(d) THE REASONING POWER OF THE CHILD

Before we proceed to a closer examination of the various symptoms of nervous unrest in detail, we may very briefly consider the scope and power of the child’s understanding.  As a rule I am sure that it is grossly underestimated.  The mental processes of the child are far ahead of his power of speech.  The capacity for understanding speech is well advanced, and an appeal to reason is often successful while the child is still powerless to express his own thoughts in words.  Because he cannot so express himself there is a tendency to underestimate the acuteness of his reasoning, to talk down to him, and to imagine that he can be imposed upon by any fiction which seems likely to suit the purpose of the moment.  A child of eighteen months is not too young to be talked to in a quiet, straightforward, sensible way.  Only if he is treated as a reasonable being can we expect his reasoning faculties to develop.  Children dislike intensely the unexplained intervention of force.  If a pair of scissors, left by an oversight lying about, has been grasped, the first impulse of the mother is to snatch the danger hurriedly from the child’s hands, and her action will generally be followed by resistance and a storm of weeping.  She will do better to approach him quietly, telling him that scissors hurt babies, and show him where to place them out of harm’s way.  Watch a child at play after his midday meal.  He has been out in his perambulator half the morning, and for the other half has been deep in his midday sleep.  Now that dinner is over he is for a moment master of his time and busily engaged in some pursuit dear to his heart.  At two o’clock inexorable routine ordains that he must again be placed in the perambulator and wheeled forth on a fresh expedition.  If the nurse does not know her business she will swoop down upon him, place him on her knee, and begin to envelop his struggling little body in his outdoor clothes, scolding his naughtiness as he kicks and screams.  If she has a way with children she will open the cupboard door and call on him to help find his gaiters and his shoes because it is time for his walk.  In a moment he will leave his toys, forgetting all about them in the joy of this new activity.

If the reason for things is explained to children they grow quick to understand quite complicated explanations.  A little girl, not yet two, was playing with her Noah’s Ark on the dining-room table with its polished surface.  The mother interposed a cloth, explaining that the animals would scratch the table if the cloth were not there.  Within a few minutes the child twice lifted the cloth, peering under it and saying, “Not scratch table.”  Yet how often do we find facetiously-minded persons confound their reasoning and confuse their judgment by foolish speeches and cock-and-bull tales, which, just because of their foolishness, seem to them well adapted to the infant intelligence.