We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that give greatest perplexity to parents.  They cannot be successfully met as isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational process.  Those to whom the development of character is a reality will watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.

Sec. 2.  THE COLLISION OF WILLS

Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with temptations.  It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself.  The martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious.  One day the parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of will.

When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in your child the central and essential quality of character.  Forgiveness will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the mistake of attempting to crush that will.  The child needs it and you will need its co-operation.  The power to see the possibility of choice of action, to know one’s self as a choosing, willing entity, able to elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive, Godlike quality.  The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle and adjust itself with all other persons.

When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take time to think what it means. Keep your temper. Do not break before the other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied.  From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from force and tradition to a moral plane.

Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request.  You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of the home.  If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his life.

Remember the right has many elements.  There is the child’s side to consider.  As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of justice are developing.  To do him an injustice is to help make him an unjust man.

Secondly, help him to see the right.  This will involve sympathetic explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children.  It may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience.  Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own way when it is wrong.  Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for instance, to imbibe carbolic acid.  But even in such circumstances it would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration—­as a drop of acid on a finger tip—­than to let the issue rest on blind authority.  One such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in other cases.