How to Treat Your Child

To the fathers and mothers who treat their children in a manner far removed from the rules of the psychological education of children — a treatment which has the worst effect upon their future...

What does the child ask for, and what are his essential needs?

If we set aside his primary natural needs of food, warmth, and rest, we find that he needs two things: love and the feeling of security.

The child who doubts his parents' true affection for him, or who is troubled because he does not feel safe at their side, generally grows up with this condition having left a deep mark upon his personality in the matter of companionship and harmony.

For this reason we should not resort to threatening children with abandonment. To say to a child, "If you keep on behaving so badly, your mother will desert you and go away from you," seems, to grown minds, a bearable form of scolding; whereas to the child it counts among the threats most disturbing to the soul, exceeding in its effect even a beating. For the child may be able to understand — indeed even to justify — a beating, whereas he can neither understand nor justify the threat of desertion. This is because he possesses a sense of justice in a real if crude form, and so he understands that by the beating, for instance, he received punishment as the result of a fault he committed.

But desertion, or the threat of desertion, is a very different matter, for it strikes at an important desire among the child's desires. To say to a child, "I do not love you," may be the cruelest sentence you can address to him; and the parent who knows the value of psychology must shun this sentence as he would shun the plague itself. We shall here set forth a few points which psychology advises parents to follow as their guide in treating their children:

First: The world into which the child is born is a great world that bewilders even grown people. In his first years of experiment the child tries to piece the world together in order to understand it, to learn how to struggle and strive in it and how to become bound to it; and nothing serves him better than that the atmosphere surrounding him should be a favorable and suitable one.

But if the child is forbidden now to do a thing, and slapped for it, and then allowed the next day to do it without reproach, he cannot then find any meaning in it; he sees that things run by no fixed rule that his mind can digest, and so in his little world he collides with a kind of contradiction instead of order.

Second: The parents must follow one single method with the child, for if they do not, his world becomes a disordered place. If one parent demands one thing and the other demands another, how can the child then make life reasonable and intelligible?

It is true that husband and wife sometimes differ in their treatment of the child — a natural thing; but they must settle their differences when the child is absent. In his presence, and in their treatment of him, they must appear as though they were one person.

Third: The parents must avoid the slightest sign from which it might be understood that they prefer one child to another; for if the child is made to feel that his parents' love for him is less than for another member of the family, he runs the danger of thinking that he has become less important than others — and thence arises in him the inferiority complex.

Dividing love among our children is an easy matter — indeed a natural one — and we must understand, through our family life, that love is not like money. For if you divide money among several persons, none of them will get all he desires; but if you divide love among a number of persons, you can give each of them the full measure he wants.

Fourth: Children must likewise be allowed a certain amount of risk. This does not mean that we expose them to certain dangers; we mean rather those parents who shield their children from small, trifling risks — for that breeds in children lack of self-confidence, timidity, and fear, which may leave its mark on the future of their lives.

Fifth: The child must be allowed, from the beginning of his life, to train his will and to try out his power of choice; for will power is like the power of the muscles: it grows with exercise. If the child is not allowed to make plain his wish and his choice, he will never one day take courage and follow his own will. There are many simple ways in which the child can use his power of choice: let him pick out his bed cover, or the color of his shirt, or put on this garment or that, or go out for a walk today or not go out. These are all simple things, and no harm can come to us if we let him act in them by his own free will and choice, instead of doing as most parents do, who impose things upon their children by sheer imposition. And I ask parents: what possible harm can come from fulfilling the child's wishes?

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These are truths drawn from the modern study of the psychology of the child, which we ought always to keep in mind when we deal with children; thereby we shall obtain useful results — and good children.