You hear the sound of sobbing in the distance, and as it draws nearer and grows more distinct you recognise the voice. A moment later the door flies open and there stands your boy, crying as though his heart would break. Little rivulets of tears are trickling down his dust-covered cheeks, and on the side of his face is the mark of a cruel blow.

Between sobs he tells you that the boy across the street did it. Why? He doesn’t know why; he wasn’t doing anything at all, “jes’ playin’ around.”

You wipe the tears away and kiss the hurt, and as you note the quivering lip and the angry bruise, a wave of indignation swells within you. Glancing out through the window you see the boy across the street, cavorting triumphantly on the curb. How much bigger and coarser and rougher than your boy he appears—isn’t it always so? Your little chap has come to you partly for sympathy, but mainly for retaliation. He shows you his wound and points to the boy who did it. He has been hurt, he has been grievously wronged, and he has come to you whom he has learned to look upon as his one never-failing protector and friend. You spring to your feet, fired with an overwhelming desire to rush into the street and avenge the wrong that has been done your child.

Madam, one moment! Don’t do it. The retaliation you contemplate may be justice so far as the tormentor across the street is concerned, but it is a rank injustice to your own boy. I want to tell you on the authority of an ex-boy that if you would serve your son best, you will not interfere.

None but a mother knows the trials and heartaches of the fighting period in a boy’s life; and none but a father realises what an important part that period plays in the shaping of the boy’s career. The period runs approximately from the ages of five to ten. Prior to that the child is too young to indulge in it, and subsequently he is too old to tell about it. In the interim these affairs of the street are of daily occurrence and are to the mother a source of annoyance as mysterious as they are harrowing.

The right way to deal with this problem may not be the easiest way but it is the simplest, and it is the best for the boy. It is to let him alone. It is to teach him from the very beginning that outside of his own dooryard he must protect himself with his own hands. Have a distinct understanding that if he gets himself into a fight, he must get himself out of it. Tell him that by helping him you would only make more trouble for him because he would get to be known as a coward, and all the boys would annoy him more than before.

I went further than this with my boy. I told him that I did not approve of fighting, but that if he were forced into it, I would expect him to hit out hard and fast and defend himself blow for blow. I provided him with a punching-bag and a set of boxing-gloves and I showed him how to use them. He was just five when I established this rule and in one year it proved itself.

At six we started him off to school, and a few days later he came home one afternoon with a discoloured eye.

But there was no tear in it. He threw his books in a corner and ran, whistling, out to play. At dinner that evening my curiosity got the better of me, but I assumed indifference.

“Where did you get the eye, old chap?” I asked casually.

He looked up sheepishly, smiled and pushed his cup toward me.

“Some more milk, if you please, father,” he said. The fighting problem had been solved forever.

The mother who coddles her boy shows him a double unkindness. She not only increases his boyhood miseries, through making him the particular target of other boys, but she retards the development of his self-reliance and his manliness.

I give the affaire d’honneur an important place in this chapter because it is one of the things about boys that mothers often misunderstand and quite generally undervalue.

Of course, the cardinal precept which should form the foundation of the character structure is—Truth. Combine in him manliness and truthfulness, and the other essential traits of good character will spring from these two like shoots from the trunk of a healthy tree. Truth-telling should be made a matter of habit with the boy. Have you not among your acquaintances men, women and children who are habitual prevaricators, people who make misstatements continuously, absolutely without purpose and without malice? Lying has become a habit with them. By the same token truth-telling can be and should be so instilled in the boy as to become automatic. He should never be punished for a falsehood as you might punish him for disobedience. The problem of disobedience, which I discussed in a foregoing chapter, is a matter of psychology from beginning to end. Truth-telling becomes so in the end but is a matter of morals at the beginning. It can be formed into a fixed habit by treating it morally and by keeping everlastingly at it until the result is achieved. You cannot beat a boy into hating a lie, but you can shame him into it.

It is natural for a very young boy to seek to evade responsibility for an offence by disclaiming it. The first time he does this he must be made to know that, however serious the offence may be, it is as nothing compared to the lie that he seeks to cover. I did not go so far as to promise my boy immunity for infractions that he frankly confessed; but I did make it a rule unto myself that he should never suffer through confession, and I did invariably commend him, in the highest terms, when he told the truth under conditions that made it peculiarly praiseworthy. An example: I find my inkstand tipped over and a great black stain upon the carpet. I summon the boy and ask him sternly: “Who did that?” My manner is threatening. The offence is grave. He is thoroughly frightened, but after a moment he answers, falteringly, “I did.” Instantly my attitude changes from admonitive to commendatory. I say to him: “This is an awful thing that you have done. The carpet is spoiled. The stain will always be there. Nothing can remove it. But you have told the truth and that is the finest thing that a boy can do. As bad as this is, I would rather you would do it a hundred times than tell one lie.”

If, on the other hand, he falsifies, I grieve before him. I tell him that nothing that a boy can do is as bad as a falsehood: that a lie is the very meanest and lowest thing in the world. I tell him that I fully forgive him for spilling the ink, but it is almost impossible to forgive him for that lie. I leave him to meditate upon it.

I never allow an untruth to pass without bringing a blush of shame to the boy’s cheek. I never let a lie show itself without holding it up as a thing to be despised. The boy first gets to fear a falsehood, then to despise it—and finally to forget it. And by forgetting I mean that it passes beyond the pale of things considerable. Truth has become a fixed habit.

Having accomplished this, you have given your boy a solid foundation upon which to rear the structure of good character.

I believe in sending the boy to the church. Regardless of the parents’ attitude toward religion, I believe it is their duty to give the boy the benefit of a church environment while he is still a boy. Irrespective of sect or creed, he is sure to absorb some good in an atmosphere of divine worship. In later years he may depart from the precepts there learned, but the early teachings and associations of the church or the Sunday school will leave their influence in some degree, and whether it is much or little, it will never be for anything but good.

I give my boy the Bible to study and the Golden Rule to live by. I teach him to speak or think deprecatingly of no religious faith, and show him that all are working for the betterment of man.

From his infancy I guard him from superstition and discourage the fear of fancied dangers. I do not believe it is necessary for a boy, at any age, to fear the dark. Mine never did. Fear of the dark is born of suggestion, and he has been successfully guarded from any word that would couple darkness with danger. Throughout his entire childhood he never sensed the usual terrors of the unlighted room and the darkened passage. I would never confirm even the Santa Claus myth, though I did not dissuade him from it, because I well remember the added joy it brought to me when I was a boy. When the question was put to me I said: “I shall not tell you because the mystery of Christmas adds much to your enjoyment of it. Believe it or not, as you choose; I have nothing to say.” With this pleasant exception he has never asked me a question that I have not answered truthfully and as completely as I could.

I live close to my boy, and by so doing I find his level and see his narrowed horizon as he sees it. When he was only six we lived together in the woods, slept under the same blanket, fished and sailed and took our daily swim together. Beginning at that early age we have sat by the campfire at night and talked of the stars and the moon and the strange noises of the wood. Nowhere can you get as close to your boy as you can out under the sky with only Nature about you. It would be a splendid thing if every father could devote a few weeks each year to “roughing it” with his boy. Besides the opportunities it offers for community of thought, it brings out a phase of the boy’s character that under other conditions might never come to the surface. I recall one evening, as the boy and I were lolling on the bank of a river, how he astonished me by exclaiming: “See! What a beautiful sunset!” He had seen the sun go down many times over the housetops of the town, but it needed the solitude of that particular place and time to give him an appreciation of its beauties. Unexpectedly there was disclosed to me an Æsthetic side of his nature that I had never known.

These are opportunities that open peculiarly to the father, and he should take advantage of them.

I believe that every boy should be encouraged to acquire a college education and that he should be made to pay for it. We hear a good deal of talk nowadays about the lack of real advantage that the college man has over the other fellow. Thousands of college men fail in their struggles with the work-a-day world, and often you find a degree man working in a subordinate capacity to a man of his own age who missed a college education. It is a fact, too, that the honour men of our colleges rarely distinguish themselves in their chosen professions. But none of these things prove anything, because the personal equation has to be reckoned in. I believe that the young man who takes his college course and takes it seriously is better fitted for the work of life than he would otherwise have been. The unschooled man who succeeds would have succeeded with more ease and to a higher standard had he been schooled. The college man who fails would have failed more miserably had he been untrained. I believe that failure of an educated man is in spite of his education, and not because of it.

If you want to make sure that your boy is going to use his college education to the best advantage, let him pay his way. The failures that our institutions of learning turn out are not the men who work their way through; they are the sons of the affluent, the little brothers of the rich. The boy who drives the hay-rake or works behind the counter of his father’s store in vacation time is rarely found among the derelicts. Let the boy share the cost with you, and you need have no fear that either the time or money spent for education will go for naught.

From the first time that he trots over to the candy store with his penny, the boy should be trained to know the intrinsic value of money. Encourage him in moderate frugality, not because the accumulation of money is a desideratum, but because profligacy is bad for the morals.

Whether it is the mother or the father who takes especial charge of the boy, or both, they should aim steadfastly to have his complete confidence always. He should be made to feel that they are not only dearer to him, but nearer to him than any one else in the world.

If a condition of implicit confidence can be established between you and the boy, you can depend upon him to be receptive of the good which you seek to charge him with.

Then, with truth as his anchor, no storm of the outer world can sweep him beyond the influence of home. The bulwark of the good character that you have builded will stand throughout his lifetime.