A BOY’S MISERY
Quite the saddest thing I have come across for some time is the account of the suicide from remorse of a widow, who drowned herself in utter misery; her body being found near the spot where a fortnight before that of her son, aged eleven, had been discovered. The boy, it seems had committed suicide after being accused of stealing money belonging to his mother.
Even from the bare outline of what happened there stands out stark, like some haunting fiend of pain, the agony suffered by this boy and mother before each sought the merciful quietness of death.
I find myself conscious of emotion stronger and more vexing than the strangling sense of pity. I am angry at the waste of two lives, and especially of the fine young life so grievously destroyed. Why, I ask myself, do we torture children by forcing on their sensitive natures punishment for failure in right conduct, while we make no attempt to understand the hidden struggles and unexplained emotions that almost always are the cause? How is it we fail to remember so completely our own growth, the mistakes we made, the undiscovered sins that now we have forgotten?
This boy stole from his mother. A thief you call him—a bad and ungrateful son.
But wait—think! Why did he steal?
An easy question, perhaps, you will say to answer. He desired to buy sweets, wished to visit the cinema; he had been betting with his marbles and getting into bad habits; or he wanted to swagger as a capitalist among his friends. Yes, that sounds probable enough; some such were, I expect, the reasons given by the mother, probably believed in by the boy himself. For so often we force the acceptance of our adult stupidities upon our children. The poor boy counted himself a thief, believed that he had sinned; he felt that he had wronged the mother whom he loved so much. He did not know, for there was no one to tell him, that he did not care at all for the money he stole for these trivial reasons. No, he did not know. But underneath, hidden in the darkness of his young soul, there was a stronger driving imperative, unknown and unsuspected by any one, most of all by the boy himself, which was the irresistible force that caused him to steal.
The reason of his action is really simple and would be recognised at once by any psychologist. It must be sought in the relation of the boy to his mother. He was not loved enough. At least, in some way, he was unhappy in his home relationship—at conflict in his innermost nature. He stole money, though, he did not know it, because he wanted love.
Of his life, through his eleven years, I lack the information that would provide us with the necessary details of proof. It is exceedingly improbable that the details will be forthcoming, for this boy was unknown and his death even at the time, caused no stir. But it is a very certain inference from the evidence of the excessive remorse that drove him to take his own life that, sometime in his earlier years, he had suffered some shock of jealousy or stress of misery in relation to his mother, that initiated the trouble, which later had to force an expression by means of his thefts.
I hope that I make my meaning clear. The idea of “transferring” a feeling into a quite different action may be a little strange to you. Yet everyone knows that, if you are angry with someone and dare not show it, you may gain relief from some kind of violent action entirely unconnected with the cause of the angry feelings. The boy who is afraid of his father, or is otherwise unhappy in his home, is very likely to be a “bully,” he takes what he has suffered out of someone weaker than himself. And it is the same process when the suppressed painful feelings of jealousy or other unhappiness take the form of spending money. The impulse is so powerful that if the money cannot be got in any other way, it will be stolen.
In many children there arises jealousy in connection with their home relationships, often without reason, but none the less real to the childish imagination, and this causes them to doubt the parental love that is as necessary to them as the sun to the flower. In its mild and practically harmless form this feeling of being neglected, which few children quite escape, is only occasionally active and remains unrecognised, though it is the frequent cause of irritability, of minor sicknesses and faults in behaviour. The results in aggravated cases are far more important, and cause, not infrequently, such a desperate consciousness of inferiority, with an always pressing sense of wanting something, that there arises an overpowering physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of the hidden trouble. This relief is found usually in acts of violence, frequently in stealing.
In the case we are considering we see the boy, beyond all shadow of doubt, over-sensitive, the symptoms of the unconscious trouble expressing themselves, on the one side, in an exaggerated feeling of inferiority, and, on the other, in a compelling need to find opportunity for the assertion of power. I do not know just how it happened. Maybe, his mother, who has paid with her life in passionate remorse, was too hindered with the troublesome details of life to be able to cultivate and pick the flowers of love. I cannot know, but I do know that in the tender psyche or soul of that poor boy was some terrible need for his mother’s love—a want which he did not understand, indeed, of which he was probably wholly unaware. He may even have been in outward rebellion, have thought he was indifferent to his mother, but such a state would but furnish further witness to the trouble within. Had he known what it was he wanted, he would not have done what he did. But the ever-disturbing need, causing confusion in his soul, drove him to steal the most obvious thing that he was without and his mother possessed—that was money.
I do not hesitate to state that in the great majority of cases of boyish thieving the reasons for the act must be sought in some deeply hidden cause, marking some inner disturbance, with a feeling of wanting something which the boy does not understand. The taking of small sums of money or other pilfering acts is a covering-mask, and has no connection with crime. There is one thing further that it is necessary to remember. Though the fault of boyish thieving is not in itself a sign of any moral failure in the character, our treatment of such small thefts—our adult stupidity in understanding the difficulties and seeking out the concealed unhappiness of the young soul, often hounds on the stealing boy into the thief.
We make criminals of the young because we are blind and hardened with our own failures and minor struggles. We also cause, as in the case of this boy who killed himself, the most heart-breaking tragedies. It is appalling even to contemplate the suffering brought quite uselessly upon boys and girls by grown-up foolish ignorance.
We show too little imagination in our treatment of the child who does wrong. We rarely remember his almost terrible sensitiveness, nor do we consider the unusual advantage (from the point of view of the child) that we possess just in being grown-up. And nothing, as I have said before, is to the boy plainer as a sign of this grown-up freedom than the power we have (or rather that they think we have) to spend money how we like and when we like. That is why the taking of money is one of the most common symbolic acts for a boy’s wish for love or power.
That boyish theft is often pathological is proved by the fact that the objects stolen are often useless to the boy, that they are hidden away, and, as a rule, forgotten, and further that the boy forgets, or almost forgets, what he has stolen or how he took them. Some boys have a passion for stealing certain objects which they will take over and over again. Those who have had anything to do with delinquent children well know these symptoms.
In nearly all cases the thieving is repeated over long periods; although each act may be followed by violent remorse. Parents and all those who have to deal with these childish wrong doers, should know that this sorrow, especially if it is emotionally excessive, serves only to increase the tendency to a fresh repetition of the theft. For remorse fixes the boy’s attention on his stealing, and, still more, on the pleasurable feelings that unconsciously to himself are connected with the act. He remembers these, though he does not know it, whenever he thinks of his wickedness in stealing. And this fixity of attention in itself is a kind of rehearsal of the act, that is very likely to lead to an actual performance of it. Boyish remorse is, no doubt, gratifying to parents, but, almost invariably, it is harmful to the boy.
Whenever the boy thinks how bad he is, how wrong and disastrous an act would be, he is in danger of being compelled to perform that act. Most of us have experienced this, but we forget its application to the moral conduct of the young. Once think how terrible it would be to fall down the precipice, and the idea of jumping down approaches.
Remorse is a form of temptation. And all forms of temptation should, if possible, be avoided in dealing with the misconduct of children. If your boy steals money do not leave money lying about. Also, even if he has stolen money several times, express no faintest suspicion as to his not using honourably any money entrusted to him, for some necessary purpose, such as paying railway fares or buying a school book. Never be suspicious over the change such a child brings you. As he steals from a feeling of inferiority, and, in particular, because through jealousy, whether imagined or real, he feels himself less blessed with the love of those about him than other more confident children, any sign of your not being able to trust him, must render him more liable to err.
If the thieving boy were treated with sympathy and understanding, and loved and helped, instead of being blamed and often cruelly punished, there would be fewer grown-up thieves.
Every child suffers sometimes from a feeling of inferiority. He is so much smaller and weaker than the grown-ups who control his play and his work that he feels uncomfortably helpless against their authority, which to him seems often to be exercised in an arbitrary and unkind way.
There are times when this consciousness of being little and weak is so overwhelming that the child is bound to do something to convince himself of his own powerfulness.
It is then that he becomes naughty. For the very easiest way to command the attention of his mother, and the other adults who are with him, is by being naughty. Good, he is left alone. The grown-ups go on with their own occupations. He feels neglected. At most he is mildly praised. “Johnnie is a nice quiet boy to-day.” But this is very different from the attention he commands when he is naughty. He defies authority. For a short time he becomes a despot, ruling the grown-ups who usually rule him. His sensation of power is intensely enjoyable. And the more disturbance he makes in the nursery life the deeper is his satisfaction. Of course, he is sorry afterwards. But his sorrow is not really for the first period of successful rebellion, but for the following time after his power fails.
Now, it is very important for the mother to understand this. The real problem is to minimise as much as can be of the child’s enjoyment of naughtiness.
Any unwisdom on the mother’s part such as her being too emotionally concerned, indulging in nagging or violent anger, may have very serious results. Inevitably the child feels as he sees his mother’s tears and want of control, “I have caused this.” Instead of being weak he is master of his mother. That is why usually he is good after he has been naughty.
But this kind of nursery behaviour is disastrous to the child’s character.
Let me tell you a rather striking story to illustrate this. A young boy, very naughty, was sent to bed. His mother, greatly troubled, went some hours later to his room. He was kneeling, praying. She thought he was asking God to forgive him. But this was what she heard: “Please, dear God, forgive my bad mummy for being so unkind to poor little Freddy.” The boy grew up in the most unfortunate way. I cannot give the details and there were, of course, several causes. Yet certainly his character suffered the first wrong in the nursery from an unwise emphasising by his mother of his own importance.
The naughty child is always the child over-occupied with thoughts of himself. And his feelings are unhealthily important to him just because he finds himself for some cause at a disadvantage. Parents, unconsciously, but very foolishly, emphasise their children’s inferiority; they speak of their weakness, tell them they are too little to do this or that, never realising the danger of what they are doing.
Children must not be subjected to conditions of emotional stress, which increase unnecessarily their inevitable consciousness of inferiority in an adult world. If the parents do not find out and remedy the cause of these feelings (which they ought to know are invariably present whenever a child is naughty) and provide an expression by which the desired power is gained in a right way, let me warn them that they are dangerously limiting their children’s chance of a successful and happy life. By connecting pleasure with bad conduct, they are certainly, though they do not know it, making the way easy for every kind of future bad conduct.
The fate of all children is decided in the nursery; criminals are made there as well as saints and heroes.
THE TYRANNY OF PARENTS
In the life of every girl and every boy there come times when they must, and should, free themselves from the thraldom of the home.
This may sound hard to parents, who desire almost always to keep their children in tutelage, and cannot often even think of them except as belonging to the home and to themselves.
Yet the young must rebel, must escape from this too-closely-binding yoke of love. They have to break away from the moorings of safety; to adventure; to find a place for themselves; to get into the world and to establish their own lives as women and men.
We should hear much less of trouble between parents and children if fathers, and especially mothers, could be made to understand that the conflict with their growing boys and girls is not a personal conflict; that it has nothing, or at least very little, to do with the actual situation, and is not directly dependent on anything that either the parents or the children may do or may not do. And this is comforting to parents—it does not mean that their children love them less.
No, the conflict is based on an inescapable psychological opposition. It is the necessity of the young to escape from the tyranny of the old.
The parent’s hand is needed to steady the child, while it is unable to stand firmly on its own feet or to guide its own steps; but as the child grows older, it must learn to walk alone. If the mother persists in holding out a hand, never lets the child fall down, she destroys a proper independence and the hand held-out-too-long is used to satisfy the mother’s selfish desire; to give her the pleasure she gains from the child’s dependence on herself, and not because of any need of the child for help.
You will see the application of this illustration.
Many mothers prolong the years of childish helplessness and absence of initiative because they do not want their children to grow up. Especially they check the boy’s or the girl’s independent feelings and impulses by persistently guiding them.
There is an immense, but usually unrecognised, selfishness in the apparently devoted parent. Such devotion ignores the right of the young to discover for themselves.
The separation between parent and child needs to be more than a mere separation in space. Sending a boy or a girl away to school or elsewhere does not separate it from the home ties; often such a separation but serves to bind them more fixedly. What is needed is a psychological separation—an emotional freedom from the too-crippling dependence of childhood. There is the need to take the home standards and compare them with other standards of the world; the getting rid of the old excessive reverence for the parents. They, too, must be criticised and judged.
This process of liberation is difficult and very painful to the child; that is why so often there is rebellion and unkindness. And the danger is greater because, at this period, the boy or the girl is so easily discouraged, turns back so readily with kindness to the old safety. And if this is countenanced by the parents, who continue to offer a too-protective affection, the character of the boy or the girl is weakened so that in after years they will not be able to meet the necessities of adult action.
The too fond mother or father perpetuates the childhood of their sons and daughters. They are a far more real danger to their children than neglectful or careless parents.
It is worthwhile considering some of the reasons why parents do too much for their children; are too careful to keep them bound to the home and within the protection of parental love.
The parents who have failed in satisfying their own desires see in their children a new opportunity. They hope for vicarious satisfaction. And for this reason, rather than for the reasons of unselfish love which they believe rule their conduct, they will sacrifice themselves so that their children may achieve what they have failed in gaining. They are to hand down and maintain their name, to keep in the world their family, and all that seems of value in themselves—all that would be lost by their approaching extinction.
If we stop to think, we shall see how common and easy it is for parents to use their children as instruments of satisfaction. Wherever one or other parent is unhappy, suffering under some unsatisfied desire, they seek to satisfy these desires through their children. Do we not know that the wife, and sometimes also the husband, not happy in their own marriage concentrate their hopes of a satisfying life on their children. The mother wants her daughters to be literally, wholly devoted to her; she loves again in her love for her sons; or the father compensates himself with his devotion to his daughters, while he seeks to satisfy his desire for power by completely directing the life of his sons.
All this is quite wrong. It breaks the power of the young; turns them into dutiful automatons, instead of rebellious adventurers. Constantly thwarted, too much protected, they become necessarily less capable of effort, with a weakened power for action. The model boy or girl of parents and schoolmasters is almost always a failure in life.
Such parents love their children too selfishly and too possessively. Seeking emotional relief, they drain for themselves the storehouse of energy which their children ought to preserve for their own lives.
The danger is deep and far reaching, a too great and unhealthy attachment to either parent may, and often does, cause an inability to transfer an adequate share of loyalty and affection from the parent to the wife or husband. It may check the desire to marry. The man’s choice of a life partner is guided by an infantile vision of his idealised mother; and then, after marriage, he will seek from his wife the feelings of a mother. That is, he will want to be helped and mothered instead of wishing to guide and protect.
This is a very frequent cause of unhappiness in marriage.
Strange as this may seem, the true Don Juan owes his incapacity to find satisfaction in love to the fact that he searches unconsciously for what he can never find, the lost features of his childhood’s mother. He is unfaithful to all women because he is faithful to one woman.
Again the girl may feel towards her husband as she did towards her father; she may be too obedient, too uncritical to be a true helpmate; or, and this is much more serious, a too excessive identification with the mother may render difficult and even impossible the right response to love.
It is not too much to say that, wherever there is this over-attachment and persistence of the childhood attitude, or where the conflict to break from the too heavy tyranny is very severe, the whole career and the whole love-history of the adult life is settled and decided—damned and fated to disaster from the start. Indeed the seed of failure, of unhappiness, even of crime and vice, often is set in helpless children by the selfishness and ignorance of over-affectionately helpful parents, whose too much interference, too emotional solicitude, blocks the narrow passes that lead on to open and independent life.
THE SUPERFLUOUS FATHER
In many homes, where there are children, the father seems a stranger—almost an intruder.
The central figure in the family is the mother. All the details of her life are familiar to the children; she is seen shopping, cooking, looking after the home. The father is a little mysterious; he goes adventuring in the unknown world. He is picturesque and wonderful; an exciting figure that arouses nursery admiration—but he is unnecessary.
At first the mother occupies all the child’s attention. She supplies food, comfort, shelter, teaching and brings happiness to the nursery. She is the first love-object and of supreme importance; the starting point of all those interests of the children which lie outside of themselves.
But the other parent—the superfluous father, comes both as interrupter and friend into this mother-child circle. He plays with the children, opens up new delightful ways of interest, brings the movement that children love. But also he is a disturber. He absorbs the mother, draws her attention and care from the children. He upsets the order and balance of the nursery. He almost dethrones the baby.
Thus at a very early age jealousy of the father begins to stir and unsettle the nursery peace. Usually we either treat this childish jealousy as a joke or refuse to admit its presence, but it is deadly earnest to the child itself. If the mother is capricious, varying in her attentions to her husband and to her children, or if she is over-tender and too demonstratively affectionate, this jealousy may, and indeed, must work great and permanent evil.
You see, it imposes a conflict in the exquisitely responsive child, between the emotions of hate and anger and envy born of jealousy, and the emotions of love and admiration and obedience dependent on a sense of the benefits conferred by the father.
It is the duty of the mother so to balance her favours and her love that the rights of the husband and the children are both maintained, and neither side is tempted to be a monopolist.
For it is not only the children who are jealous of the father. Often the father is jealous of the children. And often he has cause. Some women, when once the child is born, regard their husbands solely as the person for providing money necessary for the maintenance of the home. In any other capacity she has ceased to desire him, frankly he is in the way.
The mother type often ceases, after motherhood, to be the loving mate—the wife. There is so little time for love making in a nursery home. The man becomes a superfluity, his demands tend to be delegated to holidays that are planned, but do not often occur.
Nature herself seems to condemn the man in his capacity as father. So delicate is the bond which attaches him to the child as compared with the unbreakable bindings which hold the child to the mother; so readily can he be pushed outside the circle of the family, where, as a member apart, he will inevitably seek his own interests and pleasures.
Now, whether this complete severance happens or not, some conflict between the father and his children, especially between father and sons is almost bound to occur. This is a war which is normal and, indeed, inevitable—far more so than any class-war, any opposition and struggle between the nations.
Have we not read of the solitary polygamous father of the past, the Old Man of the Tribe, who drove his sons out of the horde as they grew up, because in his greed he wanted all the women to be his wives? Much time has passed since then, but these emotions are very old and very strong. Pity and the gentler feelings of civilisation enable the father to accept the son as a member of the family and as a companion instead of a rival. But echoes remain of the old instincts of jealous rivalry.
No science is so difficult or so important as psychology. It is because parents do not understand their own minds or the minds of their children that they make such mistakes. They do not see that some jealousy and opposition in family relationships are inevitable and, in fact, useful. Else the child would never grow up, would always be overwhelmed by its parents.
So do not let us be too alarmed if sons oppose fathers, or if fathers are wanting in sympathy with their sons.
Yet it must be remembered finally, on the other side, that the authority of the father has to be maintained. Superfluous in the family, from one point of thought, his influence is nevertheless of the most urgent importance. Without it a too great dependence on self is fostered at too early an age, which sets up an intolerant and unreasoning hatred of all authority and an inability to suffer any kind of restraint.
The father thus needs to preserve his rights and duties within the home. If women have had to fight for the Vote and the open door to the profession, the father may have to fight for the love of his children and the key to the nursery.
He must refuse to be regarded as superfluous.
THE PERFECT MOTHER
A few weeks ago a shower of sudden rain brought me for shelter into the house of a kindly stranger, who beckoned me in from the position I had taken under the thickly foliaged trees, bordering her garden. She was a woman who exuded kindness. You know the type—opulent in figure, wholesome and ripe, her face beaming in wide wrinkles of pink flesh.
The sudden generous smile of the big mouth showed her the possessor of a real charm. Her eyes had a blue twinkle that attracted laughter. Quite plainly she would be delightful as a mother. For about her was something that conjured visions of nursery fires, of warm, sweet bread-and-milk, of sugar plums after nasty powders, and of kisses and forgiveness given for childish wrong doing, without any unfair bargaining for repentence.
But this woman had no child. Nature does not always, in this matter, act as intelligently as she might. We all know of many Betsy Trotwoods. On the other hand, we find children lavished wastefully—yes, children, swarming in the cold homes of mothers who do not want them—women without understanding of children or any trace of parental passionateness. Do you not recall many modern prototypes of Mrs. Jellaby?
I felt my bowels ache for this woman with her rich and wasted motherhood. Her opulent affections were lavished not, as they should have been, on the tender warm bodies of little children, but on dogs.
Never have I seen so many dogs: they were placed all over the rather small room. Both easy chairs were occupied by a canine seater. There was a mother with new baby-pups in a lined basket before the great fire. Another dog who was sick was in another basket, wrapped in a shawl, on the other side of the fire. The room was stifling, and had a sick, close, doggy smell. And though I am a lover of dogs, I felt disgusted. I really hated those pampered toys, that snarled and snapped and grumbled at me in the most horrible way. Believe me, I am not exaggerating. You could not speak. The whole room was dogs. Enough! Let us leave them and get on to something of greater value.
It was that thought which caught and gripped my attention. This woman’s unfilled life. I could not forget it: it stayed with me long after I had left the house—a memory not to be obliterated.
She was forlorn among her dogs. It was a tragedy of waste. I have had so many dreams of the perfect mother that I was stung to anger and impatience to find her, at last here, squandering her affections on a canine brood.
The situation was so plain. This woman needed children, if not of her flesh, then adopted and made her own by the rich fullness of her motherhood.
NOBODY’S CHILDREN
CHILD ADOPTION: A MUCH NEEDED REFORM
It was a short time after I had found “the perfect mother” thus wasted, that there came into my hands the “White Paper” which gives in full the wise and interesting Report of the Committee on Child Adoption. I knew that here was just the very thing that was wanted. Here was shewn the means by which the motherly childless woman and the motherless child could be brought together.
The desire for child adoption has never been stronger than it is at the present time. But I do not hesitate to say that, in the present absence of any law to regulate and safeguard adoption, the position is so set about with difficulties and so pressed with continuous dangers that the practice ought to be actively discouraged. It is dangerous for the adopter and, what matters even more, it is dangerous for the child.
The emphatic and unanimous decision of the Committee was that there is immediate necessity for a change in the law to make the adoption of children legal in this country. Every one who gave evidence was unanimously in favour of adoption in all cases where, for one reason or another, any child could not have the care of its own parents. It is much better for every child to be brought up in a home than in an institution. Not only is it cheaper, but the child benefits far more. But adoption needs to be regulated and legalised. The child is too precious a possession to leave to anyone to do with as they desire.
The report recommends:—
1. That after obtaining the consent of the real parents and the adopting parents, as well as the consent of the child, if he (or she) is over fourteen, all adoption shall be sanctioned by a judicial authority.
2. That confidential official inquiries shall be made from time to time, as to the child’s progress and happiness in the adopted home.
3. That the child shall take the adopter’s name, and shall have, as far as is possible, the position of a natural child.
This Report was presented in June, 1921. Yet nothing has been done. And what I wish to emphasize with all the power that I have, is the crime of this delay and the urgent need there is for immediate legislation. Children are waiting to be adopted; childless people are waiting to adopt. Surely it ought not to be difficult to frame a simple law that would safeguard the interests of both.
There is little wonder that hitherto adoption has not been popular in this country. One strong reason that has prevented the far-sighted from attempting it is that in England there is no legal method by which adoption can be carried out. And because of this there is, as I have said, too much danger connected with it, as well as not enough certainty of its continuance. For the law grants the foster-parent no recognised control over the child.
There is the ever present fear, increasing as the years pass and the child grows up, lest the natural parent shall come one day and claim the right to take the child away—an injustice specially likely to happen as the child becomes older and is able to earn money.
Then there is, on the other side, the possibility (often realised) of the adoption being a commercial transaction between the parent (most frequently an unmarried mother) and a foster-parent, by which the latter receives a sum of money and takes over an unwanted child, who most frequently dies. It is horrible to contemplate.
But indeed, always, there is the dangerous position of the adopted child, who has no settled position, no legal claim on the foster-parents, who may adopt a child in the most solemn manner and keep it all through the attractive years of childhood, then, when the less attractive years of adolescence begin, or when any change in circumstances makes the adopted child no longer wanted, they can calmly withdraw their protection and turn the child out of their home. Again, I say, it is horrible to contemplate. The destiny of the adopted child is controlled throughout the unprotected years of childhood and of youth by the whim and caprice, both of the natural parent and the adopted-parent.
And do not comfort yourself by believing that these are merely imaginary troubles. They occur every day as every one knows who has any knowledge of the practice and results of child adoption in this country. I personally know of many cases of injustice that have brought disaster and unhappiness to the child. Let me tell you one. A boy was adopted by a man, unmarried, a minister of God, who was a social worker and greatly attached to children. But later in his life the man married. Under pressure from his mother, accounted as a religious and good woman, the adoption was cancelled, the boy, wanted no longer, was sent to a home for homeless children. No one troubled about him. Or take another case where an illegitimately born child—a baby girl, was abandoned and afterwards reclaimed three times during the first five years of her life! Each time the mother took her away from a happy home with foster-parents who loved and cared well for her. Then after a few months of neglect the mother again abandoned her. They had no legal remedy against the caprice of the mother.
These unguarded children belong to nobody. Here is an amazing gap in our law. It is worse than that—it is an amazing gap in our consciousness and sense of social responsibility. “Nobody’s children!” the phrase has a pitiable and stinging significance. Yet it is just this state of things we are countenancing with our lazy and callous indifference. There are tens of thousands of little ones for whom to-day it is bitter truth that they belong to no one. Orphaned, or unwanted by their natural-parents, many of them are being adopted in the worst and most casual manner—handed out “on probation” like a cat or a dog.
And if you doubt the truth of this statement, listen to the judgment of the Committee on Child Adoption as to the disgraceful carelessness with which adoption is being carried on in this country;
“We believe that the absence of proper control over the ‘adoption’ of children over seven years of age and under that age unless payment is made, results in an undesirable traffic in child life with which no one can interfere, unless proceedings are taken against the adopting parent for cruelty or neglect; children may be handed from one person to another, with or without payment, advertised for disposal, and even sent out of the country without any record being kept. Intermediaries may accept children for ‘adoption’ and dispose of them as and when they choose. Homes and institutions for the reception of the children exist which are not subject to any inspection.” (Paragraph 61, page 10 of the Report.)
The italics in this passage are mine; will you try to think what these conditions, which you are permitting, mean? Think of them with your hearts, not with your heads! And if you have a child of your own, passionately dear to your life, try to realise the abominable position—the cruelty that can hardly be escaped, as if it were your child, who was thus being handed callously from one person to another, without protection, without any form of legal guardianship.
We talk much of the nation’s care for children. Would it not then seem a necessary step to have some just provision of our law to protect the helpless unwanted child, who at present belongs to nobody? Humanity, and even good sense answers, “Yes.” The Common Law of England has hitherto always said most emphatically, “No.” Except for a reference to adoptions which has managed to slip into a marginal note of a Finance Act, there is no recognition of adoption in our laws.
The right thing to do is the simple thing. We have on the one hand, these homeless children, whose numbers have become much larger in these last years and with the change and slackening in responsible conduct, while on the other hand, we have, an increased number of women who are childless and will never be able to marry. The problem, at its simplest, is this: What can be done to bring together the childless woman with a mother’s nature and the motherless child?
I am not forgetting the Institutions that are already in existence. There are two agencies for arranging adoption, as well as other religious and social societies, and many homes, from which children can be adopted. These agencies are doing admirable work, but they cannot do a tenth part of what ought to be done. And the very worst cases, in which the child most urgently needs protection, often cannot be reached at all. This problem is too big to be muddled through privately. It is the concern of the whole nation.
The first necessary step is to legalise adoption. Until that is done, nothing can be done.
At present as I have told you, the position is one of very great danger. The law grants the foster-parents no recognised legal control over the child. The mother, or her relatives, unless obviously immoral and unfit persons, may at any time claim back the child.
Even in the most favourable circumstances there is danger, and a never-ending uncertainty that cuts at the very root of the adopted relationships. I repeat: neither the foster-parent or the child has any security. And at any time, and for any reason, the child may be taken from his home. Directly he (or she) grows up and is able to earn money, the needy relatives, with an eye on those small earnings or on the much larger sums squeezable from the foster-parents, may prove an ever-threatening nuisance. If the foster-parent acts boldly and resists such claim, the relative may apply for a writ of Habeas Corpus in the High Court, when (under the Custody of the Children’s Act, 1891) the case is decided at the discretion of the Court. As a rule, the interests of the child are considered, and, in this respect, matters have much improved of late years. But even if the decision is given in favour of the foster-parents so that the child remains in the home in which it has been reared and is loved, there is a period of ceaseless anxiety; and, that the decision will be favourable is certain only when the character of the claiming relative can be proved to be bad.
So curious is the law that it is safer to adopt the child of bad or doubtful parentage (where this can be proved) than the child of good and respectable people.
The other side of the position has also to be considered. As is evident, the foster-parents may be bad. This we have seen. And what I want to emphasise further is that here too the danger threatens the unprotected child. Just as the law gives no recognised protection to the good foster-parents, so it affords no protection to the child against a bad foster-parent.
All the time I am trying to drive into your consciousness the terrible position of the child that has no legal claims; no kind of safeguard. He (or, of course, she, and the girl babies are adopted much oftener than boys) may be adopted simply as playthings, or to satisfy deeply unconscious instincts of cruelty, or as an investment for the time when they can earn money. Also they can be cast off at the caprice of their adopters.
A further and permanent injustice, operative even under happy conditions and in a good home, arises from the fact that the adopted child is without rights of inheritance. If his foster parents, however rich, die intestate, he has no share in the family property. At any time in his life he may be left penniless and friendless, without recognition that he belongs to anyone.
Such uncertainty is awful. Try to realise the suffering which it must bring to the child, ever dogging his footsteps like a menacing shadow.
Our sluggard imaginations must surely be stirred now our attention has been directed to this gap in our law. I wish that my pen had greater power to bring home to everyone concerned—and everyone who cares or professes to care for the welfare of children is concerned—the iniquity of allowing the continuance of conditions that must bring nothing less than tragedy into the lives of these unfortunate and unprotected little ones.
This is almost the only country which does not recognise and legalise adoption: all that needs to be done is to bring our law up to the standard which prevails in other lands. We alone are neglectful. It is one of the many social matters concerning children on which Great Britain has seriously fallen behind the example of its own daughter States. The United States, Australia and New Zealand have all gone far ahead of the Mother Country in their legislation in regard to child adoption. All the forty-eight States of the Union have now Acts regulating adoption. But perhaps the Model Act is that of Western Australia, passed in 1891. It provides for the complete and careful guardianship of all adopted children. The Act has worked admirably, and with a very few alterations could be adopted to the needs of this country.
And it must not be thought that all this recognition and protection of adoption is a new thing, and, as such, possible to dismiss as unnecessary, belonging to an over-protective and grandmotherly system of law. Such a belief would be far from the truth. Students of history know how almost universal was the practice of adoption in older civilisations. Roman law recognised the custom and adoption was extremely common. I could give many other examples. Especially interesting is the custom in India, where among the Hindoos, when a child is adopted into a new family, it goes through the religious ceremonies belonging to death before quitting the home in which it was born, and afterwards goes through the religious ceremonies belonging to birth on reaching the new home. The old bond is completely severed and a new social, religious and legal bond created.
I would ask your attention to this wise provision made by one of the oldest civilisations, which often understood so much more practically and simply the needs of a social situation.
If the full necessary security is to be given to the practice of adoption there must clearly be a complete passing over of the duties and rights of the natural-parents to the adopting parents. Adoption ought to be undertaken only solemnly and with due understanding of all the difficulties, and the necessary precautions. The closest enquiries, in every case, need to be made as to the bona fide intentions and complete suitability of the adopting parents: guarantees must be given of their intentions and ability to bring up and care for the child. It would also be equally necessary, except in exceptional cases of proved cruelty and unfit parentage, to ascertain the reasons why the parents—or parent in the case of an illegitimately born child—desired to give up their rights of guardianship. But when once this has been done, and any order of adoption made, the parental relationship ought to be transferred completely from the natural to the adopting parents.
And in the interests of the child, I would have this transference carried out with the severest restrictions. I would not allow a parent, or parents, who once gave up the guardianship of the child any rights of visitation. Such visits, even under the happiest circumstances cause disturbance, remind the child unceasingly of its difficult position as an adopted child. They tend to create confusion, with feelings of dissatisfaction and jealousy; comparison between the old home and the new home; conflicts between the affection for the adopted-parents and the very possible drawing back of natural affection for the real parents.
All ways adoption must be difficult.
Science has shewn us how terribly the future of the child depends on its early relationships in the home; its relation to its mother, on whom it depends for the first childish satisfactions, its relations to its father, to its brothers and sisters. The adopted relationships can never be quite the same as the natural relationships. We now know how easily jealousy and unhappiness can arise in the heart of even the youngest child, and what havoc to the after life these feelings may bring. If we remember this, we shall realise better the disturbing emotions likely to be aroused when one parent is lost and replaced by another. That is why everything possible needs to be done to give to adopted parenthood the strongest stability. The adoption of a child ought never to be undertaken lightly. It is, perhaps, the most binding and the most solemn, and the most fatefully responsible of any human relationship.
A righteous law of adoption needs to guard the adopted child so that the voluntary relationship is as binding in every way and as permanent as the natural relationship. For this reason the adopted child should, in my opinion, have the same rights of inheritance as all other children. Nothing short of this can do justice to the adopted child.
We talk a great deal to-day about children and their rights, but very few of us realise at all practically and fully the change of attitude, in particular in connection with property and the rights of inheritances, that are likely to be necessary, if, in all circumstances, our theories are to be expressed in our daily conduct.
The whole question is complicated and very difficult, there is, indeed, no easy way out.
LET US PENSION THE MOTHERS.
I was attending a conference to consider the best steps to be taken to aid mothers and to stop the sacrifice of the lives and health of little children. All kinds of suggestions were made. We talked much, we proposed and discussed, but none of us seemed able to agree what ought to be done.
Then a strong man, an observant lawyer, rose. He spoke with the biting American twang. His words were few: “Why don’t you pay poor mothers?”
The brilliant simplicity of this question stirred at once our powers of understanding.
It was Judge Neil who spoke. In brief phrases he told us what had been done in America. Mother’s pensions, which are in reality children’s pensions, have been established in most of the forty-eight States of the Union. They are granted until the children are fourteen, or, in the case of delicate children, until sixteen. State-appointed supervisors watch over the welfare of the children to ensure that the money given is well spent by the mother.
As Judge Neil placed the facts before us, this plan of paying mothers instead of forcing them to go out as workers, possibly at “sweated” wages, and then paying other people in an institution to do their work, seemed so simple that I was filled with wonder that we had not long ago thought of so easy and obvious a reform. It is strange that it is so often the most simple things that we never think of doing. I believe it is because we think of reforms intellectually; we are not human enough to feel.
Now, it is just Judge Neil’s humanity that set his feet upon the right way. Listen to the story of how first he came to think of mother’s pensions:—
In 1911, a poor widow, broken by the burden of supporting her family, was condemned to have all her five children taken from her.
“Better to shoot her than take away her children.” said Judge Neil. He then asked how much it would cost to maintain the children in a State institution.
“The country pays the institution 10 dollars a month for each child,” was the answer.
“Why not give the 10 dollars to the mother and let her keep her children?”
Such was Judge Neil’s humane and practical solution of the problem. Thus the scheme for pensioning mothers was born.
The responsibility of the State for children ill-cared-for is admitted in most countries. It is, therefore, a question of ways and means, not a question of high principle, how best to carry out this intention and prevent child poverty.
Surely grants to good mothers are better than grants to institutions. Even the best Poor Law schools must have the faults that are inherent in institutions.
I can hardly express too strongly my own want of faith in “expert child-trainers.” I have found always that they regard the child mainly, if not entirely, as something to be improved and instructed on a definite plan. The “expert” is never human, and a child has need of all the human treatment it can get.
Every child has absolute need of its mother. All experience shows us that the home, with its sympathetic relationships of mother and child, sisters and brothers, cannot be replaced. We must insist on reforms that will make home life possible.
The child has to accept the arrangements we make; that is why this question is of such immense importance. If the matter could be fixed by the will of the children I should have no fear. The child has not lost the true values of life.
There is another fact to consider—one that will appeal to ratepayers. Grants to mothers are cheaper than grants to institutions. In the United States the payment made to a mother works out at about one-third the cost of maintaining a child in an institution. So we can do the best thing for the child and its mother and at the same time save our pockets.
BOY AND GIRL OFFENDERS, AND ADULT MISUNDERSTANDING
Much disturbing evidence on such a grave question as the bad behaviour and consequent punishment of boys and girls, in institutions, and in prisons, is made public, from time to time, to rouse the consciousness of all those who have concern for the welfare of the young. Sometimes the events recorded are of a more serious character. The attempted suicides and continued escapes of young prisoners certainly afford a rather tragic witness of some failure in our reformative efforts. Even under the Borstal system of prison life—a system that is primarily intended to be humane and educative, and not brutal and primitive, the results obtained are far from being satisfactory. We cannot feel that we are achieving anything like what ought to be done in the difficult, but necessary, duty of reclaiming these young lives that, for one cause or another, have fallen to disaster.
If we believe, as believe we must, that the old are responsible for the young—that the one generation must stand as guardian to the next—this problem of delinquency is one that we may not thrust aside. It is bigger than its immediate application in connection with reclaiming the individual boy or the individual girl: it touches the very deepest of our duties—our duty to the future. It is for us to ask many questions of ourselves, and of all those who are in any way connected with the young; questions to which it is not easy always to find satisfactory answers.
It is obvious that something is wrong.
I do not wish to harrow you with painful statistics, or by reminding you of unfortunate incidents in connection with young prisoners that you ought not to have forgotten. You would not have forgotten if you had cared as you ought to care.
I do not deny that “much is being done; that conditions are better far than they were in the past.” But this does not cover our failures or lessen our responsibilities. I plead for greater attention to, and more understanding of, the delinquent child. It is not, and never can be, a question that can be fixed or finally decided: the child is an individual; and, in each case, the problem of dealing with him must be a separate problem. This is certain—only by understanding the child who fails, his own difficulties and his own failure—can we advance. By this way only can we give aid to these young offenders, who, with a burden of ancient instincts and uncontrolled impulses, come into a world filled with undesirable examples, where they have to face manifold temptations.
Let us try, then, to consider the delinquent boy and girl, bearing these truths in our thoughts. And first we must acknowledge the complexity and terrible difficulty of the problem. Delinquency in the young cannot be explained by obvious superficial causes. The motivating impulse to naughtiness and bad conduct always lies outside of consciousness. I mean that the boy or girl who continuously does wrong, fails altogether in good conduct, whether in a reformatory, in a prison, or a Borstal institution is acting in this way from a reason which is deeply hidden, and which they do not themselves understand; while further, the present misbehaviour is connected with some experience of the past that now they have forgotten. They are driven by this inward urge into rebellion and insubordinate conduct. And the help they ought to have is one of re-education, by clearing up what was wrong in the past, and this help must be given to them by those who are specially trained to understand.
They cannot, unaided, help themselves. The things they do wrong—the breaking of rules, the failures in work, the violent conduct, the attempted escapes—in the vast majority of cases, are a defence against unhappiness that stalks as a deadly shadow, following their young lives.
Their treatment is a medical as well as a social and ethical problem. The young do wrong because their souls are sick. Such a statement is not fantastic, it is seriously true. To understand the meaning of the present bad conduct of anyone, but especially of the delinquent boy or girl, it is absolutely necessary to find out the motive which makes them want to behave badly. Always we have to search to find “a reason why.” To discover, as far as we are able, what it is causing the rebellion or the bad conduct, we must have wisdom to give up the old ignorant ideas as to its being possible to cure bad conduct, in any way that matters, by scoldings, by punishments or, indeed, any kind of direct attack.
The fault that distresses those in authority in the present must be regarded as the sign of a hidden conflict that has distressed the child in the past. It is this conflict, then, that must be discovered and dealt with. Never in any case can the lazy adult view be accepted that the delinquent child does wrong because of original sin.
The young do wrong when they suffer, usually through the blunders of those who are supposed to train them; their faults in behaviour are a relief for pain they find too intolerable to bear. If the boy or girl is happy in harmony with his or her world, then that boy or girl is good.
To find the real cure for this unhappiness of soul is, of course, a most difficult task. It can be accomplished completely only by those specially trained in understanding and analysing the child mind. But much good, and a return to healthy happiness can often be gained, by a little helpful understanding of the special problems of the individual boy or girl. It is the educator’s duty to try to pour daylight on the hidden plague spots of the soul.
This can never be done by cruelty or any form of coercive treatment which arouses fear—the most deadly enemy to right conduct. The way to educate the abnormal, the difficult boy or girl, is not to be shocked or to punish them, but to show them sympathy, directed by knowledge.
Teach these girls and boys that they have failed in good conduct, not because they are bad or different really from other more fortunate young people, but because they have been unhappy—ill with feelings of insecurity, of deficiency, of loneliness, of failure; help them to understand the causes that have brought about this condition, why they have felt inferior, been unhappy; and then build up their characters by giving them new opportunities of finding happiness in their work and in their play, providing new interests and creating opportunities for new responsibilities. These young people want kindness and to be taught to be sociable. Moral conduct is never easy. We all want what we do want. We surrender our wishes only because we find we satisfy other desires by so doing. We are praised and rewarded for good conduct and for preferring to give up to others what we want to do ourselves. And a very practical lesson in our training of delinquents depends upon this. The educators must take the greatest possible care that bad conduct does not give greater pleasure than good conduct. Doing wrong so often opens for the young the widest and easiest door to gain excitement. If boys and girls in Borstal institutions and in reformatories are left unnoticed and never praised when good they quickly feel neglected. And though they do not recognise these disappointed feelings they act very strongly in setting them to seek for some kind of relief. And if allowed to enjoy power when they become rebellious, through the notice that is bestowed upon them and the upsetting of the usual regime of the school or the prison workshop, they will continue to indulge in bad conduct whenever they are bored or, for any reason, crave some form of emotional relief.
Bad conduct is primitive, infantile conduct, and one of its strongest characteristics is the tendency to proceed more directly, more unthinkingly, and more selfishly to the goal of the wishes than is usually done by the reasonable adult.
The little child wants something, grabs at it, and when it does not at once get it, screams and breaks into a passion.
Now this is just what is done by the delinquent boy or girl, whose conduct must be regarded as infantile, frankly selfish, and regulated only by doing what one wants and getting what one wants. Such conduct points to a condition of retarded growth; and usually can be traced back to some mistake in the early training, which has prevented an adaptation of the character to grown-up conditions, so that the boy or girl of seventeen or eighteen acts still like the young child of four or five years of age.
Every child, who is to grow into a successful and happy adult, has to grow out of this primitive behaviour and to learn social standards of conduct—to think what other people want and to measure their own conduct in its relation to others.
Thus the real problem of the education of the delinquent boy or girl is to help them to grow up. And the very first step is to teach them to stop thinking about themselves. They have to learn to turn outwards towards others and away from their own wishes and hidden desires, that are the real cause of their unhappiness and bad conduct.
And for this reason, even if for no other, there could be no possible form of treatment as harmful, and also I may add so silly, as that adopted (as still so often it is) in reformatory institutions of placing insubordinate prisoners in solitary confinement, even sometimes with the use of irons. No other form of punishment could be more disastrous to a boy or girl. To permit this cruelty is assuredly to increase the faults of character that are the cause of the bad conduct. By such insane punishment the young offenders are separated from their companions, perhaps bound, and left without occupation to sit alone, brooding over their unhappiness; their thoughts necessarily fixed upon themselves. They cannot fail by means of this unhealthy process to be sent more backwards into childish and bad behaviour—driven further away from adult and social conduct.
Few of us, I think, understand sufficiently how continuous and almost unspeakably hard, are the efforts that the delinquent has to make in order to achieve re-education. He is overwhelmingly conscious (however much he may seem to be indifferent) of his own inferiority. All such boys or girls, who frequently become aggressive and insubordinate, need to be treated in such a way as will increase their confidence in themselves. This may seem contradictory, but it is true. If the young offenders are punished and discouraged the trouble from which they suffer is sure to increase by making stronger the sense of self-depreciation. Too often the devastating feelings are driven back into the obscure places of the mind—the unseen office of the directing forces that in secret issue the supreme commands that control conduct. It is in order the better to overcome the truths that would stab him about himself if he recognised them, that such a wrong-doer becomes aggressively self-assertive, indulges in foolish acts and marked insubordination. Such boys and girls are without courage, and all their pride boils up behind a maimed and timid character.
The important thing to remember is that, though bad conduct comes from what seems insubordination, “the characteristics of bad conduct” arise from the state of the boy’s or girl’s mind, and that state depends very much on the treatment he (or she) receives.
If you cure the particular fault for which the punishment was inflicted, and the boy or girl loses his (or her) soul, you have done more harm than good. But the real position is worse than that, for if you hurt the young soul, you give up for ever the opportunity of re-educating the boy or girl for good conduct.
NEW WAYS OF TEACHING CHILDREN
UNBOUNDED FREEDOM AND SOME DRAWBACKS
I remember once seeing in “Punch” a picture that has always retained in my memory the vividness of the first impression. It is a long time ago, yet I can see it now exactly as I saw it then. A father, at a children’s Christmas party, was personating a bear. Filled with the adult’s joy of being allowed to be a child, he was roaring loudly, as he crawled upon the floor covered with a woolly hearth-rug. So much for the father. Certainly he was enjoying it. But what about the children. What was their view of this performance?
They were all looking bored. Even the tiny ones shewed no enthusiasm. In the corner of the room as far withdraw as space permitted was a group of young school boys, very stiffly correct in Etons and immense white collars. They were disgusted. One, who had ostentatiously turned his back on the performing father, was plainly angry. Even his back was eloquent of disapproval and gloom surrounded him. His companion, standing next to him, attempted to cheer him in this way: “Never mind, Brown major, you know its not your fault if your pater is a blooming fool!”
It is, indeed, a different aspect of the situation. The son ashamed of the father! The young generation condemning the old! It is fitting that we should take notice and remember the lesson that is taught.
For this picture of appraising youth carries a very real moral that should be considered by those modern educational enthusiasts, who are always talking about amusing the child—as if that were the one thing which mattered. There is no subject, I believe, on which greater nonsense is talked than on this one of interesting children. Personally I am sceptical whether children are ever greatly interested in the entertainments that the adult provides for their amusement. What they find interesting are the things they provide for themselves. That is one reason why there must be so great an element of falsity in modern educational theories, which aim at making lessons so interesting that they become like play.
It cannot be done.
Much of this kind of talk sounds admirable from the point of view of the adult, but what I always want to know is the view taken by the child—by the boy or the girl. I do not think they are quite so fond of being amused as we are apt to believe. Nor do I think they can be, or indeed, ought to be, interested (which is the same really as being amused) to adult orders. I mean that to be truly effective and liberating to the child, this interest must be dependent on what he has to do for himself. The work cannot be done for him. That is why I am afraid of the incursion into the schoolroom of the too anxious and amusement-providing spirit of the home. It causes too much indirect interference. It supplies too many appliances. It is over-occupied with arrangements and the smoothing away of difficulties. In a word it does not leave the child sufficiently to himself to learn his own lessons, to satisfy his own needs in his own way.
It proposes, of course, to do this, but it is just here that enormous mistakes occur.
I can fancy a group of boys and girls who, if they said what they really felt about their own education and our ceaseless experiments and efforts to make their lessons interesting and more acceptable to them, would pity us as fools.
The point of view of the child (also of the boy and the girl, but especially, I think, of the boy) is always so utterly different from the point of view of the adult. You see they are judging the situation personally, while we are judging it vicariously and ethically.
The ever-pressing idea of the educationalist to-day is to give the child freedom. But what is freedom? That is a question to which we have not yet found an answer. Do we consider sufficiently, if what means freedom to us, really gives freedom to the young? And a second question—Are we not, perhaps, in our nervous over-anxiety, imposing upon them something they do not want?
There is a great deal said about self-development and the necessity of the teacher respecting the child’s individuality. We are continually hearing of interesting experiments made in free schools and are told of children who, even when quite young, if left to choose their own tasks, will be so interested in writing, in reading, and also in arithmetic, that they will not want to give up their work even when school-hours are over!
Still I am unconvinced. I would rather have the boy or the girl waiting in eagerness for the bell to ring to free them from the school.
We are apt to over-estimate our grown-up power. We do this because we like to do it. It flatters adult egotism. We find a delicious sense of power in realising ourselves in so many new ways as potters to mould the clay of the child’s mind. I often feel that we worry about this question of education much more to please ourselves than to help the young.
But this continuous occupation with the child is bad for the child, however gratifying it is to ourselves. By the provision of too many appliances and “helps to learn,” and by continual experiments that are too often changed, we tend to check creative originality, and thereby we destroy the interest we are labouring to stimulate. It is better for the child if we are less occupied with his needs. If we do not provide him with interests he will find them for himself. In this case they will mean more to him—do more for him. I dislike exceedingly all contrivances that make things easy. I believe the child dislikes them too. That is one reason why he tires so soon of all the appliances you provide. They do not stimulate interest and effort, except quite temporarily, indeed, they destroy both.
This applies to children’s play quite as much as to their schoolwork. Most children to-day are given too many and too elaborate toys. Perhaps nothing is more mentally destructive. The child will invent his own amusements. He wants to fight giant lamp-posts and to go to sea in an inverted table. To fasten his imagination to your adult suggestions is to destroy his vigour.
Know then this truth. You can teach the child lessons and you can discipline him by your grown up authority, but you cannot by your ready-made devices successfully interest him or give him freedom. That he must find for himself. He cannot develop fully and be reliant, unless by himself, and very often against your will, he travels on his own road.
There is the very greatest delusion about this idea of freedom in the school room. And it is open to question whether the children in the free school, left mainly to choose their own tasks and take their own time in performing them, are really freer, in any true sense, than the disciplined and directed children in the master-ruled schools who have, in my experience, much better opportunities in the out-of-school hours of developing personality. The discipline of the school does help them by giving them more rest. I think they are less influenced by their teacher. For always there is, and must be, whatever the educational plan and however free from apparent compulsions, behind the pupil the will of the teacher indirectly, if not directly, guiding. And I am not sure if this indirect coercion of suggestion is not worse, from the point of view of the child, than the old-fashioned methods of direct command. I will even go further and state my belief that its claims are heavier, and bind the boy or girl more permanently in the prison of obedience.
For one thing, such indirect coercion does close for the pupils the splendid liberating door of being rebellious.
I can still remember the excitement and real health-giving joy I obtained when, as a child, I once out-witted my instructor and escaped from my lessons, which I heartily detested, to go to a fair we had all been forbidden to visit. There was a glorious fat woman, and a man who swallowed swords! Wonderful! And there was a delicious sweet in a long roll of twisted pink and white, with inside a picture of Roger, the Claimant. It was the time of the Tichbourne trial. If you could find one tiny piece of the sweet without the picture, a whole immense bar, much bigger than those which were ordinarily sold, was to be forfeited and given to you free! Think of it! The possibility! The excitement! Every penny I had was spent—and it was worth it! Yes, a thousand times worth it! Of course, what I did brought punishment. For I had to confess my misdeeds. Those sweets made me very sick. What did that matter? I did gain the joy and liberty I was seeking. This was one of the really educating experiences of my childhood.
Seriously, I am deeply afraid that to-day in our very eagerness to help children, we may often be acting in an exactly opposite direction as a hinderance to their self-development, and future happiness. I believe we are trying to achieve something that is impossible.
One thing I am certain we ought to accept. It is the inescapable barrier between the generations—between the parents and the children, the teachers and the pupils. The young ought to be separated from the old. I think this biological fact is forgotten by many advocates of freedom and new ideals in education.
I believe also that the young want—and by “want” I mean both desire and need—the direction of the old. They want the authority that marks the division between the two generations, for this opens up opportunities to rebel. Instinctively they know they can find more liberty under authority, than when left with the pressing burden, often too heavy for their young inexperience, of deciding at school, as well as at home, almost everything for themselves.
Nor do I very much believe in the over-worrying conscientiousness of the modern teachers. Again I must insist upon this. The increasing pre-occupation with the child; the constant trying of different educational experiments, is almost certain to exercise an adverse influence. There may be a tyranny of solicitude and kindness that is harder to bear than scoldings and punishments. To me there is something mournful in this chorus of uncertainty, in which it is not difficult to detect the poverty of our faith. It tells a tale of infirmity both of life and purpose. So small a thing staggers us. We are without confidence in ourselves or in life. Why is this?
Do we, I often ask myself, know at all, what the child wants to find the freedom that gives liberty to the young soul—the only freedom that matters? How can we give the gifts of life unless we have ourselves firmer confidence? If anything can destroy the soul of a child, it is want of security. Our irresolution is our great danger. That is why so often our efforts are barren. It is a sign of a nervous disorder of the soul. We seek to gain from outside things what we should find within ourselves. And the child must suffer. For the child is so helplessly dependent, so inarticulate, so unable to express his own feelings and deeper needs.
There is still the most amazing blindness in regard to the effect of adult conduct on the child. I know of one small boy who was taught in a free school, where the idea of authority was held in abhorrence. Yet this boy of eight was found one night sobbing bitterly. His mother questioned him. It appeared he had been idle at school, rude, and generally naughty. He had not been scolded, and, of course, not punished. He had been reasoned with and told the foolishness of behaving in this way. Apparently all ought to have been well. Yet it was just in this reasonable gentleness of his headmaster that his trouble rested. He knew he had been naughty. He wanted the punishment that would have wiped out his own consciousness of wrong doing. He sobbed out his complaint to his mother, “if only he (his teacher) had punished me or been cross and nasty I could have forgotten. It would have been all over. But now I keep on thinking about it, and I feel all twisted up inside.”
Now this young boy understood his own needs much better than did his master, who was making the very common mistake of judging the child by himself. The needs of the child are entirely different from the needs of the adult. The child wants security, he wants firmness, he desires authority, he even wants punishment.
Let me tell you another story to help to bring home these forgotten truths. This time it was a little girl of the tender age of six years, who had done wrong, was rude and very unkind to her governess. The occasion was a birthday party. Over-excitement was the outside cause of her bad behaviour. No one minded the rude remarks except the child herself. We all, including the insulted governess, understood the reason. Our mistake was, we understood too well, or rather, we judged from the outside and from our grown-up point of view, forgetting that it was not that of the child. We all tried to comfort the little one’s distress, assuring her we understood and knew she did not mean what she had said. In vain. The child would not be comforted. I can never forget the fatalism of her remark, “It does not matter that Miss —— and all of you forgive me, what matters is that I did it.”
Again it was the child, not we—the grown-ups, who understood the situation as it really was. And what I want to impress upon you, is the suffering unwittingly imposed on both these children. If they had been punished they would not have felt this paralysing sense of wrong doing—a suffering of the soul, fitting perhaps for the adult, but not for the child. With punishment or even with scolding, the penalty would have been paid, and the relief would have been gained of self-forgiveness—a relief so much more necessary to happiness than the forgiveness of others.
Of course, it may be argued that morally such self-accusation which does follow from this method of adult forgiveness, with its sentimental treatment of wrong doing, is good for children. I do not think so. Certainly it makes them suffer—suffer intolerably and to an extent that few adults are sufficiently discerning to realise. But the burden placed on the untried, unhardened and sensitive child-soul is, I am certain, too heavy for them to bear safely at this stage of their psychic growth. Punishment would, in almost all cases, be far easier and more acceptable. It would also be far healthier. There is always the gravest danger in placing the immature child in any position that forces an emotional response in advance of the stage of development which has been reached. We have to see these problems as the child feels them, not as we think about them with our grown-up experience and adult deadness.
To the theoretical teacher or parent eager to reform the world on paper, it may seem easy to introduce sex education into the nursery training of the home, and into the curriculum of our schools. It appears a comparatively easy matter to tell the little child the truth about its own body, and as it grows older, to give carefully prepared lessons about plants and animals, which shall lead it slowly and beautifully into the way of knowledge.
Text books have been written, pamphlets officially issued, schemes drawn up for home and school instruction, and rules laid down—new finger-posts to right conduct, whereby the younger generation may be enlightened and (as we hope) by this means saved from making the mistakes that we ourselves have made.
I wish it were as simple as this. That sex instruction could be taken from books.
Of late various attempts have been made to focus attention on this aspect of the question or on that; we have been told how this teaching should be given, and with still greater assurance how it should not be given; this must be done and that must not be done; this said and that left unsaid. And groups of earnest-minded parents and teachers, in almost every town, have met together to discuss and decide debatable points; lecturers have been applied for, and their utterances have been listened to as a new gospel; yet I venture to think that, as in all other experimental and debatable questions, the very multitude of counsel and the earnestness that is expended, indicates the uncertainty of our knowledge and the doubtful value of many of our affirmations.
I find a tendency amongst most grown-ups, and especially teachers and advanced parents who ought to know better, to place too firm a reliance on their own power to educate the young in sex. I myself have done this. Like those drowning in deep water where they cannot swim, we have clutched at any plank of hope. You see so many of the old planks—religion, social barriers, chaperones, home restrictions, and so many more, on which our parents used to rely, have failed us; been broken in our hands by the vigorous destroying grasp of the young generation; and, therefore, we have clutched with frantic fingers at this new fair-looking life-raft, in pursuit of the one aim, to protect our children.
But will it save them? I doubt if it will except in a limited and very different way from what is usually accepted. We cannot help the young very far or deeply by any of our teaching. Not only do they want their own experience, not ours, but it is right for them to have it. The urge of adolescence carries them away out of our detaining hands. And I think it may be well that at once we realize and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our power.
Thus I have nothing new or very striking to bring to the solution of this difficult problem. I shall endeavour, however, to look at the matter broadly and practically, and attempt to indicate in what direction, as it seems to me, further progress may be made at the present stage of our very faulty knowledge.
One of the most disturbing features that we have to recognise in relation to the child is the very early age at which sex manifests itself. It was formerly supposed that the sex-life began at the age of puberty. Nothing is more untrue. Every child is born with instincts and desires—feelings of love, of hate, of jealousy, which furnish the motives of conduct, and are accompanied by physical manifestations of pleasure or discomfort which express themselves, often in a veiled way, as wishes and cravings, that find relief in action, and must therefore be yoked either to some burden of utility or to some car of vanity.
It should be noted, however, that the word sexual is somewhat ambiguous, because I want to stretch it to include the very germs that afterwards blossom into the adult sex-life. The little girl with her doll is maternal, and the boy with a tin sword is showing the crudest manifestation of the male protective instinct.
The baby whenever it enjoys the satisfaction of realising its infantile wants gurgles with delight. “Every nurse, and every mother who tends her child herself knows this, and recognises as a necessary task in the training of the child, almost from the day of its birth, the winning of it away from this egocentric concentration on its own body.”2
We are always trying not to admit that we have to recognise in relation to sex the very early age at which it manifests itself. We do not believe this, because we dislike to believe it. Our fear causes us to neglect in a quite wrong way the deeply affective results of the early childish emotions.
To the uninstructed eye, early desires and feelings connected with sex are often so unlike their final form that they pass unrecognised. But the mother who has eyes to see and knowledge to understand knows that the child can hide no secret. When the lips speak not, the faces in twitching mouth and blinking eyes; the hands, in telling gestures; the biting nails; the sucking thumb; the shuffling feet; the toes that are played with and sucked—all these utter the truth; and betrayal escapes out of every nervous movement of hands, and feet, and face.
We will not see and acknowledge the presence of these early emotions because we want to see the child an angel. We cannot surrender the picture of childhood as a period of delightful ignorance and innocence.
The very reverse is the truth. The child has brought with it much from more primitive times; just in the same way as its body still shows traces of earlier developments in life, so its emotions, its instincts, its wishes and desires, revert back, in many particulars, to lower stages of growth. Always the child has to fight its way upwards, and indeed, it has no easy task to find and keep the right path, in its short journey of discovery to reach from the savagery of the babe to the level of a civilised social man or woman. If we do not help it, the way becomes doubly hard and often the path is lost or, in other words, the savage triumphs.
We are now in a better position to answer the question, so much debated, as to the age at which the sex education of the child should begin. Instead of this being a matter that can be put off until the child is older, and the angel innocence has been sullied by contact with an evil and ugly world, it becomes overwhelmingly important that no time whatever should be lost. Every effort must be made to educate from the very hour of birth these primitive instincts, which, though permissible in the savage and the little child, are wholly wrong if allowed to remain active in the later adult years. Delay is fatal. Time lost now never can be regained: mistakes made cannot be put right. A wrong direction may most easily be given by a careless act. I cannot emphasise this too strongly, or too often. The character, the life history and the entire fate of every child is fixed in the nursery.
The mistake we have been making for so long is in regarding this instruction in sex as something we can impart to children or with-hold from them; a subject we may teach or not teach; enlightenment we may give to them or conceal from them. This view is entirely erroneous. In one sense, the whole matter really lies outside of our wills. Sex education cannot be omitted by any parent or any teacher from the training of any child, for it is given by not being given, just as surely as the other way about. There is no escape for anyone who has to do with a child.
You will see what I mean. It is not the good and wise lessons you may give, of nicely arranged explanations, with flower illustrations or stories of the mating of birds and animals; still less is it warnings or goody-goody talks about purity; nor is it any kind of formal or even conscious instruction that will have the true moulding influence on the character and emotional state of the child; but what most influences him, or in other words, teaches him, and helps or hinders him, is the peculiarly affective state—I mean, the emotional attitude—which usually is totally unknown to the parents and educators, and is also quite incomprehensible to the child himself. It is all the things that the grown-ups are trying hardest to hide from the children and perhaps also covering away from themselves that are the real directing forces in their character. The concealed enmity, or even small disharmonies between the parents, the repressed tempers, the strangled temptations, the secret longing of one or other parent, the miseries that are hidden—all these inevitably arouse a response in the children, which acting continuously and unconsciously bring them to a state corresponding with that of the parents. Their shame and want of joy in sex will become the children’s shame and want of joy; their unhappiness in love will be the children’s unhappiness; their most hidden wishes will escape to create disharmonies in these young and tender souls.
The parents, and especially the mother, impress deeply into the child’s being the seal of their characters, and the more sensitive and mouldable the child the deeper is the impression. Take, for instance, the only or favourite child, who suffers under an anxious excess of tenderness, so that his love is so fixed on the mother, that not only does he become restless with too heavy a burden of emotional stress, and often really ill, but in later life he has the greatest difficulty in establishing his own character, freeing himself from the mother’s influence, or finding his own love-mate. Again, in the exact opposite position, there is the neglected and unwanted child, who, missing his rightful possession of love, suffers from a sense of inferiority, which dark and hindering shadow dogs his footsteps through life, finding a positive expression in shyness and incapacity for action, or a negative expression in bombastic and disagreeable self-assertion. So I might continue with countless examples. Adult traits can, in almost all cases, be traced back to the child’s early experiences in connection with its parents and in its home.
The child is like a flower, and the banks where it grows are its world—its home and the friends with whom it comes in contact; the sky above is the surrounding love on which it is dependent, and to which it looks up as the flower to the sun for gladness and for life. What I mean is this: the child has desires and impulses of its own, but it reflects the changing needs and atmosphere of the small world in which it lives, and is terribly dependent on that world. It is forming and selecting a character. It very largely tries what the effect is of different kinds of conduct—different characters. The child does not itself know what it is or would wish to be. Whenever there is, as often there must be, a mistake made, a wrong step taken—a conflict inevitably occurs, and must find some quick response in childish naughtiness; otherwise dullness and unhappiness will arise; and this, if continued, will tend to bring the dangerous condition of the repressed and introverted child.
We have established now that the love-life of the child starts at a very early age; it begins in the home, and I want to investigate this love-life. To do this we must examine with some care the child’s emotional relationships to the members of his family.
These relationships are not as amicable or peaceful as at first sight would appear. At a very early age jealousy as well as love stirs in the baby’s soul. This may surprise you. But I would ask you for a moment to consider the baby’s position. The child is in a small shut-up world with its mother. At first she occupies all its life. She is the earliest love object and of supreme importance in the infantile constellation. Everything starts from her. She is the source of nutrition and as such the first object towards which the hunger-wish is directed. She is also the supplier of warmth, of comfort, of rest—the personification of shelter and happiness—the starting point of all those interests of the child which lie outside its own body. Who can wonder at the child’s possessive feelings in relation to its mother. But we have seen already, in an earlier essay, how the superfluous father comes as an intruder into this mother-child circle. And it is in this way jealousy begins to awaken, at a very early age, and sometimes is almost unbelievably active in the baby soul. For these feelings will increase if the baby is a boy, and the love of the mother may grow to great intensity, which coupled with the jealousy of the father may work great evil, especially if the mother is unwise, too tenderly solicitous, too possessive in her love, herself neurotic. In the case of the girl the position is different. The baby fixation upon the mother is, as a rule, relieved with growth, as a part of the love-fund is transferred to the father. Sometimes this does not happen, especially when the jealousy of the little girl is roused, usually by a brother or sister more loved by the mother than herself. Then, indeed, a fixation happens, either in a too passionate tenderness for the mother, which, persisting acts as an insurmountable hindrance in the later life in preventing the normal out-going of love to a member of the opposite sex. I know of one such case and it may make my meaning plainer if I tell it to you. A little girl was born in a home where there was already a brother, passionately loved by a too good mother. The little girl soon felt, for no one feels so quickly as a little child, that the brother had a place of greater importance than herself. She did not hate outwardly this brother, had she done this all might have been well, as she would have gained relief in expression. She developed the usual device of the unhappily jealous child and took to phantasy making—pretending that she had another mother, or, at other times, that she was doing some wonderful deed, being very clever, very good, very beautiful, so as to gain the love and admiration of her mother. This was the inner life of make-believe. The outer life was one of continuous nervous trouble, which culminated in St. Vitus’s Dance. What is, however most interesting, is the later love-life and the startling way it reflects this early emotional conflict. This child is now a woman nearing thirty, very charming, very nice-looking; but she is utterly unable to settle on her love-mate. Engagement has followed engagement, in each case the lover has been discarded for no adequate reason. In all other connections of life capable and good, she behaves in her love affairs with a capricious unkindness, very difficult to pardon if one did not understand.
It may be worth while to refer to another case known to me. Two daughters, with a mother and father between whom there was trouble, the father having an affection for another woman. Though the trouble was most carefully hidden from the little girls it formed the decisive factor in their lives. It is not clear to me whether the love-object was the father, though I think that this was so. It was, however, the mother who was, as, indeed, usually she is, the central figure in this nursery drama. Both children suffered jealousy, probably of the lady loved by the father, transferred to the mother. The effect was directly opposite on each daughter. The elder, stronger and more forceful charactered girl developed a passionate rebellion against the mother, a specially sweet and long-suffering woman, of so violent and unreasonable character that she could not live at home; while the other child was the absolute type of the perfect daughter, self-sacrificing and passionately loving. But why this case is interesting is that it was the good child who suffered while the bad child triumphed. The rebellious daughter was able to establish her own adult life, to work successfully and to marry happily; the dutiful daughter lost her own power to live and to love, and was not liberated even by the death of the mother. I would ask you to note this very specially as it is exceedingly important. A too great devotion and anxious excess of tenderness on the part of any one, but especially on the part of a child to a parent, covers always, and even under the most improbable circumstances, as when it appears that there is the closest sympathy and harmony of will, an intense hostile tendency. And because vice will not be choked by virtue, this over submissive state is much more dangerous and likely to destroy the springs of life than open hostility.
We have much less need to be afraid of the future for the rebellious, even the unkind and ungrateful child, than for the good and devoted child who apparently knows no will but ours, and lives in outward perfect submission. Every parent who is wise will recognise such a state as one of the greatest danger, and at any cost to herself will separate herself from the child. Mind, I do not mean send the child away. That plan may, indeed, be tried, but often, especially with sensitive children, the absence will but forge the fetters firmer. Something like this happens whenever a child who goes to school, is continuously homesick and becomes ill, not necessarily with a specified illness, but grows nervous, fails in work and in play. Such a mother has before her, perhaps the hardest task in parenthood. She has to take the child home and dissipate and send from herself the over-tender love, accepting in its place the rebellious hatred that it covers. Does she fail in this task of sacrifice, made necessary, remember, by some early mistake in the management of the child, she is simply using up for herself the energy of love, which her child ought to have to use for its own life.
I trust these two cases will have made plainer to you the kind of difficult problems that have to be met by parents. I do not think there is any family where they are not present. There are many variations, and the strength of the difficulty as well as the permanent nature of the harm suffered by the child, depends almost wholly on the wisdom and the knowledge of the mother, and, even more, on the extent to which she has been able to understand her concealed wishes and her own love-history from her childhood’s days and free herself from its heritage. You will see, I think, without my waiting to point out how complex the position is, and how hard is the task of the mother to guide the early emotional life of her children. It is obvious how easily mistakes may be made.
Hardly less difficult is the position of the father, who is at once the intruder in the family and the supporter of it. To the child, in the ordinary home, he is the final authority. He occupies the position of a god or a ruler. He is feared and rebelled against, also he is reverenced. Any omission of these qualities, and especially the last, is fatal to the child. Without this father reverence, and in absence of his needed authority, there arises an arrogant disposition that controls all the later character. As has been recognised by all modern psychologists, there is much of the childish attitude of the boy to his father in the later relations of the follower to his ruler, of the worshipper to his god, of the schoolboy to his school-master.
Every boy looks forward to the day when he can escape the rule of the father and himself usurp his power. I think you will find here the secret spring of all later rebellion against authority, either in the boy or in the man. I must give another warning. Again, it is when these childish feelings of rebellion, jealousy and hate are hidden, and work in the child’s soul without his knowledge, that the greatest harm is done.
In this connection, I may recount the case of a boy who grew out of babyhood shewing unusual affection for his step-father. He was also too much attached to his mother—being in that most unfortunate position of an only and too-much-considered child—and in consequence suffered from strongly jealous feelings towards the step-father. In this way a conflict was aroused between love and hate, and serious nervous symptoms arose. The origin of the trouble was first discovered at about ten years, when the boy developed a very passionate hatred against God. He was overheard one day swearing on his toy sword to devote his life to killing God. As he had not been brought up in an over-religious home, and had hardly ever been taken to Church, this vehement hatred, which continued for some time, was noticed as unusual. Now the specialist consulted about the nervous symptoms at once found in this God-hatred a projection of the very common boyish hatred to the father. The parents learnt that this was a sign of health, an effort the boy was making to rid himself of an unbearable inward trouble.
I would emphasise the necessity of parents having the right knowledge and the love that will enable them to recognise what is important in the development of character. Too little attention is given by parents to the spontaneous utterances of children: it is these that will give the clue to what is troubling the child. Questions never get direct and real answers. It is what the child brings out unconsciously that should be noted; his wishes hidden, as a rule, under some symbol, that the parent unaided, may find very difficult to interpret. We are too apt—and in this mothers are the worst sinners—to consider their children as unthinking beings. Always, I believe, children know more than we credit to them. This is true, in particular, of all emotional states. As I have tried to make plain, it is these emotions acting and interacting in connection with the home relations which are of lasting importance. Mothers who even in the nursery overforce the emotional growth of their little ones, with the unceasing demands of an over-demonstrative and unhealthy tenderness; fathers, who, themselves too arrogant for power, allow their boys and girls no independent possession of their own lives—such parents are the destroyers of their children. Their thoughtlessness and ignorance create problems that are tragedies of pain to children, and leave them marred, and often maimed, for their conflict with life.
I am prepared for an objection. You may some of you be thinking that this picture I have drawn for you of nursery tragedies is coloured from my imagination and without sufficient relation to truth. “Little children,” you may be saying, “cannot feel these devastating adult passions. You are projecting on to them evils created by your own diseased mind.” And you turn back to your “angel innocence” belief, which must be true, at any rate, you are convinced in the case of your own child.
But may I tell you this: you must not come to these problems of the child with an already fixed conviction that they do not exist; because this may well be, not because they are not there—active even in your own nursery—but because you shut your eyes determined not to see them. You think this about their not being present, because you want to think it, not because it is true. Also it is very easy even for the wisest parent to be led astray; for the child is the most accomplished actor, and is always hiding its real self from you.
You see the child has truly a very hard part to play, a part it can lay down only when no grown-ups are by. In surroundings very opposed to its own desires or its primitive needs, while still a savage in emotions, it has to pretend to be what you think it is, to do what you think it ought to do, and like what you think it ought to like. It has filled me often with wonder and admiration to see the really brilliant way in which even the youngest children play up to the angel-role forced upon them by grown-ups. Much naughtiness and many violent unexplained tempers are really a breakdown in this part. The right cue is forgotten at the right moment, or the correct entrance is missed. And I feel it very necessary to emphasise to you that the naughty child is not so much being naughty as being himself. He rushes at you with a knife, not because he is in a temper, but rather the temper is the liberating key which allows his real desire to kill you to break through the barricade of civilised desires that you are building around him. And it is very necessary for the grown-up to understand the intense satisfaction of creative strength which the child gains by this breaking out of his real self—a satisfaction that is greatly marred, it is true, and even turned to pain, by the consciousness of knowing he has broken adult rules of behaviour, been a naughty boy and grieved you. Always there is this conflict going on between his primitive egocentric desires and the demands of the adult world in which he has to learn to live. It is this conflict, and his success and failure in it, which determines his growth. More and more he has to learn to give up his own desires and subordinate his own will. Yet, I am not sure if his repentence, when he fails, is altogether good for him. Certainly, if it is excessive, and if it occurs too frequently, it weakens the force of life. And it is most urgent of all to remember that the parent, or nurse, or teacher, by constantly requiring from the uncivilised child the standard of conduct right for the civilised adult may, and most frequently does, produce a strain which turns the creative force of life back upon itself. It is ever thus in life when we draw back too hastily or too much coerced, from any spontaneous expression of emotion; the energy gathered for the direct expression flows back impotent. I believe that many a creative artist is destroyed in the civilising process of the child being turned into the good boy or girl.
And this brings me to a question of the most urgent importance to all parents and teachers who attempt to guide the emotional development of a child; to go slowly, and never to force an outward practice of virtue from the child, if that particular stage of virtue has not been reached. We do not expect the child to read until it has learnt to read, nor to calculate and work sums before it understands the use of figures; we do not expect it to walk until it has stumbled and fallen many times, nor to use its tiny hands with precision until it has broken many objects. Why then should we expect it to be good without learning to be good? And especially, I ask, why should we demand a standard of emotional behaviour much in advance of anything to which we ourselves have attained?
For in truth every child has a twisted and most difficult path to travel in order to reach the standard of conduct expected by the adult world. Few parents realise at all the harm that so readily may be done, from any over-hastening on the road to virtue, to the child, sensitive, responsive to every suggestion, most liable to injury; who is always balanced between the desire to be a dirty, little savage, like himself, or a clean well-behaved person, like a grown-up. For what gives every adult so tremendous a hold over the child is his never ceasing desire to push forward to a stage above what he is at. Always he is pulled in two directions, forward to effort and good conduct and the real world of action and of grown-ups, and backward towards ease and self-pleasing and the dream-world of the child, in which he thinks only of what he wants himself. If we hurry him too much there will be a regression: the uncivilised trait that has not been got rid of by experience of its uselessness and voluntarily been cast aside, will be thrust down deep into the psyche, where its unrealised power sends up primitive and uncivilised wishes, which will certainly mar the adult life, even if they do not wreck it.
It is not from sheer “contrariness” or “nastiness” that children develop “bad habits,” that they pick noses, bite nails, stammer, and other much worse things, or later are too shy or too boisterously self-assertive, or develop illness and morbid fears.3 Such symptoms may be replacements of infantile curiosities and interests which were denied their satisfaction by the mother’s warning, often harmful, however gently given, “that is not nice, darling.” In particular harm is caused by a too early checking of the child’s delight in messy things, making mud pies, playing with water, using hands instead of knife and fork, and other nasty messy habits. The particular habit may, and usually does, disappear, but the checked and thwarted energy is still potent and at any time in after life may re-appear clothed in a fresh dress of concealment.
All that can be done with the bad habit is to turn it into new directions of rightful energy. As, for instance, the messy child should be given heaps of plasticine or wax, and sand to play with. Similarly with the desire to play with water: this is a symbolic action by which the young child frees itself from some inner hidden trouble. I know of one case where a child until quite an advanced age, always after a relapse into bad and primitive behaviour, had a curious way of blowing water through long tubes. The result was highly satisfactory and never failed to bring the child back to good and social behaviour. As an example of the terrible harm that may be done by an over fastidious niceness of behaviour, I may cite a rather curious case I happen to know, where a mother, was so afraid of nakedness, and disliking the sight of her own body, that she actually put on a bathing dress when she had a bath even in the privacy of her own bath room. This mother had a son whose adult life was rendered miserable and his happiness to a great extent injured, by horrible and haunting obscene visions. Here, in very truth, the cleanness of the mother became the uncleanness of the son.
I must hasten on. I am bound to leave out much that might well be noticed, for the subject is very difficult and very wide. I hope, however, I have made clear to you the following truths:—
(1) That any education of children in sex that is to result in success in the after life cannot be fulfilled by the imparting of set and fixed lessons on sex-enlightenment, given either in the home or in the school. (2) That this education is concerned with the entire emotional life of the child. (3) That it is continuous and unceasing. (4) And that it is a work of such complexity that for even the wisest mistakes are certain and success uncertain.
Above all else, I am sure we have to avoid an easy and lazy optimism.
And with such perils awaiting the incautious, is it any wonder that the chief element of safety often is a negative one—non-interference? By non-interference the two chief factors leading to emotional disturbance and ill-health may almost certainly be avoided; thwarted wishes are not thrust back, and repressed to work harm in the psyche, causing mental and bodily ill-health which often does not manifest itself for many years; development is not hurried on too rapidly, so that necessary primitive stages of growth are omitted or hastened over too quickly, causing, not infrequently, in the later years of life, a regression backwards to primitive and uncivilised conduct.
When interference becomes necessary it must be given wisely and with due understanding of the child’s position. I mean it must be the right instruction for the special child at that stage of its growth—not at all what the adult thinks it ought to be taught or would like to teach it. There can be no fixed rules as to sex teaching; no maxims laid down that can safely be always followed.
Take, for instance, the one apparently simple matter of satisfying the child’s certain and right curiosity at the different stages of its growth, by telling it the facts of birth, and, as it grows older, explaining the difficulties that most certainly will arise in the mind of every boy and girl in regard to these questions. So far I have said little about this matter because most people say much; holding it as the one thing implied by sex education, whereas I regard it, as I have tried to make plain, as a limited, though certainly important duty in connection with that education, which should be fulfilled by parents, and within certain limitations, by teachers in the schools.
But here, again, I am bound to utter warnings. There must be no over-forcing of knowledge not sought for by the child, this is at least as injurious to the emotional growth as over-forcing is to the intellectual growth. Any one who has read Jung’s account of his analysis of little Anna, will know what I mean. Little Anna became troubled and nervous, worried about the birth of a little brother or sister (I forget which). Telling her the truth did not help her, and it took Professor Jung many months of patient work with the child to get to the bottom of exactly what was troubling her. The most urgent rule for the mother in this matter is this: never to arouse sexual curiosity but to watch for its spontaneous expression and always satisfy it when it is present. This of course is the same as saying, always tell the child all the truth it wants to know. The difficulty here, of course, is that so rarely is the child able to ask for the knowledge he (or she) wants.
What above all else it is necessary is for the mother to watch for the child’s unconscious betrayal of its own curiosity. I mean by this, that some unconsidered remark or act is the surest hope of finding just what part of the problem is troubling him (or her) at that time; in almost all cases there is a personal element of jealousy, unknown to the child or carefully hidden, which is directed against one or other parent, usually the father, or against some brother or sister. This is why the intellectual teaching of the facts of birth, though necessary, does not help very much and often disastrously fails.
As I am trying all the time to force upon you, the real sex education is an emotional education, that is why it is so difficult. I may make this plainer by means of an illustration which I give in my book on “Sex Education and National Health.” It was told me by a very wise mother of her way of dealing with her son, who was, I think, about fourteen years old. This son showed he was thinking, and was evidently worried, about the very small families of one or at the most two children, or the childless marriages, common among his mother’s friends. He did not, however, speak of his trouble directly; instead he beat round the question, somewhat in the manner of a shying horse. After this had gone on for some time, he one day asked his mother if her friends were more delicate (meaning, of course, more refined) than other people. His mother was aware of what was troubling him; she knew what he really wanted to know was whether married people lived in celibacy when they had not children. She wisely told him the plain facts and for him at that time curiosity was quieted.
A boy of nine had a dream which he told his parents. His mother was in a shop, and a man on a bicycle, dressed as an officer came along the road; he, the little boy, rushed to the bicycle, stopped it, flung the man off, and killed him. In telling the dream the boy said, “I prevented him getting to mother.” This dream is so clear that I need not wait to interpret it beyond saying that the father of the boy was an officer. It will cause no surprise to anyone, with even a rudimentary knowledge of the emotional troubles of children, to know that this boy developed serious nervous symptoms.
It has seemed worth while to record these two instructive little stories, as a means of illustrating the kind of incident which furnishes the guide with regard to the nature of the trouble to be looked for, and shows in the first case as well the kind of help a watchful and instructed parent can give to relieve the trouble prevailing in the minds of the young. Dreams should always be noted, they throw the sharpest light on the child’s emotional conflicts. I must again urge the necessity of the parent paying the closest attention to the child’s prattle, to watching carefully his games and his behaviour, for in this way only can the clue be found to make it possible to give the kind of instruction or treatment that is wanted. I may give a few instances. Such things as the frequent childish desire to sit up with father and mother, the calling for the mother at night under the plea of fear are very certain signs of active jealousy. Again the very usual unwillingness of the child to grow up arises out of the inability to meet the necessity of separating the self from the protective tenderness of the mother. The child is always tending to turn back to safety, and, if this is encouraged by the mother, the child in after life will be unable to meet the necessities of adult action. The too fond mother perpetuates the childhood of her son or her daughter.
What the parents can do is to watch the child, and to learn themselves, in order to have the knowledge to clear up difficulties as these appear, and then it may be possible to remove obstructions to growth. Further, they can place within the child’s reach the materials—the sand and clean messy things to play with—machines to pull to pieces, swords to fight with, dolls to play with—every child will need different materials, by which, to a certain extent, liberation can be found from their primitive instincts, by giving them a free and harmless expression. In fact the real work of the parent may be likened to that of the stage scene-shifter and property manager.
Parental power guides the early years of the child like a higher controlling fate. But when the boy or girl begins to grow up there begins also the conflict between the home attachments and the need to break away in order to free the growing soul from the spell of the family. It is the war between the generations. The frequent and often very deep depression of puberty arises from this struggle. And there are the many other, and often very disturbing, symptoms, which are rooted in the difficulty of the new adjustments. The boy or girl tries often to separate himself (or herself) as much as possible from his family; he (or she) may even estrange themselves from their parents but inwardly this only binds them more firmly to the family ties. The outward break must be regarded as a dangerous sign of the inner conflict which the unselfish wisdom of the parents ought to be able to aid.
I cannot follow this important matter further. But I would wish to say that this is the time for the teacher to step forward and take up the work begun by the parent. The parents at this period are often hindrances to the child, they must push their children away from them in order to help the growing souls to gain their liberation.
The uncertain and, as I fear they may seem, unsatisfactory conclusions that must result from any honest inquiry into this difficult question of helping the young at the start of their life’s journey, is due in part to the fact that, even yet, and in spite of all the new knowledge that has been gained in the last few years, we know very little about the child’s emotional processes. Unfortunately our knowledge is not sufficient to make it possible for any dogmatic statements to be placed even tentatively before parents. There can be no ready-made prescriptions, no certain cures. We do not even know where the greatest trouble lies, whether it is in the parents and the teachers—the adults who fail to understand the child; or in the child, who fights away from the understanding that those who love and train him are able to offer. We do know, however, that the difficulties on the part of the child are very great—much greater than most of us (whether we are parents or teachers)—satisfied in an easy grown-up optimism, have cared to realise. In many ways we—the adults—the parents and the teachers, we who are a generation behind the children and already have been through the long, struggling, upward journey, by which they are now travelling, ought to manage our love and our training for them more carefully, more sympathetically, and more intelligently. I say intelligently, because the sins committed in love against children are more lastingly harmful than many of the sins committed under neglect or even under unkindness.
Thus, the final word I have to say to parents in regard to their children is this:
Do not love your children too possessively.
Try to understand and respect them—realise their existence as individuals with interests and needs apart from yourself. If necessary send them from you. Do not love your children for your own satisfaction, but for their good, and to help them to establish, with as little disaster as possible, their own lives.
SEX INSTRUCTION
THE AGE AT WHICH KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BE GIVEN
A story is recorded of a father and mother in ancient Greece, who, being concerned for the welfare of their only son, went to a renowned teacher and asked him to educate and take full charge of their child. “How old is your son?” questioned the teacher.
“Just three!”
The sage shook his head. “I am sorry but you have come to me too late: the boy’s character is decided already.”
I was reminded of this most instructive story as I read the account of the evidence given by the Rev. the Hon. Ed. Lyttelton, before the Birth Rate Commission of the National Council of Public Morals. For while I agree wholeheartedly with the late headmaster of Eton College as to the necessity of instructing the young in the facts of sex, I disagree, with his view as to the method of the teaching and, even more I disagree emphatically, as to the age at which instruction should begin.
Dr. Lyttelton holds that the first lessons should be given at the age of nine years, when the boy ought to be taught the facts of maternity, this knowledge to be supplemented by further teaching at the age of twelve or thirteen explaining the even more important (for the boy) facts of paternity.
Now it is here that I venture to disagree, and think that Dr. Lyttelton has fallen into the very common error of underestimating the child’s intelligence and boundless curiosity. It is in the very early nursery days that sex education is most urgently needed. To wait until the age of nine years has been reached is often to wait too late. In a vast number of cases, it is locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen.
In all children the activity of the intelligence begins to work at a very early age, and parents, who are not willfully blind, must know that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive desire to know many elementary facts of life, which are dependent upon sex. The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know where “the new baby comes from.” A child of four or even younger, may begin to ask questions on this matter quite simply and spontaneously. The degree of curiosity, as also the frankness with which it is expressed, will differ, of course, in different children, but I am certain this curiosity is present and at times active in all children. If they do not question their elders, they will certainly puzzle over the matter themselves; often they will talk with older companions, and gain the information they are seeking in the worst possible way.
Thus the first teacher of the child must be the mother, the one who is most constantly with the child, tending him in washing, undressing, and in all the daily needs of his little body. It is the mother who ought to be the child’s supreme trainer.
Few of us understand the confusion and hurt that may be caused by a mother’s stupid silence and even more stupid hints and evasions and made-up fables. The false stories of babies brought by the doctor or the stork, or a little sister or brother found under the gooseberry bush are never believed. While the fantastic ideas of birth, that the child makes up for himself, fix their untruth into the immature minds. And afterwards they cannot be checked, owing to childish concealments, which always spring up so rapidly to meet any expression of adult reticence. These birth-fantasies, though the child seems to out-grow them, are not really forgotten but remain active in the unconscious mind. In this way, trouble is often started that will be determinative of the gravest evils in the later adult life.
Parents are greatly to blame for not answering the questions of their children, and being blind to their natural curiosity. And I would emphasise again that this curiosity is present even when no questions are asked. There need be no spoken words to make the child feel that its questions are discouraged. All adults are surprisingly ignorant of the affectability of children—their quick response to every kind of influence.
In the case of the birth of another child—an usurper who takes the older child’s place—this affectability is exceedingly acute on account of the emotional disturbance, in excitement and possible jealousy. And by means of the adult attitude, the very certain interest and investigation of the child into what is happening may so easily become confused and connected with what is shameful and wrong; and the trouble is aided, and usually in the worst possible manner, by the sharpest observations and deductions made by the child from unconsidered actions and overheard remarks of parents, and of servants and other adults—none of whom have any idea of the child’s watchfulness or his curiosity in this matter.
We think little children are not interested in birth because we do not want them to be interested. And they, with the almost uncanny sagacity which children show, understand this desire only too well and too quickly.
I had a striking illustration of this curious adult blindness quite recently. Two mothers, who were sisters, were pregnant at the same time. Each mother told me privately that her children were not interested in the event or in any way curious, but that her sister’s children were curious and wanting to find out what was happening. It would have been useless to tell these mothers the truth. Yet both of them were intelligent. They believed that their own children had no curiosity because they wished to believe this, not because it was true.
Thwarted curiosity is one of the most frequent causes of emotional disturbance in the first years of life. Do we not all know children who as they get older exhibit an unreasoning curiosity about everything, opening drawers, looking into the envelopes of other people’s letters, searching excitedly for what they do not want. We want to ask the question: Why does the child do this? What is it that urges him to act like a “Peeping Tom?” For he is urged. You will find this habit of needless prying almost impossible to check. It may persist into adult life. Do not we all know grown-ups who cannot refrain from prying, always curious, they are, on all occasions, seeking for knowledge they do not want.
This seeking action is symbolic. It implies that the search for the thing that is not wanted, the curiosity over something of no interest at all, is a substitute action for something that at one time was wanted—something about which knowledge was desired, and desired so much that it would not be denied. It was a curiosity so real that the thwarting of it has started emotional trouble of which these searching acts and persisting curiosity are the symbol or sign.
This substitute formation is one of the commonest emotional processes in children. The child pries, open drawers and letters, collects useless objects, aimlessly searches for knowledge he does not want because there is some knowledge he wants tremendously badly, but cannot speak about. That is why he persists in his habits of peeping and prying in spite of your scoldings and punishments. He must persist, unless you deaden his character so terribly by your ill-judged repression that even this substitute relief is closed. Your child will then, probably, find some other make-believe comfort; he will bite his nails, pick his nose, or other much worse habits may begin, or again the emotional disturbance may be so acute that it becomes impossible for the child to face, so that he fails in achieving any kind of symbolic replacement. The thwarted and emotionally over-charged curiosity is thrust back into the psyche where it remains a cause of ill-health of body and uncleanness of mind, until that time in the adult years, when the harvest of tares is reaped from the bad seed that has been sown.
The parents have the greatest responsibility, as I have said already. A child of four or even younger may begin to ask questions of its mother, simply and spontaneously. It is the child who must guide the parent. But again I would give warning. The mother must not be over-eager, or she will fall easily into the error of stimulating instead of quieting the child’s restless inquiring mind. The child at the age when such questions will first be asked and should be answered, will very quickly tire of any information that may be given to it. It will break off to run away and play and will interrupt the most beautiful and carefully prepared lessons. And if the mother is wise she will never go beyond the interest of the child, or the satisfying and nothing further, of the special curiosity which at that special time is occupying the child. If this course is pursued the child will probably continue to ask for information—though there can be no certainty that this desirable result will follow. But where such opportunities arise the right kind of sex instruction can be attempted. For the mother will be able to give answers in natural conversation, which will not force information not sought for by the child. When so treated, it will be found that children are not over-burdened by the subject, they will interrupt and break away from the answer to the question they have asked to speak about toy soldiers or dolls. This, to me, is the immense value of this form of teaching: the child has the information, and yet does not trouble about it when it is not to the point. Such a result can never be gained by means of set talks or fixed lessons, especially if these are mixed up with warnings, and much vague talk of things that the child neither cares for or understands.
I should, however, be giving a wrong impression if I left the matter here, so that this answering of children’s questions seemed to be a simple matter. It is not simple. For each child, as for each adult the problems of sex are personal problems. And the child whose problem is the hardest—who most urgently needs help, will hardly ever ask questions. Instruction in sex is not and never can be like teaching the child about other things. That is what so many of the modern advocates of sex education so entirely forget.
In every child, as I have tried to show you there are hidden conflicts of jealousy, of love, of hate, which determine beforehand its response to the teaching that is given by the parents.
I cannot here treat at all adequately this difficult question; it is one on which I have written elsewhere (Mother and Son, Sex Education and National Health, The Mind of the Naughty Child) I can say only what I have emphasised already that from the start to the end, sex education is an emotional education. That, of course, is why it is so difficult.
There is, in my opinion, too firm a belief in the efficacy of formal instruction. The way is not so easy as this to discharge our debt to the young. And sometimes I fear that parental talks about sex, in particular when such talks are delayed until the boy or the girl is reaching puberty, or until the time when the dangers of school life have to be met, involving, as it must, a sudden breaking through of the silence of years, may work for harm instead of for good. That this is so in the case of some boys and girls I know to be true. You see you cannot grow flowers in a soil choked already with weeds.
THE MYTH OF THE VIRTUOUS SEX
A day or two ago I was passing one of the great London schools at the afternoon hour when the boys were released. I write “boys,” but among them were many of sixteen, seventeen, or even eighteen years who looked almost men.
On the street side, two flappers, quite young—not more, I should judge, than fifteen, stood with their faces pressed between the iron rails and watched the exit of the boys. Certainly they were not nice girls; they invited with smiles, they giggled, they ogled, they gestured. There could, I think, be no mistake as to the purpose of the girls.
I am glad to record that no single boy took the slightest notice of them.
Now this very unpleasant incident has set me thinking. I am oppressed with feelings of responsibility; yes—and also of shame. If I am to be honest I must accept here, as in all relations between the two sexes, the validity of the mans’ plea that rings—yes, and will continue to ring—through the centuries: “The woman tempted me!”
Now, though we may accept this responsibility in theory, most often we repudiate it in practice. From time to time—and the intervals are not long apart—efforts are made to pass new laws which are supported by many virtuous people—laws, whose one purpose is to increase the punishments of men for offences against young girls.
I am in whole-hearted sympathy with any changes in our law that will afford greater protection to young girls. I cannot, however, refuse to see the reverse side of the question. It is proposed to raise the age of consent for girls, while at the same time a woman is not to be held responsible for seducing a boy who is much younger than herself. This is unjust.
Why should we afford a period of protection longer for the girl than for the boy?
It may, of course, be argued that the boy is better able to look after himself. This is not true.
The girl grows up more quickly always than the boy; emotionally she is far more developed, and, therefore, should be more, and not less, responsible than he is. I have no doubt about this at all.
No boy knows very much about love until some girl or woman has taught him.
Of course, the view of the evil nature of men, and of women as always the victim, is one that can hardly fail to be pleasing to women, depending, as it does, on their moral superiority, which stamps them as Amazons of Purity, on the glorious mountain heights of virtue, from where they must send down climbing ropes and ladders, in the form of prohibitions and regulations and new laws, to pull men up out of the deep valleys of vice.
But if we inquire more honestly into this question of men’s sins, we shall find that it is not they who are wholly responsible. There is little difference between men’s virtue and women’s virtue.
Almost unceasingly in our streets women are tempting men.
Always there is the invitation near: “Come and make love to me.” To be provocative is the one simple rule of many women’s lives. Men’s admiration is a necessity to their very existence.
True, in the after results, the woman may be, and, indeed, often is, the victim—has to pay the heavier price; but at the start she is the leader of the assault.
The essential fact in every relationship of the sexes is the woman’s power over the man, and it is the misuse of this power that is the beginning of sin.
Do not think I am unfair. Most men, I know, are not only tolerant of women’s wiles; they like them. But most men succumb, I believe, against their will, and often against their inclination, to the tyranny of their own aroused passions.
Men’s chivalry, as well as their pride, has woven a cloak of silence on this question of the temptation they are so frequently called upon to resist and this silence has protected women—even the worst.
Let us alter our laws to help girls by all means. Yet, let us be just. There is such a thing as too much temptation for a boy—temptation that a woman has no right to give.
SENTIMENTAL TAMPERING WITH DIFFICULT PROBLEMS:
WITH SOME REMARKS ON SEX FAVOURITISM
It is sometimes difficult to have patience with the proposals that are brought forward, so frequently and with such persistent zeal, to amend our Criminal Law. One cannot doubt the sincerity of these efforts to improve our disordered moral conditions. But something more than good-will is required. There is such a thing as over-haste in righteousness.
Besides, the attitude taken by these scavengers of conduct is almost always sentimental and one-sided. It is also dishonest. I say so, because almost without exception, they fail entirely to meet the true facts of the evils they attempt to cure. As reformers they seem to have but one idea; if they have more, they keep them secret, for they agitate but for one object.
Morality is a word that has been wrested from its true meaning of the whole duty of man in his social character and limited to the one narrow application of sexual conduct. It is curious and significant. It is as if we transferred to others some judgment which unconsciously was imposed from within.
Yet obviously the strongest impediment against effective reform lies just here—in this blindness to reality; this separation from the truth. I need not wait to enlarge upon this further, it is impossible to contradict. To judge blindly is to judge upon a lie.
Would you ask me to give you examples?
There is, to take one illuminative instance, the long continued and still unsettled agitation for raising the age of consent for girls. Those who are chiefly eager for this reform invariably evince frenzied zeal, combined with the most curious and deplorable ignorance of the real facts. I cannot for a moment believe that they are in the least degree, consciously blind. But that does not alter the fact that they are blind. Instead of facing the situation squarely with knowledge and due consideration of all the complicated conditions, they ignore every thing they do not want to see. They wallow in sex-righteousness.
Consider again the controversy that raged now sometime back, with regard to the White Slave Traffic. The sudden frenzy. The unproved stories of the trapping of girls! The clamour for legislative measures! Every moral reformer became obsessed.
The instinctive attitude of the one-ideaed reformer had a unique chance of displaying itself, and one marvelled at the almost curious enthusiasm, mated to inexperience, with which the subject was approached. While the most offensive feature of the agitation was the sex-obsession, which gave rise to the silly notion of the helpless perfection of women and the dangerous opposite view of the indescribable imperfections of men. It is no exaggeration to say that every sense of reality was lost in white clouds of virtue.
I would wish to make it plain that I am not judging these questions either on one side or the other. What I desire to show is the danger of a prejudiced view. And the danger is particularly active in connection with all these attempts at changing the law, in order to give greater protection to women and girls, while, at the same time, boys are left unprotected.
This unpopular view of the need to protect the boy from the girl—the man from woman—the temptress of man—is not usually brought forward. Yet, it is a view of the situation, seen from a different side, that cannot be neglected. The evidence is overwhelming of girls of sixteen years and even younger tempting boys of the same age as well as those older than themselves. If in such cases the boy is to be punished and the girl treated as a wronged and helpless victim, not only will a great unjustice be done, but there will be a very certain danger of graver demoralisations.
This truth of the woman’s power, which depends upon Nature and not upon law, the supporters of a one-sided alteration of our criminal law too often fail to face.
I am reminded here of a little incident that happened many years ago. I had quarrelled seriously with a man, who before I had always liked and respected, for what I then considered was his light treatment of a certain girl who was my friend. She had written and told me her side of this occurrence.
Very well I recall what he said: “You don’t understand. She asked for it.” Then, when I pressed him further, he went on. “A man always treats a girl in the way she wants him to do.”
Now, one of the greatest troubles in connection with all sex-legislation to-day arises from this fact that women do not understand. They are inexperienced and in too great a hurry. They think they can cure old evils with quick penny-in-the slot reforms. There is still a chivalry that protects women and shields their ignorance. These illusions are maintained, even by men of the world, who are acquainted with all the complex difficulties. It is the romantic view, a kind of male blindness that nothing seems to cure. Women must be protected from men, who are the great offenders in all sexual sins. Often I have marvelled at the acceptance by men of a view of the sex-conflict so highly untrue, though flattering to women, depending as it does on their entirely unproved moral superiority.
And here I wish to ask your attention to a consideration of the question that is very rarely appreciated. I regard it as exceedingly important. Those who are possessed with a frenzy for protecting girls ought to remember that there is still greater necessity to protect boys. It is forgotten that the young girl is not usually in constant close relations with other men than her father and brothers. She has to be guarded only from the outside lover, whom in the first beginning of intimacy she could, if she wished, easily repel.
The reverse is the case with boys. In a sense, they cannot escape from situations of danger. At school, in lodgings, even at home, in sickness and also in health; on every occasion opportunities are provided that make abuse exceedingly easy. The part played in the sexual initiation of boys by servants, by lodging and boarding-house keepers, and by other women who have to tend, and feed and mend for them is much larger than is credited. It is folly to close our eyes to the evils that so often arise. Probably every man who is a seducer of women was himself first seduced by a woman.
In spite of the emancipation upon which women pride themselves, in spite of much theoretical knowledge, yes, in spite of social and rescue work—where, it should be noted, they hear the woman’s story but only in the rarest cases the man’s story—almost all women lead a shielded life. Much that happens is outside their experience—as long as they are virtuous. This sets definite limits to their knowledge and their power of comprehension. And this again explains the continued belief in the woman’s notion that, in all cases, the girl is the victim of the man.
It would be nearer the truth to reverse the position. Girls need to be taught their great and unavoidable responsibility. They should be trained to be protectors rather than to seek protection. Men will treat them as they want to be treated.
Let us now, for a moment, be practical and consider if there is any reason we can discover, which will explain why we hear so much more about the seduction of girls and the sins of men than we ever do about the other side—the tempting by women and girls, and the seduction of boys. The answer is simple. The boy will not talk about what happens to him if he is led into a sexual offence at an early age. This is true also to a large extent of the man. But the boy especially considers he ought to have known: also he is much more self-conscious. Then he expects to be blamed for not resisting, whatever the circumstances. He will probably not tell anyone, unless the girl does so, until years afterwards.
I know a schoolboy who was seduced by a woman relation years older than himself, in a very shameful way. This boy was of high character and very sensitive; he suffered in ways impossible to relate here, but he never told anyone until about ten years afterwards, when he told the woman he was to marry.
Now, if this case had been reversed and a young schoolgirl had been the victim of a male relative, I am fairly confident the fact would not have been concealed. Girls, even if not wholly innocent, almost always will tell, because it has at all times been allowed to them to blame the man. They thus can count on sympathy. This means much more than usually is reckoned with.
Let me give a less tragic instance of a different and humourous character. A schoolboy, about seventeen years old, was waiting for a motor-bus in which he was going home. He was a dreamy boy and a bus came up and, lost in his thoughts, he did not take it. He was brought back to reality by a girl accosting him. “I waited, too,” she said. “You, are glad arn’t you? You would like me to go in the bus with you.”
She smiled up at him: but he was not to be caught.
“I don’t care, the hell, what you do as long as you don’t expect me to pay your fare!”
That silenced her and sent her away. But how easily, had the boy been a less confident type, the incident might have taken a different course. And then, if disaster had followed, the boy would be blamed, the girl would be pitied. There is an enormous amount of sex unfairness.
I could recount many further cases in proof of how almost always it is the girl (or the woman) who takes the first steps in forming these friendships. Men, at least, will know that I speak the truth. And yet this fiction of the greater virtue of the woman is persistently maintained: while the man is condemned as being nearer the devil and the beast.
I know that the many horrible cases of criminal assault upon children will be quoted against me, in proof of the justice of this heavy condemnation of men. Please do not think that I am in any way unaware of the awfulness of these crimes. The protection of little children is the one matter on which I feel most deeply. But there can be no fair comparison between this class of crime and the ordinary cases of seduction, whether we believe it is the man who seduces the woman, or the other way round, the woman who tempts and excites the boy or the man. In the one case an unhappy and terrible degenerate is passion-driven into the commission of an atrocity, in the other there is, and, indeed, must be to some extent, a mutual purpose, usually with some calculation and a certain deliberate choice.
That is why it is so false to reality to regard the one partner as a helpless victim. It is really a position that is impossible and ridiculous. Are we to believe that all women are impotent and imbecile weaklings incapable of resisting men? The truth is that in slandering men we only slander women with the backward swing of the same blow.
THE SEDUCTION OF MEN
Quite recently an action has been brought in the High Courts by a wife against a woman for the seduction of her husband. It is the first time a charge of this kind has been heard in an English court of law, though, I believe, such actions are not unknown in the newer lands of America and Canada.
The case is one of very special interest, and opens up many questions that go right down to the deepest problems of the relationships of men and women.
As we should expect, the action failed. It was held that the man had not been seduced. He was not enticed away from his wife by “the other woman,” rather, it was the other way round. The man, not the woman, must be held responsible; she had yielded to him only at his desire, after persuasion and against her will.
But is this true?
As already in the two previous essays I have emphasised, perhaps over-emphasised, the accepted, very sentimental and peculiar judgment in all these cases. The woman the victim: the man the seducer. He the active sinner: she the passive sufferer. All the blame to be heaped on to him: all the pity to be given to her.
Really it is difficult, as so frequently I have stated, to have patience at this shelving of the real facts. It seems to be forgotten entirely how tremendous is the power of the woman in all love relationships. Why a man under the influence of a woman he loves is as easily led and as devoid of all will-power as a young child. Indeed, he becomes the child of the woman, as soon as, and for as long as, he loves her. He is her’s to make or to destroy. She strengthens him enormously or irreparably injures and weakens his resistance. She can hold him to the hardest duty and keep him in the fine path of right doing. It is she leads him, not he who leads her, into the easier ways of love.
Yes, it is women who shape the souls of men as it is women who gave them birth.
That is why this view of the man’s responsibility in love being greater than the woman’s is so singularly untrue. If we inquire at all truthfully into this question of seduction, it is obvious that not the man but the woman is the more responsible. For one thing, she knows so much more about love, from the beginning, and without being taught, than a man ever knows. Most often it is the woman who takes the first step, breaks down the first barrier. Always there is the invitation which unceasingly she gives, whether consciously or unconsciously expressed—“Come and love me.”
Her dress, her movements—all invite love. To be provocative is however, little she knows it, the one fixed simple rule of her life. In the end, and indeed, sometimes very soon the position may be reversed, but at the start assuredly the woman holds the cards and can make the first move in the love-game. She is the pursuer, far more often and far more truly, than the pursued. Too often she directs a continuous attack.
Her relation to the man is comparable to that of a magnet to a heap of iron filings.
Love to a woman so often, when she is young, is less an affair of passion than of excitement. It gratifies her insatiable desire for power. The boy or the man more certainly is driven by love. This is his principal motive. While the girl often starts on the adventure for the sake of experiment and because she wants amusement. She pursues love almost as a game. Passion plays a part only in the second degree. Not infrequently, in the midst of love, the coldness of her heart is plainly apparent.
This may seem a hard saying. I believe it is true.
Seduction as the crime of the man alone cannot, I am convinced, be accepted, in any case without great caution. It is, as I have said several times already, so comfortable to place the sins of sex on men. But I doubt very much if any woman can be seduced against her will.
I must insist again that excitement and escape from dullness, as also the joy in receiving presents and having “a good time,” are the principal motives that first lead girls into illegal relations.
Sometimes it is worse than this.
Many women, seducers of men—women who draw men from their wives and their homes, and their duty, are nothing but cold experimentors. They are speculators in love. They do this for delight of power, in the same way as men are speculators in business.
Perhaps the position is unavoidable.
The subjection of man is a necessity to some women’s existence. Love is to them a similar feeling to love of the chase. They cannot keep from pursuing men. It is, as I have said, an expression of the ever increasing demand for excitement. Conquest in love gives to women the opportunities for the fulfilment of themselves, which men gain in many different departments of life.
But no man, I think, could satisfy completely the craving for dominion, which the delusive humility of his desire awakens in this type of woman. Then when she commits the error, from a womanly point of view, of hunting down her man; leading him on by helping him too much—seducing him, instead of waiting for him and drawing him slowly and unconsciously by her love, she awakens the same instinct for dominion and thirst for excitement in the man. It is then that the man becomes a seducer of other women. It is the lust to devour, to crush, quickened into being by suggestion. It explains, I believe, the cruelty of all wild love.
PLAYING WITH LOVE
Many girls to-day try deliberately to keep love light. Shrewd enough to understand the heavy claims of serious love affairs that lead to marriage, they prefer flirtations of weeks only—episodes that are a secret and, as it were, detachable part of their lives.
It is a dangerous state.
Emotional power and the enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life are dried up by such constant stimulation. A new diet of excitement must always be provided. The object of life is to cheat time and to crowd out boredom. Whatever is going on they must be in it from a jazz dance or river picnic to a church bazaar.
In the old days it used to be only duties for girls—now it is rights and pleasure with the demand to be left to make their own lives. There is a turning away from duty; a hatred of anything dull.
Girls as I have just shown you want love as an experience and to provide the always desired excitement. They do not want to marry and to settle down.
Thus while condescending to fascinate men, while deliberately seeking attention these young women still hold themselves in hand. Intending to exploit life to the uttermost they find love amusing, but they fight always against its being a vocation.
There is calculation and dangerous hardiness in their attitude to their lovers.
Their transitory love affairs are, indeed, regarded in very much the same way as formerly they were regarded by the average young men—as enjoyable and thrilling incidents of which they are ashamed only when they are talked about and blamed.
With no sex conscience, these wantons of excitement have no consciousness of womanly responsibility. Each new affair affords an eagerly snatched tribute to a colossal and restless vanity.
This is one type of woman who to-day plays with love.
There are as well other girls of a different character, less concerned with pleasure, less consciously vain, more emotional, and to men more interesting. They are incessantly thinking of their own personalities; and, for this reason, they are equally, even if not more, harmfully destructive in the utter misery they often create.
These are the girls who are always emotion hunting.
Impossible to tell what are their pseudo-feelings. A sort of sterile passion, which expends itself in their failure to know, and find, what they want.
They do not wish consciously to escape the responsibilities of marriage; indeed they seek unceasingly the perfect man to whom they may surrender their freedom. But they suffer from a formless discontent that rots into every love and prevents them finding satisfaction.
Consumed with haggard restlessness, such girls pass their days in a dangerous state of expectancy and nervous tiredness. Eternally they are unsatisfied without knowing why.
Born spiritual adventurers, these worshippers of emotionalism, attitudinising and thinking perpetually of themselves, desire at all cost a position in the limelight. They love romantically, but rarely are they strong enough to obey their inclinations. Such girls are out on an eternal quest; and, every now and again, they believe they have found the ideal man they are seeking. Then they discover they have not found him, so their search is taken up anew. While often their insistent egoism, which causes them to ignore the rights of others and all social obligations, drives them into dangerous corners; does not give them a chance; turns them to use mean weapons of deceit; forces them into false situations that too often close around them like a trap.
Many other nobler types, besides these two, have been playing with love.
Girls of profound and steadfast emotional nature are rare. The great majority of girls certainly are not entirely light-minded, but they are less serious, more noisily determined to do what they want, to get what they can both out of men and out of life. They are very like children, playing at desperate rebels, who take up weapons to use far more deadly than they know.
All this playing with love is detestable—all of it. It bears witness to a poverty of emotion and a shameful shirking of responsibility.
Women are the custodians of manners in love. The future rests with them. And this responsibility cannot safely be set aside, dependent as it is on forces active long before human relations were established—forces which press on women back and back through the ages.
Yes, woman has laid upon her the sacred necessity of seriousness in all that is connected with Love. It is a duty imposed upon her by Nature, and one that she cannot escape. That is why there is so much danger in these restless neurotic years, when girls are too excited to be serious.
