While most mothers rely altogether too much upon speech as a means of explaining life to the child, yet it must be admitted that speech has a great function to perform in this regard.  Nevertheless it is well to bear in mind that it is not true that a child will always do what you tell him to do, no matter how plain you may tell him, nor how perfectly you may explain your reasons.

[Sidenote:  Limitations of Words]

In the first place, speech means less to children than to grown persons.  Each word has a smaller content of experience.  They cannot get the full force of the most clear and eloquent statement.  Therefore all speech must be reinforced by example, and by as many forms of concrete illustrations as can be commanded.  Each necessary truth should enter the child’s mind by several channels; hearing, eye-sight, motor activity should all be called upon.  Many truths may be dramatized.  This, where the mother is clever enough to employ it, is the surest method of appeal.  But in any case, speech alone must not be relied upon, nor the child considered a hopeless case who does not respond to it.

Denunciatory speech especially needs wise regulation.  As Richter says, “What is to be followed as a rule of prudence, yea, of justice, toward grown-up people, should be much more observed toward children, namely, that one should never judgingly declare, for instance, ’You are a liar,’ or even, ‘You are a bad boy,’ instead of saying, ’You have told an untruth,’ or ‘You have done wrong.’  For since the power to command yourself implies at the same time the power of obeying, man feels a minute after his fault as free as Socrates, and the branding mark of his nature, not his deed, must seem to him blameworthy of punishment.

“To this must be added that every individual’s wrong actions, owing to his inalienable sense of a moral aim and hope, seem to him only short, usurped interregnums of the devil, or comets in the uniform solar system.  The child, consequently, under such a moral annihilation, feels the wrong-doing of others more than his own; and this all the more because, in him, want of reflection and the general warmth of his feelings, represent the injustice of others in a more ugly light than his own.”

[Sidenote:  Example versus Precept]

If any one desires to prove the superior force of example over precept, let him try teaching a baby to say “Thank you” or “Please,” merely by being scrupulously careful to say these things to the baby on all fit occasions.  No one has taken the statistics of the number of times every small child is exhorted to perfect himself in this particular observance; but it is safe to say that in the United States alone these injunctions are spoken something like a million times a day and all quite unnecessarily.  The child will say “Please” and “Thank you” without being told to do so, if he merely has his attention called to the fact that the people around him all use these phrases.