Parents regard their children with all sorts of feelings, with love of course, with indulgence, with amusement, and even, so it is said, with self-complacency and admiration; but it sometimes seems as if very few regard them with respect. No one who respects another will lie to him, or visit him with empty threats, or make to him vain promises; yet fathers and mothers in all parts of the country are at this moment lying to their children, threatening them with punishments they do not mean to inflict, and making promises they do not intend to fulfill. The faith of a child ought to be proverbial. It is the only substance of things hoped for which many children ever get. I sometimes wonder if it is really just to lay the Fifth Commandment upon all American children. Somehow, there seems to be something reciprocal implied in it. If that commandment is of universal application, it can be considered so, I imagine, only on the ground that it states a duty owed ultimately not to the parents but to the Almighty. Certainly that parent who does not respect his children has no personal claim upon their honor.

What I mean by respect for a child I can perhaps explain best by an instance. Marshall, aged seven, had yielded to temptation in the form of a preserved pear. Instead of putting the temptation behind him, he had put it within him; and he had been caught. The maternal court decided that a fair equivalent for this pear was a week of desserts. For two days the culprit sat inactive at the close of dinner while his comrades ate with relish their portions of pudding. Then unexpectedly came an invitation to dinner from a friend. On the return homeward an aunt remarked, "I noticed that Marshall ate dessert with the others." "Yes," replied his mother, "I think he must have forgotten. I noticed it too, but I did not speak to him because there was no expectation of this treat when the punishment was determined upon. Besides, I do not think it would have been just to add to his punishment by humiliating him before the others."

In this case respect for the youthful Marshall meant, first, attributing the failure to observe the rule to something besides deliberate intent; second, recognizing that he was to be treated not merely with severity, but also with justice; and, third, appreciating the individuality of the child, which included special sensitiveness to the attention and opinion of others. The very fact that Marshall was accustomed to regularity of discipline, to invariableness in punishment, and even to ridicule of vanity or silliness, made it possible for his mother to do something that smacked of irregularity and of variableness, and to save him from unnecessary abasement. Just because she had a rule which she habitually followed, she could break it. She could not have broken it if she had not had it. The effectiveness of this act of omission lay in the very fact that it was an exception. It was a case in which fairness to the boy depended upon inconsistency. This only illustrates the truth that in dealing with a child you may violate any principle so long as you keep your respect for the child inviolate. And the secret of respect for a child lies in regarding him as a human being.

The limitation of the devotee of "child study," the scientific investigator of "child nature," the observer of "the child mind," is that he cannot regard a child as a human being. In other words, his limitation consists in being too broad. He observes individuals only for the sake of disregarding their individuality. He is busy establishing some general laws of childhood. He must choose to know nothing of children that he may know the Child. As soon as he begins to respect an individual child he becomes personal and biased; and as soon as he becomes personal and biased he ceases to be scientific. A good mother, on the other hand, is good just because of her prejudices. She knows so much about her child that her testimony is scientifically worthless. In everything the child does she sees something he, and not another child has done before; and she makes her judgments accordingly. And it is just because her observations would be vicious in a table of statistics that they are the best possible basis for conduct. In other words, she is dealing, not with a subject, a cadaver, so to speak, that can be classified, but with a live being that for her purposes belongs in a class by himself. That is what I mean by respecting a child.

It is here that the teacher and the parent are at odds. The teacher is dealing with childhood, the parent is dealing with Dick-hood or Mary-hood. The teacher is engaged chiefly in providing each child with the equipment that belongs by right to all civilized children; the parent, on the other hand, is bound to bring each child to his, and not another's, highest development. The teacher is responsible for the school or the class; the parent, for the boy or girl. The difference in point of view makes the difference in duty. It was from the parental point of view that the ancient sage wrote his proverb—"Train up a child in the way he should go." He was not thinking of the way of universal obligation, for what he really said was, "Train up a child in the way he [that particular individual] is to go;" in other words, prepare him for the kind of life for which he is fitted. In order to do this, one must have regard for that child's temperament, his distinctive traits.

The severest test of our respect for a child comes when we find his will conflicting with ours. It is easy enough to overbear a child's will; it is difficult to educate it. The hardest task of a parent is to retain respect for a child while administering a spanking. It is easy to roll out the cant saying, "I spank you because I love you," but it is very difficult to bring one's self into that frame of mind in which it would be the mere truth to say, "I spank you because I respect you." Anybody, by simply being persistent, can thwart a child; and any one with the ordinary strength of an adult can beat him; but no one who is unwilling to do him the courtesy of regarding him as an individual can master and direct a child, or really punish him.

Not long ago I was traveling in a day coach. In front of me were a man, a woman, and a small boy of about five years. The woman was the dominant member of the group. Her face, with its thin, compressed lips and its hard gray eyes, had a look of indolent selfishness with a suggestion of latent high temper. The man seemed rather dull, weak, and unhappy. The boy had the rotund, insensitive countenance of his father; but he had not yet lost interest in life. He was no more restless than a boy of his age ought to be. When his mother found his movements disturbing, she darted a rebuke at him. For the moment he sat still or moved out of the way. Finally he edged out into the aisle. The woman made a pretense of ordering him back into the seat. The boy, evidently realizing that his mother, since she was now put to no inconvenience by him, had no intention of enforcing her command, remained passively where he was. When his mother's attention was distracted, he made use of his freedom to get a little mild gymnastic exercise. The train as it drew up to a station jerkily stopped. The lurch of the car threw the boy backward on the floor. Stunned for but an instant, the little lad sent forth a wail. Some of the passengers turned around; others started forward to the child. The woman was obviously annoyed by the disturbance. Before the father had fairly picked him up, she seized the child, roughly brushed off his clothes, and set him violently down on the seat. "You're a bad boy." She spat the words out at him and shook him. She turned to her husband: "I told him not to stand there." The man was silenced before his dull wits allowed him the chance to speak. "Now," to the boy, "stop your crying." The youngster could not repress his sobs; he was still somewhat dazed. The man gently rubbed the back of the lad's head. The woman glanced at the spectators. She must have noticed that her method of avoiding a scene was not altogether successful. She leaned toward the boy. "Did you hurt yourself?" she asked, and took him into her lap. He let his head fall indifferently on the woman's shoulder. Her tardy and rather formal caresses aroused no response. She put him back on the seat, less ungently than before. "Now will you be good?"

If any but the fool is ever tempted to doubt the existence of God, it is when he reflects that children are intrusted to the mercy of such women as this. None of us is of her breed. We do not like her coarseness. We should never allow ourselves to make the mistake she made—of being found out. She was too frank with her emotions. She had not the skill to conceal the springs of her conduct. What difference, at bottom, however, is there between her and us when we are governed, in disciplining a child, by the degree of our own displeasure? Every one of us has been, on occasions, at heart as incompetent as this vulgar female. We have all of us judged children, at one time and another, by their conformity to our will. A very good woman it was, of the straitest New England doctrines, who sent a boy supperless to bed because, while putting on his overcoat, he accidentally toppled over and smashed a prized vase. That boy is now a man gray with years and laden with honors; but to this day he has not forgotten the fact that he was made to suffer, not for his own fault, but for his aunt's disappointment.

The only thing that will free us from the futile way of the ogreish woman on the railway car and the austere Puritan lady is an abiding respect for our children. This will save us from attributing to our children our own willfulness! To be authoritative with children is something else besides being opinionated. The opinionated may compel obedience; but only the authoritative secure it. And even the opinionated find obedience not easy of compulsion. When caprice assumes command, I have a sly conviction that disobedience becomes a virtue. Preliminary to teaching children how to obey is the process of learning how to command. When a child is intransigent, it is worth while to consider whether it is not he that is administering a rebuke.

Sometimes resistance to even rightful authority is not as depraved as we, who do not fancy being resisted, delude ourselves into thinking. There comes the time when any child will exult at the discovery that he is a being apart. He naturally wants to measure his will, and his mother's or his father's will is the handiest standard of comparison. A test of that sort is sometimes disconcerting. A five-year-old, too much given to sliding down from his chair at meal-time, was warned by his father that whenever in the future he should leave his chair, he should not be allowed to return to the table. Soon afterwards the boy disappeared from his place. He had evidently renewed his slippery ways, and had made up his mind to lurk beneath the table and await results. Intent upon the enforcement of the decree, his father said sternly, "You may be excused." Forthwith a head of tousled hair was thrust above the level of the table. "But I didn't leave my chair." Sure enough, there he lay prone across the seat, like a bag of meal on an ass's back. His father had to find what scant refuge he could in the permissive form of his sentence of dismissal. The lad's wits had won a victory for his will. Those who enter such an engagement without reconnoitring must accept the risk, and, if they wish to preserve the advantage of a commanding position, must abide by the results of any such skirmish. To turn it into a battle of wills is to commit the blunder of underestimating their opponent's strength. A child's will is not a fragile thing. It is not "broken" when it is overcome by another will reinforced by physical strength. An old lady of Maine, now gone to her own place,—which I venture to say is not far from that of Luther and Knox and Jonathan Edwards,—once told me how, when a small girl, she had had her will broken; she recounted the passionate resistance, the screaming protestation, the convulsive and futile rage exhausted only by hours of kicking and pounding the floor, and her final capitulation, announced by her picking up the toy which, in defiance of her father's order, she had at first refused to touch. She gloried in this Spartan training, and deplored the lack of it in the present degenerate generation. It was this same old lady, with the "broken" will, who, rejecting all advances, stanchly maintained her side in a family feud to, I believe, her dying day. Her will, it is plain, had not even been cracked; it showed not so much as a suture; neither had it been trained. The only treatment it had received had been one of contumely. The old lady was not exactly to blame for the outcome.

If we respect a child's will, we shall give it a chance to operate. We do not thereby surrender a pea's weight of authority. A certain young mother, let us say, believes that there is a sort of unselfishness that has no part in love: she will not relieve her children of effort and responsibility. One of her brood, a lad of seven, with a touch of dreaminess in his mobile face, with impatience of the material restraints of time and space, with a will of his own that is the harder to direct because it is seldom aggressive, is engaged in propelling a vast tow of block barges along the river that winds across the nursery floor. Of his companions, one is umpiring a game of football between teams of leaden soldiers, and the other is constructing a fearsome dungeon ten blocks deep. At the door appears Authority. "It is now four o'clock," she announces. "At a quarter past four I want to have all the blocks and toys put away." The football umpire and the dungeon-builder, sniffing a prospective treat, bring their operations to an abrupt close. The lad of dreams listens abstractedly, and then turns with great puffing and snorting to his labors of navigation. Inattention? Partly; but partly, too, a deliberate choice of present pleasure and a willful rejection of the words of authority. Ten, eleven, twelve minutes pass. Again sounds the authoritative voice. "In three minutes it will be a quarter past four. I shall want you then to begin to wash and dress for a drive. Eric, I am afraid you won't be able to go with us; your blocks are not put away." She might, of course, justly tell him then and there that he will not be allowed to go; she chooses, however, the better way, and lets him wrestle with the situation. "You had better not stop to cry," she warns him; "there is no time to waste." In fractious misery he hurriedly begins his belated task. His will, so far from being broken or weakened, is actually stiffened; but it is now enlisted on the side of authority. The others—not a whit more virtuous, by the way, but only more sagacious—are half dressed before he has put his blocks in order. If he fails to overtake them, he will stand disconsolate, abject, perhaps tempestuous, and watch them depart. He has had his way, but he has won no victory; he has simply learned the cost of willfulness. If he succeeds in overtaking them, he will not have lost his lesson. His mother, it is true, will not exactly have had her way; but she reckons that no loss, as her way was not her end; she will have enlisted his will. The victory which the boy will have won is not over her. The only antagonist he has had is himself. Because of her respect for him, he will now have a new respect for himself and for her. He is on the road to acquiring the will to obey.

If it had been one of the other two who had disobeyed, her course might have been different. A sullen, recalcitrant will, open-eyed, calculating, defiant, might easily suggest a different treatment. "You have chosen your leaden soldiers; now leaden soldiers it shall be. Since you did not make your duty your choice, then I shall arrange matters so that your choice shall be your duty. Nothing but leaden soldiers till we return." Such a variation in the treatment of children smacks not in the least of partiality. It simply means that respect for the child has involved respect for his individuality. The maxim, Let the punishment fit the crime, may express a principle of action useful for the government of a State or of a school; but for the purposes of the home it should be altered so as to read, Let the punishment fit the child.

This ought to be the answer whenever that question arises that still serves the purpose of discussion in the correspondence columns of the newspapers, Is corporal punishment defensible? The conventional answer nowadays is, No. This is supposed to betoken the benignant mind. Any other answer nowadays classifies one as an autocratic brute. It seems to be assumed that corporal punishment must necessarily be administered in the jaunty spirit of the Chinese proverb which runs: "A cloudy day—leisure to beat the children." Real tenderness of heart, so runs the accepted modern doctrine, forbids the infliction of physical pain. In all these discussions, however, one consideration seems to be ignored—a decent respect for children. To one who is governed by this consideration, there is only one answer to the question, Do you believe in spanking a child? That answer is comprised in another question, What child? It is not necessary to go as far as Menander, who declared, "He who is not flogged is not educated," to be convinced that a good many children have been deprived of their rights because they have never been spanked.

There was once a little girl who could never forget the indignity she suffered in a spanking she had received. She grew up with her mind resolutely set against all corporal punishment. In the course of time she was married and had two children. With one of them she had no problems of discipline; but with the other, a daughter, she had problems that taxed her wits to the utmost. At times the little girl seemed verily possessed. At last, in desperation, this harassed mother, driven into recreancy to her own principle, resorted to the form of chastisement she had forsworn. The effect was instantaneous. The child was relieved, as it were, from herself. With some temperaments in some moods the rod is like the wand of a magician. The childish petulance, the outburst of temper, the streak of almost malicious perversity, is but the child's way of expressing his quarrel with himself; and when the sharp physical pain comes, it seems to announce the subjugation of an enemy. In a household there are three children. One, sensitive to physical pain, shrivels and warps at the very prospect of it; a second is deterred from no act by the fear of it, and is altered not a whit by the memory of it; the third seems to find in it the comforting sense of being mastered at those times when he is out of sorts with himself, and responds to it with renewed affection and restored sweetness of temper. For the mother of that trio academic discussions on corporal punishment are not only uninteresting—they are positively irritating. She has paid her children the decent respect of considering their temperaments.