12: The Child At Home

There are upon earth many millions of people—most of them children. Mankind has been continuous upon earth for millions of years; children have been equally continuous. Children constitute a permanent class, the largest class in the population. There are men, there are women, there are children, and the children outnumber the adults by three to two.

In the order of nature, all things give way before the laws and processes of reproduction; the individual is sacrificed to the race. Natural forces, working through the unconscious submission of the animal, tend steadily to improve a species through its young.

Social forces, working through our conscious system of education, tend to improve our species through its young. Humanity is developed age after age through a gradual improvement in its children; and since we have seen this and learned somewhat to assist nature by art, humanity develops more quickly and smoothly.

Every generation brings us more close to recognition of this great basic law, finds us more willing to follow nature's principle and bend all our energies to the best development of the child. We early learned to multiply our power and wisdom by transmission through speech, and, applying that process to the child, we taught him what we knew, saving to humanity millennial periods of evolution by this conscious short-cut through education.

Nature's way of teaching is a very crude one—mere wholesale capital punishment. She kills off the erring without explanation. They die without knowing what for, and the survivors don't know, either. We, by education, markedly assist nature, transmitting quick knowledge from mouth to mouth, as well as slow tendency from generation to generation. More and more we learn to collect race-improvement and transmit it to the child, the most swift and easy method of social progress. To-day, more than ever before, are our best minds giving attention to this vital problem—how to make better people. How to make better bodies and better minds, better tendencies, better habits, better ideas—this is the study of the modern educator.

Slowly we have learned that the best methods of education are more in modifying influence than in transmitted facts; that, as the proverb puts it, "example is better than precept." The modifying influences of social environment have deeper and surer effect on the human race than any others, and that effect is strongest on the young. Therefore, we attach great importance to what we call the "bringing up" of children, and we are right. The education of the little child, through the influences of its early environment, is the most important process of human life.

Whatever progress we make in art and science, in manufacture and commerce, is of no permanent importance unless it modifies humanity for the better. That a race of apes should live by agriculture, manufacture, and commerce is inconceivable. They would cease to be apes by so living; but, if they could, those processes would be of no value, the product being only apes. We are here to grow, to become a higher and better kind of people. Every process of life is valuable in proportion to its contributing to our improvement, and the process that most contributes to our improvement is the most important of human life. That process is the education of the child, and that education includes all the influences which reach him, the active efforts of parent and teacher, the unconscious influence of all associates, and the passive effect of the physical environment.

All these forces, during the most impressionable years of childhood, and most of them during the whole period, are centered in the home. The home is by all means the most active factor in the education of the child. This we know well. This we believe devoutly. This we accept without reservation or inquiry, seeing the power of home influences, and never presuming to question their merit.

In our general contented home-worship we seem to think that a home—any home—is in itself competent to do all that is necessary for the right rearing of children. Or, if we discriminate at all, if we dare admit by referring to "a good home" that there are bad ones—we then hold all the more firmly that the usual type of "a good home" is the perfect environment for a child. If this dogma is questioned, our only alternative is to contrast the state of the child without a home to that of the child with one. The orphan, the foundling, the neglected child of the street is contrasted with the well-fed and comfortably clothed darling of the household, and we relapse into our profound conviction that the home is all right.

Again the reader is asked to put screws on the feelings and use the reason for a little while. Let us examine both the child and the home, with new eyes, seeing eyes, and consider if there is no room for improvement. And first, to soothe the ruffled spirit and quiet alarm, let it be here stated in good set terms that the author does NOT advocate "separating the child from the mother," or depriving it of the home. Mother and child can never be "separated" in any such sense as these unreasoning terrors suggest. The child has as much right to the home as anyone—more, for it was originated for his good. The point raised is, whether the home, as it now is, is the best and only environment for children, and, further, whether the home as an environment for children cannot be improved.

What is a child? The young of the human species. First, a young animal, whose physical life must be conserved and brought to full development. Then, a young human, whose psychical life, the human life, must be similarly cared for.

How does the home stand as regards either branch of development? In what way is it specifically prepared for the use, enjoyment, and benefit of a child? First, as to the structure of the thing, the house. We build houses for ourselves, modifying them somewhat according to climate, position, and so on. How do we modify them for children? What is there in the make-up of any ordinary house designed to please, instruct, educate, and generally benefit a child? In so far as he shares our own physical needs for shelter and convenience he is benefited; but, as a child, with his own specific necessities, desires, and limitations, what has the architect planned for the child—what have the mason and carpenter built for the child? Is there anything in the size and proportion, the material, the internal arrangement, the finish and decoration, to hint of the existence of children on earth?

The most that we find, in the most favoured houses, is "a sunny nursery." In one home of a thousand we find one room out of a dozen planned for children. What sort of an allowance is this for the largest class of citizens? Suppose our homes had, among the more expensive ones, one room for the adult family to flock into, and all the rest was built and arranged for children! We should think ourselves somewhat neglected in such an arrangement. But we are not as numerous as our children, nor as important; and, in any case, the home belongs to the child; he is the cause of its being; it is for him, hypothetically, that we marry and start a home.

What, then, is the explanation of this lack of special provision for the real founder of the home? This utter unsuitability of the house to the child, and the child to the house, finds its crowning expression in our cities, where house-owners refuse to let their houses to families with children! What are houses for? What are homes for? For children, first, last, and always! How, then, have we come to this vanishing point of absurdity? What paradoxical gulf stretches between these houses where "no children need apply" and the rest of the houses. There is no visible difference in their plans and construction. No houses are built for children; and these particular landlords simply accent the fact, and try to limit the use of the house to the persons for whom it was intended—the adults.

What is there in the presence of children in a house to alarm the owner? "They are so destructive," he will tell you; "they are mischievous, they are noisy. Other tenants object to them. They injure the house when old enough to run about, and squall objectionably when babies." All this is true enough. Most babies are a source of distress to their immediate neighbours because of their painful wailing, and most little children continue to cause distress by their noise in play and shrieks under punishment. Is all this outcry necessary? Must the poor baby suffer by night and day; must the small child bang and yell, and must it be punished so frequently? Why is the process of getting acclimated to the world so difficult and agonising? Is there really no way that the experience of all the ages may be turned to account to facilitate the first years of a child's life?

Our behaviour to the child rests on several assumptions which are, at least, not proven. We assume that he has to be sick. We assume that he has to be naughty. We assume that life is hard and unpleasant, anyway, and that, the sooner he learns this and gets broken into it, the better. There is no more reason why a child should be sick than a calf or colt. Infancy is tender, and needs care, but it is not a disease. The Egyptian mother loves her baby, no doubt, though it goes blind through her ignorance and neglect—she knows nothing of ophthalmia, and lets the flies crawl over its helpless face, even while she loves it. We scorn and pity her ignorance, but we accept the colic, disorders of teething, and all the train of "preventable diseases" which kill off our babies, precisely as she accepts ophthalmia.

We have not learned yet how to make a baby the happy, contented, smoothly developing little animal that he should be. Some of us do better than others, but the knowledge of one is no gain to the rest, being confined to one family. Slowly the wider human care, the larger love, the broader knowledge, of doctor, nurse, and teacher are penetrating the innermost fortress of the home, and teaching the mother how to care for the child. The home did not teach her, and never would. In the untouched homes of ancient Eastern races, countless generations of mothers transmit the same traditional mistakes, love in the same blind way, and weep the same loss as unprofitably as they did ten thousand years ago.

In the homes of civilised races, where the light of social progress is most fully felt, we see the most improvement; but even here the pressure of growing knowledge is still combated by the jealous arrogance of the untaught mother, and the measureless inertia of the home.

In plain fact, what does the average home offer to the newcomer, the utterly defenceless baby, the all-important Coming Generation? See physical conditions first. To what sort of world is the new soul introduced? To a place built and furnished for several mixed and conflicting industries; not to a place planned for babies—aired, lighted, heated, coloured, and kept quiet to suit the young brain and body; but a building meant for a number of grown people to cook in, sweep and dust in, wash and iron in, cut and sew in, eat and wash dishes in, see their friends in, dress, undress, and sleep in; and incidentally, in the cracks and crevices of all these varied goings on, to "bring up" children in.

In that very small percentage of families where a nursery is arranged for children, and a nurse and a nursery-governess do deputy service for the always alleged "mother's care," we find some provision made for children; but of what sort? This deputy is inferior to the mother, save in a certain rule-of-thumb experience which enables her to "manage children." Her knowledge of infant hygiene is not much greater, nor of infant psychology. Look, for instance, at the babies of our richer classes, as we see them continually in the streets and parks. Our only alternative from the home is the street, we having as yet no place for our babies. If near a park so much the better, but in general the sidewalk must serve, for rich or poor.

As one immediate physical condition, examine the dress of these babies and young children; this among parents of wealth, and, presumably, intelligence. See the baby in the perambulator so rolled and bedded in, so tucked and strapped, that he cannot move anything but perhaps a stiffly projecting arm. Think of an adult cocooned in this manner, unable to roll, stir, turn, in any way relieve the pressure or change the attitude. And, when you have considered the sensations of a tough and patient adult frame, think further of those of a soft, tender, active, and impatient baby body.

The dress of a baby or little child bears no relation to his immediate comfort or to the needs of his incessant growth. Among our wisest parents there is to-day a new custom, happily increasing, of barefoot freedom, of dirt-proof overalls, of a chance for beautiful, unconscious growth; but this does not reach the vast majority of suffering little ones. It does not spread because of the seclusion and irresponsible dominance of the separate home; and further—because of the low-grade intelligence of the home-bound mother.

She whose condition of arrested development makes her unquestioningly submit to the distortion, constriction, weight, and profusion of fashion in clothing for her own body, is not likely to show much sense in dressing a child. Beautiful fabrics, rich textures, expensive adornments, she heaps upon it. She wishes it to look pretty, according to her barbaric taste; and she disfigures the grave, sweet beauty of a baby face, the lovely moving curves of the little body, with heavy masses of stiff cloth, starched frippery, and huge, nodding, gaily decorated hats that would please an Ashantee warrior.

If some cartoonist would give us a copy of the Sistine Mother and Child in the costume of our mothers and children, showing those immortal cherub faces blinking obliquely from under flopping hat brims and rich plumes, perhaps we might in sudden shocked perception see with what coarse irreverence we disfigure our blessed little ones.

The child does not find in the home any assurance of health, beauty, or free growth. He, and especially she, must wear the dainty garments on which our misguided mother love so wastefully lavishes itself; and must then be restricted in all natural exercise lest they be torn or soiled. To dress a little child so that he may be perfectly comfortable, and grow in absolute freedom, has not occurred to the home-bound mother.

Neither has she learned how to feed it. If the home is the best place for children, if the home is the best place for the preparation of food, would it not seem as if in all these long, long years we might have evolved some system of feeding little children so as to keep them at least alive—to say nothing of their being healthy?

The animal mother, guided by her unspoiled instinct, does manage to feed her young, and to teach it how to feed itself. The human mother, long since cut off from that poor primitive guidance, and proudly refusing to put knowledge in its place, feeds the baby in accordance with her revered domestic traditions, and calls in the doctor to remedy her mistakes. One man, in Buffalo, has recently saved fifteen hundred babies in a year, lowering the annual death rate by that amount, by public distribution of directions for preparing milk. He was not a mother. He was not shut up in a home. He studied and he taught in the light of public progress, in a growing world; and succeeded in filtering some of this saving knowledge into the darkness of fifteen hundred homes.

The average child is not fed properly; and there is nothing in the home to teach the mother how. She must learn outside, but she is not willing to. She still believes, and her husband with her, in the infallible power of "a mother's love" and "a mother's care"; and our babies are buried by thousands and thousands without our learning anything by the continual sacrifice. This is owing to the isolation of the home. If there were any general knowledge, general custom, association, comparison; if mothers considered their enormous responsibility as a class, instead of merely as individuals, this could not be. Knowledge and experience have to be gathered by wide and prolonged study; they do not come by an infinite repetition of the same private experiments.

We have to-day the first stirring of this great multitude of separately concealed experimenters toward that association and exchange of view, that carefully recorded observation, that reasonable study, which are necessary for any human advance. Our mothers are beginning to come out of their isolation into normal human contact; to take that first step toward wisdom—the acknowledgment of ignorance; and to study what little is known of this new science, Child-culture.

But it is only a beginning, very scant and small, and ridiculed unmercifully by the great slow dead-weight of the majority. The position of the satirist of modern motherhood is a safe and easy one. To ally one's self with the great mass of present humanity, and the far greater mass of the past, of all our hoary and revered traditions, and to direct this combined weight against the first movement of a new idea—this is an old game. Humanity has thus resisted every step of its own progress; but, though it makes that progress difficult and slow, it cannot wholly prevent it.

If the home and the home-bound mother do not ensure right food or clothing for the child, what do they offer in safety, and in the increasing educational influence which early environment must have? As to safety—the shelter of the home—we have already seen that even to the adult the home offers no protection from the main dangers of our time: disease, crime, and fire or other accident. The child not only shares these common dangers, but is more exposed to them, owing to more absolute confinement to the home and greater susceptibility. Whatever we suffer from sewer-gas, carbonic dioxide, or microbes and bacteria, the child suffers more.

He breathes the dust of our carpets, and eats it if we do not watch him. "I can't take my eyes off that child one minute," cries the admiring mamma, "or he'll be sure to put something in his mouth!" That a perfectly clean place might be prepared for a creeping baby, where there was nothing whatever he could put in his mouth, has never occurred to her. The child shares and more than shares every danger of the home, and furthermore suffers an endless list of accidents peculiar to his limitations. Even our dull nerves are roused to some sort of response by the terrible frequency of accidents to little children.

I have here a number, taken from one newspaper in one city during one year; not exhaustive daily scrutiny either; merely a casual collection:

"Mother and Baby Both Badly Burned." A three-year-old baby this—a match, a little night-dress flaming, struggle, torture, death! "Choked in Mother's Arms" is the next one; the divine instinct of Maternity giving a two-year-old child half a filbert to eat. It was remarked in the item that the "desolate couple" had lost two other little ones within two months. It did not state whether the two others were accidentally murdered by a mother's care.

"Child's Game Proved Fatal" is the next. Three-years-old twins were these; "playing fire engine in the parlour while their mother prepared the midday meal."

One climbed on the table and lit a newspaper at a gas jet, and set fire to the other. It is then related "Both children cried out, but their mother, thinking they were only playing, did not hasten to find what was the matter." "The child died at 3 P.M." is the conclusion.

"Accidentally Killed His Baby" follows. The fond father, holding his two-year-old son on his knee, shot and killed him with a revolver "which he believed to be empty."

"Escaping Gas Kills Baby"—"Boy Has Cent in His Throat"—"Insane Mother's Crime"—"Drowns her Eight-year-old Daughter"—and here a doctor says, "It would be an excellent idea for every family to have a little book giving briefly prompt antidotes for various poisons. Physicians know that there are scores of cases of accidental poisoning never heard of outside the family concerned. I've had several cases of poisoning by an accidental dose of chloroform and aconite liniment, and one woman gave her child muriatic acid that was kept for cleaning the marbles."

Another "Mother and Child Burned"—"Child Scratched by a 60-foot Fall"—(this one was saved by striking several clothes-lines after she fell out of the window)—"Kitten was Life Preserver"—another fall out of a window, but the child was holding a kitten, and her head struck on it—so only the kitten was smashed.

"A Governor's Child badly Hurt"—"will probably prove fatal," this was a two-story drop over a staircase; and shows that it is not only in the homes of the poor that these things happen. Another "Baby Burned" follows—this poor little one was left strapped into its carriage, and set fire to by an enterprising little brother.

"Tiny Singer Fell Dead" describes a five-year-old boy as singing a selection from "Cavalleria Rusticana" as a means of entertaining a party of young friends—and burst a blood-vessel in the brain. Then there is a story of a grisly murder in which a tiny child testifies as to seeing her father kill her mother; the child was not hurt—physically. And then a bit of negative evidence quite striking in its way, describing "The Mother of Twenty-five Children" and incidentally stating "of these only three sons and four daughters are now living." Seven out of twenty-five does not seem a large proportion to survive the perils of the home.

These are a few, a very few, instances of extreme injury and death. They are as nothing to the wide-spread similar facts we do not hear of; and as less than nothing to the list of minor accidents to which little children are constantly exposed in the shelter of the home. We bar our windows and gate our stairs in some cases; but our principal reliance is on an unending watchfulness and a system of rigid discipline. "Children need constant care!" we maintain; and "A child must be taught to mind instantly, for its own protection." A child is not a self-acting poison or explosive. If he were in an absolutely safe place he might be free for long, bright, blessed hours from the glaring Argus-eyed watchfulness which is so intense an irritant. Convicts under sentence of death are in their last hours kept under surveillance like this, lest they take their own lives. Partly lest the child injure himself among the many dangers of the home, and partly lest he injure its frail and costly contents, he grows up under "constant watching." If this is remitted, he "gets into mischief" very promptly. "Mischief" is our broad term for the natural interaction of a child and a home. The inquiry of the young mind, and the activity of the young body, finding no proper provision made for them, inevitably fall foul of our complicated utensils, furniture, and decorations, and what should be a normal exercise becomes "mischief."

Our chapter of accidents here leads us to the great underlying field of education. Say that the child lives to grow up, during these wholly home-bound years; in spite of wrong clothing, wrong feeding, and the many perils we fatuously call "incident to babyhood" (when they are only incident to our lack of proper provision for babyhood). If he battles through his infancy and early childhood successfully, what has he gained from his early environment in education? What are the main facts of life, as impressed upon every growing child by his home surroundings?

The principal fact is eating. This he learns perforce by seeing his mother spending half her time on that one business; by seeing so much house-space given to it; by the constant arrival of food supplies, meat, groceries, milk, ice, and the rest; and excursions to get them. The instincts of early savagery, which every child has to grow through, are heavily reinforced by the engrossing food-processes of the home.

They do not necessarily please him or her, either. The child does not grow up with a burning ambition to be a cook. Whether the ever-present kitchen business was run by the mother or by a servant, it was not run joyously and proudly; nor was it run in such wise as to really teach the child the principles of hygiene in food-values and preparation. If the family is a wealthy one the child is not allowed in the kitchen perhaps, but is the more impressed by the complicated machinery of the dining-room, and that elaborate cult of special "manners" used in this sacred service of the body. Thus and thus must he eat, and thus handle his utensils; and if the years and the tears spent in acquiring these Eleusinian mysteries make due impression on the fresh brain tissue, then we may expect to find the human being more impressed by the art of eating than by any other.

And so we do find him. The children of the kitchen are differently affected from the children of the dining-room. These last, of our "upper classes," receive the indelible stamp of the tri-daily ritual, and go through the rest of life thinking more highly of "table manners" than of any other line of conduct, for the reason that they were more incessantly, thoroughly, and importunately taught that code than any other. To handle a fork properly is insisted upon far more imperatively than to properly handle a temper.

The principal business of the home being the care of the body, and this accomplished through these archaic domestic industries, the unending up-current of young life, which should so steadily purify and uplift the world, in every generation is steeped anew in this exaggeration of physical needs and caprices.

Beyond the overwhelming cares of the table the other home industries involve the care and replenishment of furniture and clothes. Hour after hour, day after day, the child sees his mother devoting her entire life to attendance upon these things—the daily cleaning, the weekly cleaning, the spring and fall cleaning, the sewing and mending at all times.

These things must be done, by some people, somewhere; but must they be done by all people, that is by all women, the people who surround the child, and all the time? Must the child always associate womanhood with house-service; and assume, necessarily assume, that the main business of life is to be clean, well-dressed, and eat in a proper manner?

If the mother is not herself the house-servant—what else is she? What does the growing brain gather of the true proportions of life from his dining-room-and-parlour mamma? Her main care, and talk, is still that of food and clothes; and partly that of "entertainment," which means more food and more clothes.

Can we not by one daring burst of effort imagine a home where there was still the father and mother love, still the comfort, convenience, and beauty we so enjoy, still the sweet union of the family group, and yet no kitchen? Perhaps even, in some remote dream, no dining-room? Where the mother was a wise, strong, efficient human being, interested in and working for the progress of humanity; and giving to her baby, in these sweet hours of companionship, some true sense of what life is for and how it works. No, we cannot imagine it, most of us. We really cannot. We are so indelibly kitchen-bred, or dining-room-bred, that mother means cook, or at least housekeeper, to our minds; and family means dinner-table.

So grows the child in the home. In the school he learns something of social values, in the church something, in the street something; from his father, who is a real factor in society, something; but in the home he learns by inexorably repeated impressions of every day and hour, that life, this deep, new, thrilling mystery of life consists mainly of eating and sleeping, of the making and wearing of clothes. We are irresistibly reminded of the strange text, "Take no thought of what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink or wherewithal ye shall be clothed." A little difficult to follow this command when mother does nothing else!