"Those children will not listen to reason," said a friend whom I discovered in an agitated state of mind one afternoon, when I came to make a call; and she was by no means the first to make this observation. Indeed, it is one of the characteristics of children that they will not listen to reason,—that is, our reason. Which is not, however, saying anything against the children's good sense, for people with much more experience have refused to listen to reason—the children's reason.

Margaret told me her troubles. Her sister had rented a farm near the city for the summer and had offered to let Walter spend his vacation with her in exchange for such bits of help as he was able to render. But Walter had made up his mind to go to work in an office that summer, and, although he loved the country and had always wanted to drive a horse and go fishing, his mother's attempts to convince him of the wisdom of her choice were without avail. He would not listen to her reasons. She pointed to the health argument, to the opportunities for play, the free time, the driving, the fishing, and the fruit without limit. Knowing Walter as I did, I could not understand why it was so hard to convince him.

But every story has at least two sides to it, and of this story I had heard only one. The mother was so concerned with giving her son her good reasons for going to the country that she never even thought of finding out his equally good reasons for going to the office. Presently, however, Walter came in, and my first leading question brought out the true secret of the disagreement.

"What is there about working in an office," I asked the boy, "that you care so much about?"

"Oh, it isn't working in an office that I care about; I just want to earn some money. I never did make any money myself, and now I have a good chance and mother won't let me."

This was really too simple; here two sane persons had spent several days on the problem without coming to any solution. By placing Walter's services on the farm on a financial basis and making him pay for his board he managed to spend his vacation, healthfully and happily and profitably in every sense; and everybody was satisfied.

Over and over again we are impressed with the fact that most disagreements between people—whether between adults or between children, or between children and adults—are due to misunderstandings. As soon as parents resolve not to treat their children arbitrarily,— that is, on the basis of their superior strength and authority,—they adopt a plan of "reasoning" with them. This plan might work very well, if the parents only understood the children's way of reasoning, if they but realized that the child does not reason as do adults, that he reasons differently in each stage of his development.

Our manner of reasoning depends very closely upon our language. But every significant word that we use has a distinct meaning in the mind of the individual, depending altogether upon his experience. As the experience of the child is very meagre, compared to that of the grown-up person, it is no wonder that our everyday remarks are constant sources of misunderstanding to children.

The little girl who had been frequently reproved for not using her right hand came to have a positive dislike for her other hand, which she naturally understood to be wrong hand, and she did not wish to have anything wrong about her person. A boy was trying to tell his sister the meaning of "homesick." "You know how it feels to be seasick, don't you? Well, it's the same way, only it's at home."

Children are apt to attach to a word the first meaning that they learn in connection with it. Only with the increase of experience can a word come to have more than one meaning. Moreover, the child will apply what he hears with fatal exactness and literalness.

Two little girls were at a party and the older one found occasion to slap her sister's hand. The hostess reproved her for this, whereupon the little girl asked, "Isn't she my own sister?" The hostess had to admit that she was. "Well, I heard papa say that he can do what he likes with his own."

Doing what we like with our own meant to the child exactly what the words said, without those qualifications which we naturally put in because of our greater experience.

Children learn with wonder that mother was once a baby, and that father was once a baby, and so on. Dr. Sully tells of the little girl who asked her mother, "When everybody was a baby, then who could be the nurse if they were all babies?" Thus shows real reasoning power; it was not the child's fault that she had no historical perspective, and so could not see the babyhoods of different people in their proper relations in time.

A little boy who was beginning to read deciphered a sign in a grocery store, "Families supplied." He asked his mother whether they could not get a new baby there.

When Herbert was passing through the scissors stage he cut a hole in his father's coat. The father scolded him for spoiling his suit; Herbert calmly replied, "I did not cut your suit; I only cut the coat." He resented this accusation, which in his mind was not merely an exaggeration, but entirely false, since a suit is a suit and a coat is a coat.

A little girl, while out with her nurse and brother, got lost by separating herself from the nurse's side. When she was at last found she was reprimanded for running away from the nurse. She felt that she was being unjustly treated, for she said, "I did not run away; I only stood away," meaning, she had stepped around the corner to look in a window. If she had been scolded for getting out of sight of the nurse, she would have felt justly reproved; but, accused of doing something she never did and never thought of doing,—that is, running away,—she naturally resented this.

Those who have to deal with children in an intimate way cannot be too scrupulous about how they use their words.

The logic of children often appears to us all wrong until we take the trouble to see how they come to their queer conclusions.

The story is told of a boy who was sent to the circus in the neighboring town by his uncle, who gave him an additional quarter "so you can ride back in case it rains." Well, it did rain, and Howard came back riding on the top seat, next to the driver, wet to the skin. Now, any grown-up person knows why he was to ride back "in case it rains"; but to Howard the association of ideas was directly between raining and riding, and not between riding and coming home dry.

This illustrates a very common difference between the reasoning of children and that of adults. We select ideas from a situation and combine them and come to conclusions. The child combines ideas, but he does not make any selection, and the simple explanation for this lies in the fact that the child has not enough experience to enable him to select what is significant. Thus a little girl, who had been too boisterous in her play, was called in by her mother and made to sit quietly in a chair for about ten minutes. At the end of this time her mother asked her whether she would "be good now." The child promised that she would, and was told that she might then go out to play again. As she arose she affectionately turned to the chair and said, "Thank you, dear chair, for making me so good." Having been declared "good" after sitting in the chair, she attributed the beneficent change in her behavior to the chair; and, being a polite little girl, she thanked the chair.

Very often these simple types of reasoning have their humorous aspects and we do not take them seriously. One winter a little boy who had always gone to bed regularly (he was four and a half years old then) began to call for some one to come to him after he was supposed to be asleep. He wanted to sit up and play, he wanted to get dressed, and he wanted something more to eat. This continued for several evenings, and it seemed impossible to get him back into his good habits. At last he was asked, "Why do you want to get up now?" and he answered at once, "Because it is winter now."

"Yes, it is winter now, but it is time for you to be asleep," he was told.

"But it says in the book that I must get up," he insisted.

"Which book?"

"I will show you," and he took from his shelf a copy of Stevenson's "Garden of Verses," and turned to the picture opposite the poem that begins:

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle light.

To him this meant that in winter, after going to bed, at night, one must get up and dress. It is very likely many children who have had this delightful poem read to them have interpreted it in the same way, but probably very few parents have taken the pains to trace their children's unaccountable "misbehavior" at bedtime to such a source.

This same poem produced in another child quite a different train of reasoning, for "Why did the little girl get up at night and sleep in the daytime?" he asked, "Was she a trained nurse?" It then became necessary to recall that an aunt of the child's, who was a trained nurse, often slept at home during the day, after having worked with some patient at night.

There is no doubt that many of the crotchets and "perversities" of a child have their origin in chains of reasoning that are perfectly legitimate, in view of the past experiences of the young mind, although not in harmony with the reasoning of more mature minds. The parent spends much time and energy, and much heartburning, sometimes, to overcome these whims. What is needed is a patient and sympathetic attempt to discover how the child has come to his queer ideas and desires.

The annoyance that children cause us with their questionings is due very largely to the fact that we cannot answer their questions, since the reasoning that prompts them is too searching. A little boy shocked and vexed his grandmother, who was trying to teach him the elements of theology, by asking "Who made God?" It is very likely that every normal child has asked the same question in one form or another. This attempt to reach back to the very beginning of causes resembles in many ways the speculations of the mediaeval metaphysicians, and should certainly not be discouraged. We need not, on the other hand, make the effort to answer every question a child may ask, for at a certain stage in his development he will get the habit of asking questions without really caring for the answers. But the questions are worth hearing, in most cases, just to help us understand how the child does reason. Some of the questions indicate a great deal of reasoning of a very valuable kind. When the little boy asks, "Why don't I see two things with my two eyes?" or when the little girl looks up from her dolls and asks, "Am I real, or just pretend, like my doll?" they show that they have been thinking. When a child has passed through the metaphysical stage of reasoning, he will be more interested in animals and other objects of Nature; and his questions will have to do more with the operation of processes—how he grows, and how fishes breathe in the water, and how birds fly. Later, he wants to know how things work, what makes the locomotive go, how the noise goes through the telephone, how the incubator makes chickens come out of eggs. The reasoning of the child may lead to weird conclusions, but it is real reasoning, and can be improved not by being ridiculed, nor by being suppressed, but by being sympathetically understood and encouraged.

Perhaps the most serious phase of the peculiarities of children's reasoning appears with older children when it comes to reasoning about right and wrong conduct. Professor Swift, of Washington University, has made a careful study of this subject, from replies given by many men to questions about their ideas as boys. It seems that men who are irreproachable in their moral standards pass through a stage in which they consider it legitimate fun to rob orchards or to commit petty thefts.

Children draw fine distinctions between wrong acts and acts that are not very wrong, though they may not be quite right. One man says, "I distinguished between taking money, real stealing, and taking fruit." Another says of fruit taking, "I only partly regarded it as stealing." One man writes, "When a close-fisted employer refused to let me have my clothes at cost, I pocketed enough of his change to bring my clothes down to the cost mark." Few regarded taking money from their parents as "very bad," and distinguished between such stealing and taking money from strangers.

A boy of fifteen was reproved for holding his ear to the keyhole of a room in which his mother and sisters were having an animated discussion. The appellation "eavesdropper" did not disconcert him in the least. On the contrary, he undertook to justify his conduct on the ground that he was being discussed, and as he had no "dictagraph" he was obliged to do the listening in person. The fact that the dictagraph had been so frequently used for getting information that was later used in court was to him a sufficient justification of his conduct.

It is well known that all children pass through the stage illustrated by these cases, in which they have the savage's conception of right and wrong. For most children the difference between going to the reformatory or jail and turning out decent men and women is one of wholesome and sympathetic environment. Undue severity, no less than bad example, confirms many a youth in these habits—which should represent but a passing stage in his development.

Adults should not read their own ideas of morality into the acts of their children and then catalogue them as right or wrong. Most children's acts are neither right nor wrong: they are merely expressions of feelings and ideas peculiar to the stage of development. With young children ideas of right and wrong divide themselves into acts which are permitted and those which are forbidden. They have no conception of right and wrong beyond that.

Many an act that a boy commits, which we consider wrong, is but the expression of the instincts of his age. Our duty consists in helping him to pass through that stage without making permanent habits of these temporary impulses. This help must not be given through branding the acts as wicked or criminal, nor is moralizing itself generally effective. Help must come through providing adequate opportunities for play and games and work that will use up surplus energy both of mind and body. Above all, help must come through the healthy examples and the constant manifestation of high ideals in the home.

Every normal child will in time respond to these influences. There are, unfortunately, some children that will not develop beyond this stage of primitive, savage instincts; but such abnormal children are rare and we cannot deal with them here.

With the problem of reasoning, then, as with all other aspects of child training, it is a question of understanding, of being in close relations with one's children, and being able to fathom the workings of their minds.