As soon, however, as your commands become positive instead of negative, the difficulty of meeting the situation begins to disappear.  It is usually much easier to tell the child why he should do a thing than why he should not do its opposite.  For example, it is much easier to make him see that he ought to be a helpful member of the family than to make him understand why he should stop making a loud noise, or refrain from waking up the baby.  There is something in the child which in calm moments recognizes that love demands some sacrifice.  To this something you must appeal and these calm moments, for the most part, you must choose for making the appeal.  The effort is to prevent the appearance of evil by the active presence of good.  The child who is busy trying to be good has little time to be naughty.

[Sidenote:  Original Goodness]

Froebel’s most characteristic utterance is perhaps this:  “A suppressed or perverted good quality—­a good tendency, only repressed, misunderstood, or misguided—­lies originally at the bottom of every shortcoming in man.  Hence the only and infallible remedy for counteracting any shortcoming and even wickedness is to find the originally good source, the originally good side of the human being that has been repressed, disturbed, or misled into the shortcoming, and then to foster, build up, and properly guide this good side.  Thus the shortcoming will at last disappear, although it may involve a hard struggle against habit, but not against original depravity in man, and this is accomplished so much the more rapidly and surely because man himself tends to abandon his shortcomings, for man prefers right to wrong.”  The natural deduction from this is that we should say “do” rather than “don’t”; open up the natural way for rightful activity instead of uttering loud warning cries at the entrance to every wrong path.

[Sidenote:  Kindergarten Methods]

It is for this reason that the kindergarten tries by every means to make right doing delightful.  This is one of the reasons for its songs, dances, plays, its bright colors, birds, and flowers.  And in this respect it may well be imitated in every home.  No one loves that which is disagreeable, ugly, and forbidding; yet many little children are expected to love right doing which is seldom attractively presented to them.

The results of such treatment are apparent in the grown people of to-day.  Most persons have an underlying conviction that sinners, or at any rate unconscientious persons, have a much easier and pleasanter time of it than those who try to do right.  To the imagination of the majority of adults sin is dressed in glittering colors and virtue in gray, somber garments.  There are few who do not take credit for right doing as if they had chosen a hard and disagreeable part instead of the more alluring ways of wrong.  This is because they have been mis-taught in childhood and have come to think of wrongdoing as pleasant and virtue as hard, whereas the real truth is exactly the opposite.  It is wrongdoing that brings unpleasant consequences and virtue that brings happiness.