateful enough. When I think of the 
tireless ingenuity she devoted to inventing 
amusements for me; I never had a moment’s 
ennui then—” 
“Exactly,” I said. 
“You don’t mean that that has anything to 
do with the way I feel now, at fifty?” 
“Why not? You have said enough already 
to explain why you are unable to entertain 
yourself for an hour. The dear, good mother 
who used to be your source of initiative is gone 
now, and you never discovered or created any 
source within yourself. All of your inspirations 
and incentives have to come from outside of 
you.” 
209 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
'T'HAT little girl never was allowed to think 
* for herself; to develop her own resources 
of invention and adaptation; to find in the 
world about her the innumerable resources of 
interest and enthusiasm that invite discovery; 
she never was permitted to exercise her own 
individuality. Her mother, like thousands of 
other mothers, especially in our over-civilized 
circle of the well-to-do, feared to leave the 
child to develop along any lines of her own 
instinct. 
“The individuality of the child is the divinity 
in it,” says James L. Hughes. “It is the element 
that should do most for the child and for the 
world.” 
Real personality is the basis of strength of 
character, and personality, in any sense of the 
word that amounts to anything, can be de- 
veloped only by the exercise of individual taste, 
initiative, and judgment. The mother who, 
in blind, devoted love, hovers over her child, 
thinking, planning, fairly feeling for the child, 
allowing it no opportunity to work out its own 
character and find or make its own resources, 
is ignorantly stunting the personality, walling 
up the “avenues of escape,” which cannot be 
found again at fifty. 
I often think the children of the poor have 
an advantage here; the hard-working mother 
210 “AVENUES OF ESCAPE” 
of six children must of necessity leave them to 
work out their own problems, find their own 
amusements, exercise their own initiative. Un- 
fortunately, this goes far over to the other ex- 
treme, and means neglect. But of the two—I 
wonder. 
TN the very small child begins the opportunity 
* for self-expression. Yes, I do keep harping 
and harping on that! There is no such thing 
as “too early” in the development of a child. 
From its earliest infancy give it liberty, freedom 
of expression; help it to observe and gather 
impressions and experiment and make its own 
deductions. Let your child make mistakes; 
your function is only to see that the mistakes 
are not costly beyond its power of endurance. 
It is chiefly by our mistakes that we learn. 
What is “experience” but the sum total of our 
mistakes? Only in a limited degree can ex- 
perience be acquired second-hand. 
By liberty of self-expression I do not mean 
that you should have a lawless, disobedient 
child; very far from it. Your guiding hand 
should be firm and your government definite 
and purposeful. There is a vast difference be- 
tween this and the fussing, clucking mother- 
hen attitude taken by so many “devoted” 
mothers. In each child there is from the outset 
211 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
something definitely different, peculiar to it- 
self—its own separate personality, which should 
be watched and fostered and developed as the 
most important thing in the whole world. 
It is through its senses that the little child 
seeks out and opens the avenues to the world 
about him; here a little and there a little he 
ventures out; so on until he really finds his 
true self and the ways that suit his own feet. 
You cannot do too much in the cultivation of 
keen senses, accuracy of sight and hearing and 
touch; true judgment of quality, texture, form, 
and color—these are the basic judgments which 
afterward exert themselves in assessment of 
higher things. 
'T'HE character which is brought up depend- 
ent upon others for entertainment and stim- 
uli becomes one blind to half the beauties and 
wonders of the world, shut in a spiritual prison 
always waiting for some one else to come and 
hold open the door. Strength comes only from 
“working out your own salvation.” If the 
child is not allowed, nay, compelled, to do his 
own thinking and choosing and planning—with- 
in the lines of reasonable safety, to be sure—he 
never will learn to do it after he passes out 
beyond your guidance. Col. Francis W. Parker 
put it this way: 
212 “AVENUES OF ESCAPE” 
“The principal business of the parent is to 
equip and train the child so that at the earliest 
possible moment he can get along without 
parents.” 
A child, taught to observe and enjoy every- 
thing about him, with love and consideration 
for others, sharing his enthusiasms with those 
about him as he works out his own character, 
will be a blessing to mankind, a leader among 
his fellows, never hanging back in the fear of 
his own society until some one else comes to 
cheer his loneliness. XXXIII 
IGNORANT GIRLS WHO GET MARRIED 
IT was a beautifully dressed woman who said 
to me at a meeting of the board of managers 
of a fashionable charity: 
“Why do we allow these factory girls to 
marry till they know something about house- 
keeping?” 
She didn’t seem to like my reply: 
“For the same reason that we allow the 
daughters of the wealthy to marry when they 
know nothing about housekeeping.” 
The question does not come up in just this 
form before the boards of charities. A few 
factory girls attend settlement classes in cook- 
ing, millinery, and dressmaking. Very much 
fewer of the girls in what we call the “upper 
classes” attend such classes. I fancy that they 
need it, on the whole, rather more than do the 
daughters of the poor. 
The best housekeepers come from homes 
214 IGNORANT GIRLS WHO GET MARRIED 
where the girls, be they rich or poor, are taught 
by their mothers and take a little time to prac- 
tise before undertaking to establish homes of 
their own. 
The friendly visitor goes into the tenement 
homes and finds out all the trials and tribu- 
lations of the young housekeeper. There is no 
access for “friendly visitors” to discover the 
shortcomings of the “newlyweds” of the upper 
classes! 
Money may help some to gloss over the 
troubles in the kitchen, but the patch is poorly 
applied. What we need is girls of every grade 
and station in life, trained for the profession of 
Homemaker—the basic profession of them all. 
I asked a young engaged girl what she was 
doing by way of preparation. She expected to 
be married soon, and had the precious winter 
before her to learn a few things about her “job.” 
“Are you studying anything or going to any 
classes of any kind?” 
“Oh no,” she said, “I’m not doing a thing. 
No, I don’t know how to cook and I can hardly 
sew a straight seam, but I guess I can get along. 
Harold has a strong digestion,” and she laughed 
a bewitching little laugh that covered a multi- 
tude of sins. 
But how long will her laugh last when she is 
really up against a real woman’s work? We 
215 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
do not expect our boys to be editors, doctors, 
or engineers without special training. How 
can we expect our daughters to be good home- 
makers? 
“A college-trained girl or a well-educated 
woman,” says some one, “can apply her brain to 
any problem and succeed.” 
Well, can she? Are all the brainy, well- 
educated women you know good housekeepers 
and mothers? I am talking about homemak- 
ers in the broadest sense. Women who know 
their profession in every detail are good house- 
keepers, model mothers, charming, interesting, 
and intelligent hostesses, congenial companions, 
and their sons, daughters, and husbands— 
whatever their professions—well read, well in- 
formed, well dressed, and well poised. 
TTOW many of our daughters are ready at 
* * least to start in such a profession? Have 
you given them the first equipment? Have they 
had an allowance, large or small, on which to 
dress themselves, knowing the proportion they 
should pay for clothes, recreation, charity, in- 
tellectual uplift, etc.? Have you let them keep 
house for you for six months, learning the table 
expenses, house rent, light, heat, and service 
expenses? Have they been to market, learning 
216 IGNORANT GIRLS WHO GET MARRIED 
to pick out fresh fruits and vegetables from the 
stale, dried-up stuff? Do they know when 
fish is fresh, the kinds in market best at cer- 
tain seasons? Do they know the best cuts of 
meat, how long beef, mutton, lamb, etc., ought 
to hang before it is fit to eat? Do they also 
know the cheap cuts, how to cook them to the 
best possible advantage, and serve them de- 
liciously? Can they plan and give a luncheon 
or dinner without being flustered? Do they 
know anything about babies or little children, 
except that they are “too cute for anything”? 
Can they trim a hat or make a dress, if necessity 
demands? 
TF they cannot do these things, why can’t 
* they? Whose fault is it? They may know 
how to dance, skate, sing, and play, which is 
splendid, but why not go on and teach them a 
few of the really practical accomplishments? 
They will thank you for it many times over 
the first year they have to keep house. 
A few months of practical study in a domestic- 
science school or with a wise mother will start 
them on the right track and be a blessing to 
them forever. I learned much in such a school, 
but I had groundwork from a good mother. 
Your own daughters are not one whit better 
equipped, by reason of their mere wealth or 
217 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
ornamental “accomplishments,” for the work 
before them than the factory girl. Ten to one 
she is doing her best to get ready to be married, 
going to a settlement cooking-class and a dress- 
making-class, and making the most of her op 
portunities. Did you not say your daughter 
would learn all this in time? Yes, I dare say 
she will, when it is too late. And at whose ex- 
pense? She may have wasted many hundreds 
of dollars, be broken down with worn-out 
nerves, had endless trouble with servants, 
spoiled her husband’s digestion—to say noth- 
ing of his disposition—with delicatessen food, 
or possibly have lost him altogether. This may 
be a sad picture, but it is a true one—the thing 
is happening every day—and we mothers who 
have brought these precious daughters into the 
world take our responsibility so lightly, shirk- 
ing the task nearest at hand, preferring a com- 
fortable game of bridge, a club meeting, or 
directorship on a popular charity to really 
bringing our own daughters up by hand. It is 
a wonder our daughters love us as much as 
they do! XXXIV 
WHEN THE CHILDREN GO AWAY 
WHAT a place to study human nature is 
the piazza of a summer hotel! It seems 
as if people, especially women, were more un- 
reserved in their self-revelation there than at 
any other time in the year. A stenographer 
might do a world of good by giving to certain 
women as they left for home a verbatim tran- 
script of their idle-time conversations. As I 
write this I have just come in from one of these 
chatterfests. More than ordinarily it set me 
thinking seasonably, for the conversation was 
about the children’s going away to school. 
“Yes, my daughter goes away this fall,” one 
woman said. “It is her first absence from home. 
I do hope she won’t be homesick. It is a beau- 
tiful school, and she will have a splendid time 
after she gets started; with just enough study 
to keep the child busy, and so much besides— 
dancing, music, art, and a fancy-dress party 
219 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
once a month. I dare say she will forget all 
about home after she gets acquainted.” 
“Of course you will write to her,” some one 
said. 
“Oh yes; but my letters are such stupid 
things, and I can’t hope to keep her interested 
in our dull round of home affairs.” 
“My two boys are going away, too,” said 
another. “I am so glad to get them into a 
good school, where they will be looked after 
properly and be under some kind of discipline. 
They have been getting beyond my control 
lately. Of course I shall miss them. I can’t 
hope that they will write to me; you know 
how boys are about writing letters.” 
“I should say so!” exclaimed the tall, thin 
one. “My son was away at college last year, 
and sometimes there were weeks without a 
letter between us.” 
“But you kept on writing to him,” I as- 
sumed. 
“Indeed I did not!” she snapped. “I just 
told him to begin with that I would not write 
to him unless he wrote to me. He didn’t seem 
to care at all.” 
I wondered how much she cared herself. And 
I hadn’t much difficulty in understanding why 
he might care less. 
220 WHEN THE CHILDREN GO AWAY 
A LL of these women—oh yes, there were 
** some of the other kind, who were as 
much disgusted as I was at this sort of talk— 
had taken utmost pains to see that the children 
should be provided with the right sort of cloth- 
ing, that they should have comfortable rooms, 
and meals as good as the place afforded; some 
of them had given careful thought to arrange- 
ments for church attendance, courses of study, 
and other matters of that general nature. But 
few seemed to be thinking of the tremendous 
thing that had happened or was about to hap- 
pen to their chicks in this their first departure 
from the home-nest. I wondered, too, how 
much of a “nest” such women could make. 
Even if a child has been very much “nested” 
at home, he or she will get out of touch very 
quickly unless the line of communication is 
kept open. It is the principal business of young 
people to adapt themselves to their environ- 
ment, and they get along best who adapt them- 
selves most quickly and most easily. Children 
live their lives in the Here and Now, and 
school is a very interesting and absorbing place. 
Its doings and values swiftly replace those of 
the home unless something is done by the home 
to keep itself in the foreground. Believe me, 
if you lose touch with your son or daughter 
now, you will never recover it. And you will 
221 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
be the loser; for the child will not long really 
miss the mother or father who suffers the ab- 
sence to become spiritual as well as physical. 
It is up to you, and to nobody else. This thing 
requires definite and purposeful attention, and 
bears fruit in direct ratio to the pains you take 
with it. 
HTO begin with, write often and regularly, 
and insist upon frequency and regularity 
in return. Let your letters come to the children 
with the same punctuality as their recitations; 
so that Monday and Thursday mornings (let 
us say) bring your letter as certainly as break- 
fast or daylight. 
How to make your letters interesting? Easiest 
thing in the world. Keep before them the con- 
tinuous story of the home life. It may seem 
dull enough to you; but remember that the 
child is away from home and that everything 
that happens helps to fill in the memory- 
picture of the dear old place. Every member 
of the family, including the cook and the cat, 
and the clink of the milk-bottles as the milk- 
man goes his round, lives somewhere in that 
memory, and the doings of each are of interest. 
A child away from home should write not 
less than twice a week—a fairly long letter on 
Sunday and a note, or perhaps only a postal- 
222 WHEN THE CHILDREN GO AWAY 
card, in midweek. This is about all that can 
reasonably be required of a child. I know one 
dear woman who demanded a letter every day 
and made the duty a nuisance to the poor lad. 
And above all, do not permit either end of 
the correspondence to degenerate into a bar- 
gain—a letter-and-answer affair—“You write 
me and I’ll write you.” 
Never let your letters take the form of peri- 
odical scoldings. I remember one poor girl at 
college who dreaded her mother’s letters like 
a summons of the principal, because they were 
invariably either a wail of distress about mis- 
happenings at home or a sour complaint about 
something the child had or hadn’t done. 
"C VERY little while send something that 
will be welcome—a gift of some kind— 
a book, a picture, a new game, a decorative 
poster, a half-dozen tennis-balls. If you never 
went away to school or college yourself, you 
have at least seen pictures of a college room. 
The signs, banners, posters, funny pictures. I 
know a father who, from time to time, sends 
his boy a sign—“Keep off the grass,” “Safety 
first,” “Four of this kind for fifty cents”— 
that sort of thing; you’ve no idea how school 
boys and girls prize these, and either hang them 
223 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
up in their own rooms or exchange them with 
chums. 
Well-managed schools usually deprecate or 
forbid boxes of food, for obvious reasons, but 
simple cakes, figs, or dates, and other things, 
may be permitted, and if they are not there are 
plenty of other things with which to remember 
a birthday or other anniversary—Thanksgiving, 
Hallowe’en, St. Valentine’s Day, and so on. 
T SPEAK especially to mothers, but what I 
*■ say applies just as well to fathers. A busy 
doctor in the town where I live writes once a 
week to each of his boys at school as regularly 
as the day comes round. And he gets letters 
from them, and carries them round in his 
pocket, and reads them to appreciative patients. 
After all, the bottom is consideration for 
others. It will be hard to get this sort of thing 
out of a selfish home. There is such a thing 
as a boy’s getting away with relief, and caring 
very little. But even in such a case letters 
from home take on a new interest—absence 
does “make the heart grow fonder,” and it 
may be that in the correspondence which you 
will begin when your son or your daughter 
goes away you can restore or even create a 
bond that has grown thin or perhaps never 
existed before. 
224 XXXV 
AWAY AT SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 
“ you are now eighteen, ready 
' for college, and I hope ready to take 
your place in the new world to which you are 
going. It is now your part, alone, to show what 
you are made of and what sort of place you 
can make for yourself. I have done all for you 
that I can.” 
“But, mother,” gasped the daughter, “you 
surely haven’t finished with me?” 
“No, not exactly, but I feel that my part 
in forming your character is quite finished. If 
by now you have not developed a strong char- 
acter, a feeling that you have something within 
yourself to help you along, I fear you never 
will. Anyway, I can’t give it to you if I have 
not done so already.” 
This conversation between herself and her 
own mother was related to me by one of the 
finest women that I know. And she added: 
225 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
“I never felt so queer in my life—as if I 
had been pushed out into deep water and told 
to sink or swim, alone. But it certainly left 
me with the impression that if I didn’t make 
good it would be a discredit, not only to my 
parents, but to myself.” 
What sort of connection abides between you 
and your sons and daughters as they take their 
first steps in the college the world of which 
they have become a part? Have you fitted 
them to get along without you, and at the same 
time kept a chord of harmony and sympathy 
to vibrate even when your only communication 
will be by letters? 
nnHE bond between parent and child ought 
•*- to continue very close when the boy or 
girl goes away to school; but when at eighteen 
he or she goes to college there should be a dis- 
tinct recognition of the fact that the time has 
come for a large measure of self-management, 
self-government. For his or her own good the 
youthful man or woman should be left to govern 
activities and make even pretty important de- 
cisions. At that distance the parent cannot go 
on as if there were close touch, even if it were 
desirable. 
You want your letters to be full of home news, 
226 AWAY AT SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 
and son’s or daughter’s to you to be full of 
the college doings, studies, athletics, social ac- 
tivities, and so on; but it is time to stop 
fussing about details. For one thing, you must 
make the impression, if you never did before, 
that you are big, that you have neither desire 
nor necessity to nag and fuss and worry about 
trifles. As I said before, I know boys and girls 
who dread to receive mother’s letters, because 
they invariably are full of petty commands and 
complaints and worries—attempts to keep on 
with the kind of trivial oversight from which 
they are at least by physical absence set free. If 
your home training has been of the right kind, 
they are perfectly capable now of taking care 
of themselves in the minor matters of daily 
life. If it hasn’t, it is too late now. To be 
sure, I realize perfectly that if you are a 
“natural-born” or habituated fusser, you will 
be one to the end of your days. But by a little 
thought you can keep the fussing out of your 
letters. 
yOIJR relations with your absent children 
* now ought to be more and more those of a 
warm friend, writing intimately about every- 
thing, and showing the keenest interest in their 
doings and thinkings and aspirations; but quite 
as often consulting as being consulted. If you 
227 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
haven’t tried it, you can have no idea of the 
fine result upon your relation with your nearly 
grown son or daughter of your writing for ad- 
vice about something that interests you both. 
It is your open recognition of the fact that they 
are on the eve of maturity and that you value 
their judgment. 
I have recently had a peculiarly good oppor- 
tunity to watch the relationship of a mother 
and son who seem somehow to have very little 
in common. They never seem to be able to 
“get together” about anything. All the time 
they are managing to hurt each other because 
they never take each other in the least inti- 
mately. At one time, when the lad needs 
“mothering,” she treats him as if he were a 
middle-aged man, at best a distant relative; 
at another, when there is opportunity for self- 
reliance and exercise of judgment upon his 
part, she acts toward him as if he were a child. 
While he was at college, she wrote to him in- 
termittently, and usually on the strictest basis 
of tit-for-tat. “I write to him when he writes 
to me,” she said to me once. 
There was a horse, an old family pet, of 
which the children were deeply fond. The 
boy used to write about him from college as 
he wrote about members of the family. I recall 
that one of his college themes, a really beautiful 
228 AWAY AT SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 
composition, was about that horse. While he 
was away at school the mother sold that horse, 
without consulting or even informing her son. 
By the time he heard about it weeks had passed. 
A small thing, perhaps, and she had every legal 
right to do it; but what do you think it typified 
as to their relationship, and what do you think 
it did to that relationship? I happen to know 
the answer to both questions, for the boy told 
me about it, and made no secret of his feelings. 
TT is better, but not much better, to treat 
* your nearly grown children as if they were 
still merely your children. To keep the bond 
too close is better than to keep no bond at all; 
but when are you going to set them free? 
Whose fault is it if their judgment cannot be 
trusted? Who is to blame if by this time they 
have not, or better, are not, fine, strong, reliable 
characters, beginning to take the place of men 
and women in the world? When do you expect 
them to begin? 
The early mental and moral environment that 
you gave your boy or girl has established a 
certain spiritual background, a certain soil, so 
to speak, in which his life will grow. The per- 
sons and activities which surround him, now 
that he is thrown with other people, serve to 
229 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
test all the work that you have done through- 
out the years of childhood. If in his own home 
he has learned to give and take, to do things 
with you and with the others of the family with 
mutual consideration, and at the same time 
with upstanding personality of his own, he 
can be trusted to do team-work in college and 
choose right paths and make right decisions. 
The more self-reliant he is there the more 
credit to the work you have done in the past. 
If you have brought up a sheltered, weak, 
timid offspring who cannot be trusted beyond 
the length of his mother’s apron-strings—how 
will it go with him when mother and her apron- 
strings are no more? 
UP to this time he has taken your ideals and 
standards in life and religion. Now he 
is out in the Big World, meeting students and 
professors, men of varying mind and point of 
view. He must choose for himself. Do not be 
alarmed if he seems to be thinking along lines 
unfamiliar to you. If you grounded him deeply 
in sound things, he will not go far astray. In 
any event, if his mind and character are worth 
worrying about, he must find and make his 
own choices in these matters, too. There is no 
moral action worthy of the name when the 
230 AWAY AT SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 
individual does not have freedom to think 
things out and choose ways for himself. If 
your relations with him at home were right 
and sound and strong, nothing that you gave 
him will be lost in the long run. XXXVI 
HOME AGAIN AFTER COMMENCEMENT 
I WONDER how many parents realize what 
it means to a live girl, or a live boy, to 
return to the comparatively humdrum life of 
the old home from the gay and eventful life 
at school or college. Put yourself in the place 
of son or daughter and fancy how it must seem 
to drop suddenly into the old home routine. 
It isn’t at all the same as when they went away. 
Father and mother are older, and usually less 
elastic and adaptable. Is it any wonder that 
the youngsters are restless and perhaps irri- 
table? 
Has this girl, this boy, come back really 
'prepared for life as she, or he, will have to take 
it up? Has the education fitted the child for 
social life? I do not mean for what is foolishly 
called “society,” but to take a purposeful and 
responsible part in the community; to per- 
ceive and step into the relationships which 
232 HOME AGAIN AFTER COMMENCEMENT 
henceforth must constitute warp and woof of 
the life to be lived. 
Probably you still think of the youngsters as 
“too young, too inexperienced.” Well, this 
daughter of yours, at eighteen, is three years 
older than my grandmother was when she was 
married, and you won’t get along with her 
very well if you insist upon treating her still 
as a child! 
Yes, they are young—thank the Lord for 
that!—they have life all before them. But if 
their education has been of anything like the 
right kind, they have not been learning things 
by rote, but have been imbibing day by day, 
not out of books, but out of their contact with 
;people, the material of character, the stuff that 
conditions their relationships with the world 
in which they will live and of which they are 
to be a part. It has done this well or ill, as the 
case may be. Whatever is lacking you must 
make shift to supply or it will not be supplied 
at all. 
'TMIE young graduate is apt to be very 
-*• self-important. Bless her heart, hasn’t she 
been valedictorian—head-liner on her little 
stage? Hasn’t she been picked out of her little 
world and made class president? And you 
233 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
would treat her as if she were nobody at all 
except your little Mary! 
Another thing: These young people come 
home nervously tired after the strain of ex- 
aminations and the hubbub of commencement, 
receptions, class day, and what-not. The re- 
action is tremendous, and the “let-down” in 
the quiet of home is bound to be a serious thing. 
You must be very lenient, very considerate. 
The first thing you must avoid is nagging— 
picking at the girl because she does not in- 
stantly drop into the routine of the house. Help 
her to find herself, to adjust herself to new 
conditions; new and not the less strange be- 
cause the scene is within the old, familiar walls. 
And one of the things to guard against, very 
gently, very tactfully, after an interval of rest, 
is a falling into wasteful habits of thought and 
action. This is a different girl from the one 
who went away. 
What traits of character are strong in your 
daughter? Find them and build upon them. 
Every girl ought to have at least a trace of the 
maternal instinct. This instinct shows itself 
in various ways, and always ought to be cher- 
ished and used as a foundation for greater 
things. It may appear in the nurture instinct; 
perhaps at first only in her love of flowers. 
She may have a garden—good! Nothing better 
234 HOME AGAIN AFTER COMMENCEMENT 
for nerves, health, or moral uplift. Caring for 
plants or animals is one of the best preparations 
for the later mothering of life of a higher order. 
Is the daughter interested in the home? Any 
phase of it will make a beginning. The care and 
arrangement of rooms or table; cooking, even 
if it be only cake- or candy-making, all are evi- 
dences and vehicles for the maternal instinct— 
which, in the last analysis, is caring for others. 
These first months are precious. Do not let 
them go by without this daughter getting a 
good groundwork. And do not let her be con- 
tent with superficial fussing with artistic ar- 
rangement of flowers. Give her important re- 
sponsibilities in the home, things the value of 
which is evident to her. 
Perhaps she will exhibit her maternal in- 
stinct in community activities outside the home 
—in settlement work, or participation in church 
or charities. Her devotion to this sort of thing 
may be her way of working out her social edu- 
cation. The sense of justice, inspiring interest 
in better laws, better living and working con- 
ditions for her fellow-men, is one of the finest 
expressions of the maternal instinct. 
r"FHE son is usually not quite so much of a 
problem as the daughter. He generally 
takes up work of some kind, and is at least oc- 
235 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
cupied, often very busy. In him abides the 
paternal instinct. His primitive ancestor went 
out with stone hatchet, or bow and arrow, to 
bring home food for the family. This lad finds 
a “job” and feels pretty big, too, when he 
brings home his first week’s wrages—or salary, 
as he may prefer to call it. He probably will 
appear selfish at first and want to spend his 
money for himself. Do not worry; this is to 
be expected. He may develop a sense of de- 
votion and protection to mother or sisters later. 
A part of your task will be to lead him into this 
less selfish way. That same boy that you 
thought selfish and lazy when he first left col- 
lege may develop into a devoted slave for his 
own wife and family. 
Do not worry about the unpleasant traits 
that you see in your boy. Look for the 
good, and try to encourage that. Has he 
a sense of justice, fairness, a constructive 
or creative instinct? The psychologists tell 
us these are all phases of the paternal 
instinct. 
Remember this: When these youngsters were 
very little, you were patient with them, guided 
them, made allowances for them. ' They were 
beginning human life, and you knew they had 
to learn. Now, in these later years, they are 
still beginning, though in a larger world. Per- 
236 HOME AGAIN AFTER COMMENCEMENT 
haps more than ever they need your patient, 
helpful, resourceful nurture and guidance. And 
if you see that you made mistakes with them 
in those earlier years—all the more must you 
devote yourself now. XXXVII 
THE TEST OF TRAINING* 
NOW, whether you like it or not, however 
little you or he may be ready for it, your 
boy is called for by the nation. And until this 
very hour you have been thinking of him as 
your “baby”—too young to be trusted out 
in the midstream of life’s currents. 
Well, there’s no use in whimpering about it; 
we are not the first women to raise boys with 
tender care and solicitude, to be something in 
the world, and have them snatched away all 
untimely to do things we never dreamed of. 
Think of the mothers of France, and England, 
and Germany, and Russia; of Serbia and Tur- 
key, Rumania and Bulgaria; of Italy and 
Austria! Surely you didn’t think mother-love 
an exclusively American instinct! 
What are the qualities your son will need 
* Tliis chapter was written when the Selective Service, or 
Draft, Law went into effect. It is retained in its original form 
because the general principle set forth is equally applicable in 
war or peace. 
238 THE TEST OF TRAINING 
as he goes into camp and on shipboard? How 
have you fortified him? How have you in- 
spired him? How is he reacting mentally and 
morally to the appeals that are coming to him 
now; how to the duties and the temptations 
that are before him? Even if he is going to 
work in physical safety in shop and shipyard, 
on the farm or wherever—has he some sense 
of public duty, or is he merely glad that he is 
going to be safe? If he left school to join the 
army or navy, or to drive an ambulance, as- 
sured of escape from routine school duties and 
from the dreaded examinations, did he go in 
search of adventure? Or was he really inspired 
by a real sense of public duty? Do you feel 
that you have trained him for just such an 
emergency as this? What does he lack, and 
whose fault is it? 
I asked questions like this of several mothers. 
Two sons of one were in the National Army in 
France; two of another in the Aviation Corps; 
one in the navy; nearly all had sons available 
for the draft. The mothers looked very sober; 
some of them wept. Their confessions, if any, 
were made mostly within their own hearts. 
But a two-hours’ discussion ensued; one of the 
most interesting and instructive I ever have 
heard. 
239 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
f\NE mother said: “If I had only known 
this awful war was coming, I should cer- 
tainly have trained my son differently.” 
“In what way?” 
“Self-control is needed, I think, more than 
anything else,” she answered, slowly, “and I 
am not at all sure that my boy has it. I am 
afraid it will be very hard for him to learn it now. 
It ought to have been taught in the nursery.” 
An eager dispute followed, as to whether 
courage or self-control was needed most; but 
it seemed to most of us that real self-control 
includes courage; that it takes real courage to 
be self-controlled. 
It is a pity we are so blind to the first awaken- 
ing of this great force of self-control and the 
opportunity to strengthen or to waste and 
neglect it. In the very small infant the first 
dawning of consciousness may be utilized for 
the development of moral habits. 
When, for instance, a child can see and under- 
stand that his mother is fixing his food, he 
ought to be taught by an assuring tone that 
he will get it soon and not to cry. It is a simple 
lesson, but of mighty significance and power. 
This organic and instinctive impulse to keep on 
crying when he sees the mother is getting what 
he wants is one of the first things to be noticed 
in the training of self-control. You will soon 
240 THE TEST OF TRAINING 
find that if he understands by word and tone 
that he must not cry, he will later wait quite 
an interval without crying. 
It seems a long distance from the early feed- 
ing of a young infant to the young man on the 
battle-field or in some other work or danger or 
dull duty, but ’way back in those first months 
was the place the self-control began—or didn’t! 
REPRESSING an impulse that is bad, doing 
a task not very agreeable but necessary, 
sometimes with a happy result, trying hard not 
to cry when hurt or in danger—all these things 
that little children can be taught are tremen- 
dously potential for just such times in after-life 
as we and our sons are going through now. 
One can hardly measure the moral effect of 
persevering to the finish of a task, however 
simple, when it takes real self-control to keep 
at it. If your son didn’t learn it at your knee, 
it is probably too late for him to learn it now at 
twenty-one. 
“As children grow older they should learn 
that it often pays to delay the gratification of 
an impulse for a time, in order that a greater 
pleasure may be experienced later,” says Kirk- 
patrick in his Fundamentals of Child Study. 
“If you will keep quiet until I get through, 
241 MOTHER-LOVE IN ACTION 
you may ask questions and look at the pict- 
ures.” Here, if the reason is convinced, is a 
homely lesson in self-control. Every hour of 
the day something arises to help the child 
learn the great lesson of self-control, but some- 
times the mother or nurse does not see her op- 
portunity. It seems a small thing to say, 
“If you wait for the others, I think you will 
have a better time,” but it means much, es- 
pecially if you carry it out and see that the 
child does “wait,” and that the reward of his 
patience keeps your promise. 
So inconspicuous are these little every-day 
experiences in character-building that they 
seem sometimes hardly worth while, but they 
are of tremendous import—if you only knew 
it—worth all your time and thought and care. 
Keep at it and at it, not in a nagging, but in an 
intelligent way, looking ahead to the time when 
your son, grown up, is alone on some battle- 
field of life; hunting for the wounded, driving 
the ambulance under fire. That will be a su- 
preme test—will he be self-controlled then? 
Has he learned through curbing his appetite 
for such trivial things as sodas, cheap candy, and 
cigarettes to stand the greater strain? It all 
hangs together. Self-control is worth while 
striving for from the first week of birth. But 
you have to exhibit it yourself. A lazy, self- 
242 THE TEST OF TRAINING 
indulgent woman is not likely to teach any- 
body anything; but you can pity her because 
nobody bothered to teach her when she was 
little! 
r’PHERE is no benighted soul whom I pity as 
* I do the mother—or the father, either—who 
is ignorant of or oblivious to the Job and the 
Opportunity of parenthood. None, unless it 
be the helpless children who are victims of their 
indifference. Fortunately, under the urge of 
the Purpose that animates the universe, children 
do “come up somehow,” and even under most 
conditions negative or even adverse turn into 
admirable men and women. In these pages 
I have tried to present a point of view, and 
something, too, of method. Yes, it calls for 
infinite pains; but “thereunto were ye called,” 
and called—never forget that!—by your own 
choice and act. 
My whole purpose has been to point out and 
emphasize the fact that Parenthood is not only 
the highest of professions, but much more an 
inestimable opportunity and privilege; that 
Mother-love doesn’t amount to much except 
“in action.” 
THE END