The American Child - Elizabeth McCracken
The American Child
by Elizabeth Mccracken
With Illustrations from photographs by Alice Austin
1913
[Illustration: COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS]
to My Father And Mother
PREFACE
The purpose of this preface is that of every preface--to say "thank
you" to the persons who have helped in the making of the book.
I would render thanks first of all to the Editors of the "Outlook" for
permission to reprint the chapters of the book which appeared as
articles in the monthly magazine numbers of their publication.
I return thanks also to Miss Rosamond F. Rothery, Miss Sara Cone Bryant,
Miss Agnes F. Perkins, and Mr. Ferris Greenslet. Without the help and
encouragement of all of these, the book never would have been written.
Finally, I wish to say an additional word of thanks to my physician, Dr.
John E. Stillwell. Had it not been for his consummate skill and untiring
care after an accident, which, four years ago, made me a year-long
hospital patient, I should never have lived to write anything.
E. McC.
CAMBRIDGE, January, 1913
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE CHILD AT HOME
II. THE CHILD AT PLAY
III. THE COUNTRY CHILD
IV. THE CHILD IN SCHOOL
V. THE CHILD IN THE LIBRARY
VI. THE CHILD IN CHURCH
CONCLUSION
ILLUSTRATIONS
COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS
THREE SMALL GIRLS
THE BOY OF THE HOUSE
"DID YOU PLAY IT THIS WAY?"
THE DEAR DELIGHTS OF PLAYING ALONE
"THE CHILDREN--THEY ARE SUCH DEARS"
A SMALL COUNTRY BOY
ARRAYED IN SPOTLESS WHITE
THEY PAINT PICTURES AS A REGULAR PART OF THEIR SCHOOL ROUTINE
THEY DO SO MANY THINGS!
THEY HAVE SO MANY THINGS!
THE STORY HOUR IN THE CHILDREN'S ROOM
THE CHILDREN'S EDITION
IN THE INFANT CLASS
"DO YOU LIKE MY NEW HYMN?"
CHILDREN GO TO CHURCH
INTRODUCTION
One day several years ago, when Mr. Lowes Dickinson's statement that he
had found no conversation and--worse still--no conversationalists in
America was fresh in our outraged minds, I happened to meet an English
woman who had spent approximately the same amount of time in our country
as had Mr. Lowes Dickinson. "What has been your experience?" I anxiously
asked her. "Is it true that we only 'talk'? Can it really be that we
never 'converse'?"
"Dear me, no!" she exclaimed with gratifying fervor. "You are the most
delightful conversationalists in the world, on your own subject--"
"Our own subject?" I echoed.
"Certainly," she returned; "your own subject, the national subject,--the
child, the American child. It is possible to 'converse' with any
American on that subject; every one of you has something to say on it;
and every one of you will listen eagerly to what any other person says
on it. You modify the opinions of your hearers by what you say; and you
actually allow your own opinions to be modified by what you hear said.
If that is conversation, without a doubt you have it in America, and
have it in as perfect a state as conversation ever was had anywhere. But
you have it only on that subject. I wonder why," she went on, half-
musingly, before I could make an attempt to persuade her to qualify her
rather sweeping assertion. "It may be because you do so much for
children, in America. They are always on your mind; they are hardly ever
out of your sight. You are forever either doing something for them, or
planning to do something for them. No wonder the child is your one
subject of conversation. You do so _very_ much for children in America,"
she repeated.
Few of us will agree with the English woman that the child, the American
child, is the only subject upon which we converse. Certainly, though, it
is a favorite subject; it may even not inaptly be called our national
subject. Whatever our various views concerning this may chance to be,
however, it is likely that we are all in entire agreement with regard to
the other matter touched upon by the English woman,--the pervasiveness
of American children. Is it not true that we keep them continually in
mind; that we seldom let them go quite out of sight; that we are always
doing, or planning to do, something for them? What is it that we would
do? And why is it that we try so unceasingly to do it?
It seems to me that we desire with a great desire to make the boys and
girls do; that all of the "_very_ much" that we do for them is done in
order to teach them just that--to do. It is a large and many-sided and
varicolored desire, and to follow its leadings is an arduous labor; but
is there one of us who knows a child well who has not this desire, and
who does not cheerfully perform that labor? Having decided in so far as
we are able what were good to do, we try, not only to do it ourselves,
in our grown-up way, but so to train the children that they, too, may do
it, in their childish way. The various means that we find most helpful
to the end of our own doing we secure for the children,--adapting them,
simplifying them, and even re-shaping them, that the boys and girls may
use them to the full.
There is, of course, a certain impersonal quality in a great deal of
what we, in America, do for children. It is not based so much on
friendship for an individual child as on a sense of responsibility for
the well-being of all childhood, especially all childhood in our own
country. But most of what we do, after all, we do for the boys and girls
whom we know and love; and we do it because they are our friends, and we
wish them to share in the good things of our lives,--our work and our
play. To what amazing lengths we sometimes go in this "doing for" the
children of our circles!
One Saturday afternoon, only a few weeks ago, I saw at the annual
exhibit of the State Board of Health, a man, one of my neighbors, with
his little eight-year old boy. The exhibit consisted of the customary
display of charts and photographs, showing the nature of the year's work
in relation to the milk supply, the water supply, the housing of the
poor, and the prevention of contagious diseases. My neighbor is not a
specialist in any one of these matters; his knowledge is merely that of
an average good citizen. He went from one subject to the other, studying
them. His boy followed close beside him, looking where his father
looked,--if with a lesser interest at the charts, with as great an
intentness at the photographs. As they made their way about the room
given over to the exhibit, they talked, the boy asking questions, the
father endeavoring to answer them.
The small boy caught sight of me as I stood before one of the charts
relating to the prevention of contagious diseases, and ran across the
room to me. "What are _you_ looking at?" he said. "That! It shows how
many people were vaccinated, doesn't it? Come over here and see the
pictures of the calves the doctors get the stuff to vaccinate with
from!"
"Isn't this an odd place for a little boy on a Saturday afternoon?" I
remarked to my neighbor, a little later, when the boy had roamed to the
other side of the room, out of hearing.
"Not at all!" asserted the child's father. "He was inquiring the other
day why he had been vaccinated, why all the children at school had been
vaccinated. Just before that, he had asked where the water in the tap
came from. This is just the place for him right now! It isn't odd at all
for him to be here on a Saturday afternoon. It is much odder for _me_"
he continued with a smile. "I'd naturally be playing golf! But when
children begin to ask questions, one has to do something about answering
them; and coming here seemed to be the best way of answering these
newest questions of my boy's. I want him to learn about the connection
of the state with these things; so he will be ready to do his part in
them, when he gets to the 'voting age.'"
"But can he understand, yet?" I ventured.
"More than if he hadn't seen all this, and heard about what it means,"
my neighbor replied.
It is not unnatural, when a child asks questions so great and so far-
reaching as those my neighbor's small boy had put to him, that we should
"do something about answering them,"--something as vivid as may be
within our power. But, even when the queries are of a minor character,
we still bestir ourselves until they are adequately answered.
"Mamma," I heard a little girl inquire recently, as she fingered a scrap
of pink gingham of which her mother was making "rompers" for the baby of
the family, "why are the threads of this cloth pink when you unravel it
one way, and white when you unravel it the other?"
The mother was busy; but she laid aside her sewing and explained to the
child about the warp and the woof in weaving.
"I don't _quite_ see why _that_ makes the threads pink one way and white
the other," the little girl said, perplexedly, when the explanation was
finished.
"When you go to kindergarten, you will," I suggested.
"But I want to know now," the child demurred.
The next day I got for the little girl at a "kindergarten supply"
establishment a box of the paper woofs and warps, so well-known to
kindergarten pupils. Not more than three or four days elapsed before I
took them to the child; but I found that her busy mother had already
provided her with some; pink and white, moreover, among other colors;
and had taught the little girl how to weave with them.
"She understands, _now_, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one
way and white the other!" the mother observed.
"Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some
curiosity.
"Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time.
She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do the
spending the better for knowing just what she is buying,--what it is
made of, and how it is made!"
It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future
than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents
of all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me,
however, that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of
any other era or nation, think, in training their children, of what one
might designate as a most minutely detailed future. The mother of whom I
have been telling wished to teach her little girl not only how to buy,
but how to buy gingham; and the father desired his small boy to learn
not alone that his state had a board of health, but that he might hope
to become a member of a particular department of it.
We occasionally hear elderly persons exclaim that children of the
present day are taught a great many things that did not enter into the
education of their grandparents, or even of their parents. But, on
investigation, we scarcely find that this is the case. What we discover
is that the children of to-day are taught, not new lessons, but the old
lessons by a new method. Sewing, for example: little girls no longer
make samplers, working on them the letters of the alphabet in "cross-
stitch"; they learn to do cross-stitch letters, only they learn not by
working the entire alphabet on a square of linen merely available to
"learn on," but by working the initials of a mother or an aunt on a
"guest towel," which later serves as a Christmas or a birthday gift of
the most satisfactory kind! Perhaps one of the best things we do for the
little girls of our families is to teach them to take their first
stitches to some definite end. Certainly we do it with as conscientious
a care as ever watched over the stitches of the little girls of old as
they made the faded samplers we cherish so affectionately.
The brothers of these little girls learned carpentry, when they were old
enough to handle tools with safety. The boys of to-day also learn it;
some of them begin long before they can handle any tools with safety,
and when they can handle no tool at all except a hammer. As soon as they
wish to drive nails, they are allowed to drive them, and taught to drive
them to some purpose. I happened not a great while ago to pass the day
at the summer camp of a friend of mine who is the mother of a small boy,
aged five. My friend's husband was constructing a rustic bench.
The little boy watched for a time; then, "Daddy, _I_ want to put in
nails," he said.
"All right," replied his father; "you may. Just wait a minute and I'll
let you have the hammer and the nails. Your mother wants some nails in
the kitchen to hang the tin things on. If she will show you where she
wants them, I'll show you how to put them in."
This was done, with much gayety on the part of us all. When the small
boy, tutored by his father, had driven in all the required nails, he
lifted a triumphant face to his mother. "There they are!" he exclaimed.
"Now let's hang the tin things on them, and see how they look!"
The boy's father did not finish the rustic bench that day. When a
neighboring camper, who stopped in to call toward the end of the
afternoon, expressed surprise at his apparent dilatoriness, and asked
for an explanation, the father simply said, "I did mean to finish it to-
day, but I had to do something for my boy instead."
One of the things we grown-ups do for children that has been rather
severely criticized is the lavishing upon them of toys,--intricate and
costly toys. "What, as a child, I used to _pretend_ the toys I had,
were, the toys my children have now, _are_!" an acquaintance of mine was
saying to me recently. "For instance," she went on, "I had a box with a
hole in one end of it; I used to pretend that it was a camera, and
pretend to take pictures with it! I cannot imagine my children doing
that! They have real cameras and take real pictures."
The camera would seem to be typical of the toys we give to the children
of to-day; they can do something with it,--something real.
The dearest treasure of my childhood was a tiny gold locket, shaped, and
even engraved, like a watch. Not long ago I was showing it to a little
girl who lives in New York. "I used to pretend it _was_ a watch," I
said; "I used to pretend telling the time by it."
She gazed at it with interested eyes. "It is very nice," she observed
politely; "but wouldn't you have liked to have a _real_ watch? _I_ have
one; and I _really_ tell the time by it."
"But you cannot pretend with it!" I found myself saying.
"Oh, yes, I can," the little girl exclaimed in surprise; "and I do! I
hang it on the cupola of my dolls' house and pretend that it is the
clock in the Metropolitan Tower!"
The alarmists warn us that what we do for the children in the direction
of costly and complicated toys may, even while helping them do something
for themselves, mar their priceless simplicity. Need we fear this? Is it
not likely that the "real" watches which we give them that they may
"really" tell time, will be used, also, for more than one of the other
simple purposes of childhood?
The English woman said that we Americans did so much, so _very_ much,
for the children of our nation. There have been other foreigners who
asserted that we did _too_ much. Indubitably, we do a great deal. But,
since we do it all that the children may learn to do, and, through
doing, to be, can we ever possibly do too much? "It is possible to
converse with any American on the American child," the English woman
said. Certainly every American has something to say on that subject,
because every American is trying to do something for some American
child, or group of children, to do much, _very_ much.
I
THE CHILD AT HOME
In one of the letters of Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, to her mother,
Queen Victoria, she writes: "I try to give my children in their home
what I had in my childhood's home. As well as I am able, I copy what you
did."
There is something essentially British in this point of view. The
English mother, whatever her rank, tries to give her children in their
home what she had in her childhood's home; as well as she is able, she
copies what her mother did. The conditions of her life may be entirely
different from those of her mother, her children may be unlike herself
in disposition; yet she still holds to tradition in regard to their
upbringing; she tries to make their home a reproduction of her mother's
home.
The American mother, whatever her station, does the exact opposite--she
attempts to bestow upon her children what she did not possess; and she
makes an effort to imitate as little as possible what her mother did.
She desires her children to have that which she did not have, and for
which she longed; or that which she now thinks so much better a
possession than anything she did have. Her ambition is to train her
children, not after her mother's way, but in accordance with "the most
approved modern method." This method is apt, on analysis, to turn out to
be merely the reverse side of her mother's procedure.
I have an acquaintance, the mother of a plump, jolly little tomboy of a
girl; which child my acquaintance dresses in dainty embroideries and
laces, delicately colored ribbons, velvet cloaks, and feathered hats.
These garments are not "becoming" to the little girl, and they are a
distinct hindrance to her hoydenish activities. They are not what she
ought to have, and, moreover, they are not what she wants.
"I wish I had a middy blouse, and some bloomers, and an aviation cap,
and a sweater, and a Peter Thompson coat!" I heard her say recently to
her mother: "the other children have them."
"Children are never satisfied!" her mother exclaimed to me later, when
we were alone. "I spend so much time and money seeing that she has nice
clothes; and you hear what she thinks of them!"
"But, for ordinary wear, for play, wouldn't the things she wants be more
comfortable?" I ventured. "You dress her so beautifully!" I added.
"Well," said my acquaintance in a gratified tone, "I am glad you think
so. _I_ had _no_ very pretty clothes when I was a child; and I always
longed for them. My mother didn't believe in finery for children; and
she dressed us very plainly indeed. I want my little girl to look as I
used to wish _I_ might look!"
"But she doesn't care how she looks--" I began.
"I know," the child's mother sighed. "I can _see_ how _her_ little girls
will be dressed!"
Can we not all see just that? And doubtless the little girls of this
beruffled, befurbelowed tomboy--dressed in middy blouses, and bloomers,
and aviation caps, and sweaters, and Peter Thompson coats, or their
future equivalents--will wish they had garments of a totally different
kind; and _she_ will be exclaiming, "Children are never satisfied!"
If this principle on the part of mothers in America in providing for
their children were confined to such superficialities as their clothing,
no appreciable harm--or good--would come of it. But such is not the
case; it extends to the uttermost parts of the child's home life.
Only the other day I happened to call upon a friend of mine during the
hour set aside for her little girl's piano lesson. The child was
tearfully and rebelliously playing a "piece." Her teacher, a musician of
unusual ability, guided her stumbling fingers with conscientious
patience and care. A child of the least musical talent would surely have
responded in some measure to such excellent instruction. My friend's
little girl did not. When the lesson was finished, she slipped from the
piano stool with a sigh of intense relief.
She started to run out of doors; but her mother detained her. "You may
go to your room for an hour," she said, gently but gravely, "and stay
there all alone. That will help you to remember to try harder tomorrow
to have a good music lesson." And the child, more tearful, more
rebellious than before, crept away to her room.
"When I was her age I didn't like the work involved in taking music
lessons any better than she does," my friend said. "So my mother didn't
insist upon my taking them. I have regretted it all my life. I love
music; I always loved it--I loved it even when I hated practising and
music lessons. I wish my mother had made me keep at it, no matter how
much I objected! Well, I shall do it with _my_ daughter; she'll thank me
for it some day."
I am not so sure that her daughter will. Her music-teacher agrees with
me. "The child has no talent whatever," she told me. "It is a waste of
time for her to take piano lessons. Her mother now--_she_ has a real
gift for it! I often wish _she_ would take the lessons!"
American mothers are no more prone to give their children what they
themselves did not have than are American fathers. The man who is most
eager that his son should have a college education is not the man who
has two or three academic degrees, but the man who never went to college
at all. The father whose boys are allowed to be irregular in their
church attendance is the father who, as a boy, was compelled to go to
church, rain or shine, twice on every Sunday.
In the more intimate life of the family the same principle rules. The
parents try to give to the children ideals that were not given to them;
they attempt to inculcate in the children habits that were not
inculcated in themselves.
I know a family in which are three small girls, between whom there is
very little difference in age. These children all enjoy coming to take
tea with me. For convenience, I should naturally invite them all on the
same afternoon.
Both their father and mother, however, have requested me not to do this.
"Do ask them one at a time on different days," they said.
"Of course I will," I assented. "But--why?" I could not forbear
questioning.
"When I was a child," the mother of the three little girls explained, "I
was never allowed to accept an invitation unless my younger sister was
invited, too. I was fond of my sister; but I used to long to go
somewhere sometime by myself! My husband had the same experience--his
brother always had to be invited when he was, or he couldn't go. Our
children shall not be so circumscribed!"
There is not much danger for them, certainly, in that direction. Yet I
rather think they would enjoy doing more things together. One day, not a
great while ago, I chanced to meet all three of them near a tearoom. I
asked them--perforce all of them--to go in with me and partake of ice
cream. As we sat around the table, the oldest of the three glanced at
the other two with a friendly smile. "It is nice--all of us having ice
cream with you at the same time," she remarked, and her younger sisters
enthusiastically agreed.
To be sure, they are nearer the same age and they are more alike in
their tastes than their mother and her sister, or their father and his
brother. Perhaps their parents needed to take their pleasures singly;
they seem able quite happily to take theirs in company.
I have another friend, who was brought up in a household in which, as
she says, "individuality" was the keynote. In her own home the keynote
is "the family." She encourages her children to "do things together."
Furthermore, she and her husband habitually participate in their
children's occupations to a greater degree than any other parents I have
ever seen.
[Illustration: THREE SMALL GIRLS]
Their friends usually entertain these children "as a family"; but not
long ago, happening to have only two tickets to a concert, I asked one,
and just one, of the little girls of this household to attend it with
me. She accepted eagerly. During an intermission she looked up at me and
said, confidingly, "It is nice sometimes to do things not 'as a family,'
but just as one's self!"
Then, for the first time, it occurred to me that she was the "odd one"
of her family. All its pleasures, all its interests, were not equally
hers. She needed sometimes to do things as herself.
In matters of discipline, too, we find the same theory at work. Parents
who were severely punished as children do not punish their children at
all; and the most austere of parents are those who, when children, were
"spoiled." Almost regardless of the natures of their children, parents
deal with them, so far as discipline is concerned, as they themselves
were not dealt with.
This implies no lack of love, no lack of respect, for the older
generation. On the contrary, it is the sign and symbol of a love, a
respect, so great as to permit of divergences of opinion and procedure,
in spite of differences of age.
"I am not going to bring up the baby in the way I was brought up, mamma,
darling," I once heard a mother of a month-old baby (her first child)
say to the baby's grandmother.
"Aren't you, dear?" replied the older lady, with a smile. "Why not?"
"Oh," returned the daughter, "I want her to be better than I am. I think
if you'd brought me up conversely from the way you did, I'd have been a
much more worth-while person."
She spoke very solemnly, but her mother only laughed, and then fondly
kissed her daughter and her granddaughter. "That is what I said to _my_
mother when _you_ were a month old!" she said whimsically.
Children in American homes, it might be supposed, would be affected by
such diversity in the theories of their parents and their grandparents
concerning their rearing. They might naturally be expected to "take
sides" with the one or the other; or, at any rate, to be puzzled or
disturbed by the principle of "contrariwiseness" governing their lives.
From their earliest years they are aware of it. The small girl very soon
learns that the real reason why she finds a gold bracelet in her
Christmas stocking is that mother "always wanted one, but grandma did
not approve of jewelry for children." The little boy quickly discovers
that his dog sleeps on the foot of his bed mainly because "father's dog
was never allowed even to come into the house. Grandpa was a doctor, and
thought dogs were not clean."