Read Ebook: Bringing up the Boy A Message to Fathers and Mothers from a Boy of Yesterday Concerning the Men of To-morrow by Werner Carl Avery

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There; my blessing with thee! And these few precepts in thy memory See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man. Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

FOREWORD

It was surprising that of the many letters received while these articles were appearing serially, only a small minority of the writers disagreed with my views, and those few protests were confined to one or two subjects. So far as could be reasonably expected of one whose time is much occupied in pursuing a livelihood, I replied to all such communications. If in some instances I failed, the omission was not because I was lacking in a keen appreciation of the interest, the sympathy, the suggestions and the criticisms thus expressed. As to those who disagreed with me, I would like to repeat here what I have said to them in personal replies: They may be right, and I wrong. This much only, I know--That Providence is kind in that He permits me to retain a distinct picture of the boy's cosmos; that as a man and a father I can still see--and feel--from the boy's viewpoint; and that, preserving that visuality, I have tried, with the best judgment and most constant effort of which I am capable, to employ it for the greatest good. Everything that I have written about boy training is solidly fixed on this foundation; and everything that I have written has been or is being employed, to the very letter, in my stewardship of one who is infinitely more precious to me than life itself--my own boy. If I have erred, may God forgive me; but on this score my conscience is as clear as a crystal pool, for so far as human vision penetrates not one duty has been left undone and not one endeavour has gone astray. And happily, though I say it with a prayer on my lips and humility in my heart, every passing year adds its living testimony to the principles which I advocate and for which I plead.

C. W.

Bringing up the Boy

FROM BABY TO BOY

Your son, madam, while passing a vacant house, paused, poised his arm and deliberately sent a small stone crashing through one of the windows. Then, turning on his heel, he ran nimbly up the street and disappeared around the corner.

You know it occurred, because some one living next to the house saw him do it and told the owner, and the owner came to you for reparation and you charged the boy with it and he admitted it to be true.

You are heartbroken because you find yourself confronted with what appears to be irrefutable evidence that your son is a bad boy.

You ask him why he did it. He doesn't know. You suggest that it might have been an accident. Being a truthful boy, he replies tearfully that it was not. You enquire if he had any grievance against the man who owns the house. He answers that he hadn't even heard of the owner and didn't know who he was. Then--you ask again--why did he do it? You get the same answer:

"I don't know."

It certainly looks dubious for your boy, madam, doesn't it? If at the tender age of ten years a lad will deliberately "chuck" a stone through a neighbouring window, with no reason or provocation for it whatsoever, what may he not be capable of at twenty? The thought is appalling, isn't it?

Happily, however, I think it can be demonstrated to your complete satisfaction that your son is not bad--so far as this particular offence is concerned, anyway--and that this stone-throwing business is a perfectly natural thing for a perfectly normal boy to do.

To start with, let us suppose that I have placed on your back fence, side by side, a brick and a bottle. I then hand you a little target-rifle and invite you to try your skill at shooting. Now, which will you aim at--the brick or the bottle?

The bottle, of course. You answer more quickly than I can write it.

And why the bottle?

Just think that over a moment, please. Why the bottle?

Meanwhile, let us go back to the boy and the window.

The desire to see a physical result from any personal effort is deep-seated in every human being. Where is the author who does not take secret and real pleasure in scanning the achievements of his pen in the public print? Where is the architect who would forego the pleasure of seeing the finished structure, the lines and masses of which he has dreamed over and designed? The desire to see the result follow the endeavour, the effect follow the cause, is strong within us all.

It may seem a far cry from art and letters to the boy and the broken window, but the psychologic principle involved is one and the same. The boy, sauntering along the street or the roadway, has been amusing himself by throwing stones. He has sent one against the side of a barn with no effect other than the sound of a hollow thud as it struck the boards. He has heaved one at a telegraph pole, and the pole didn't even quiver. Then he spies the vacant house.

It is obviously deserted and abandoned. A pane already shattered in one of the windows starts the idea. It is far enough back from the street to make the throw a test of skill. If he misses there's no harm done. If he hits there'll be a noise, a crash, a shower of flying glass and--Enough! Up goes the arm, away goes the stone with fateful accuracy and the deed is done. It was the act of a sudden impulse. Before the conscience within him could assert itself the missile had struck; and that innate human ambition to produce a visible result was gratified.

The deed is done, and the boy doesn't know why he did it. But returning to the hypothesis of the brick and the bottle, perhaps you, madam, can explain why you would prefer to shoot at the bottle.

In these talks I want to tell mothers something of what I know about boys; not all about them, but just a few of the more vital things that every mother of a boy ought to know and every father ought to be reminded of. I say "reminded" advisedly, for the fathers must have known some time, though it would seem that most of them have forgotten now. What I say I know about boys, I know. What I may suggest or advise is another matter. It can stand only as a belief, an opinion, and my sole excuse for presuming to offer it is that I love the boy; I live close to him and I believe in him.

I do not believe that the intuitiveness generally accredited to motherhood is in the least degree overestimated or exaggerated. But mere intuitiveness, even in its highest form of development, can hardly be expected to bridge the natural gap of temperamental sex difference between mother and son.

Unfortunately, the father, not eager to invade what he believes to be the mother's sphere, usually is content to leave the management of the boy in the mother's hands, while the mother, not recognising the deficiency of her position, labours on patiently, lovingly, untiringly, but in many cases blindly, and often with poor success. If mothers only understood this it would be better. If they could be brought to realize the handicap under which they are striving they could fortify themselves against it. They could deepen the interest of the father or, failing that, they could at the least draw upon his experience and knowledge of real boyhood with good effect. But there are no sex distinctions to the average mother. The boys and the girls are just "the children" and the difference of sex is lost in the great catholicity of maternal love.

At the very beginning parents must concede the existence of an inherent temperamental difference between the boy and the girl. This, for the mother, is not so easy of adjustment as it may appear. The boy is her baby, just her baby, from swaddling-clothes to long trousers.

The fact is, of course, that the assertion of the sex temperament starts almost with the beginning of life. For the first four or five years it is, to be sure, almost a negligible quantity, but after that the boy needs to be treated as a boy, and not as a sexless baby.

Put a pair of new red shoes on a little girl's feet and send her out among a group of misses shod in black. Then watch her plume herself and pose at the front gate and mince up and down the avenue, as proud as a peacock.

Now, rig up the six-year-old boy in some new and untried kink of fashion and turn him loose on the highway--and observe what follows. Note how sheepishly he looks down the street to where his playfellows are gathered, and see how he edges toward them, faltering and keeping as close to the fence as he can. Observe how, just as he is trying to slip into their midst unostentatiously, one of them cries in a shrill voice:

"Look who's here!" and another remarks:

"Oh, what a shine!" and still another exclaims:

"Pipe the kelly!" meaning, observe the hat.

Then perhaps there is the very rude boy who asks whether the "rags" have been "rassled," said enquiry being gently emphasised by a push from behind. In which case the young glass of fashion, having a gloomy premonition of what may happen to him at home if he returns bearing the marks of combat, backs discreetly off the firing-line, and retreats to his own dooryard with as small loss of dignity as the exigency of the occasion will permit. And he is pretty sure to stick there the remainder of the afternoon, while occasionally other boys, in regulation woollens or corduroys, peep at him curiously through the palings, making him feel like one of those unpronounceable animals that they keep in cages and lecture about at the zoo.

Do you think this characteristic of the boy really signifies that he is "notional"? Do you put it down merely as "finicality"? Then you do him a great injustice. In the true analysis it is quite the opposite. It is but one feature of a unique democracy, a splendid democracy that you will find holding sway wherever boys gather. Oh, this democracy of boyhood is a wonderful thing! To me it is the r?gime beautiful. There is something so inspiring about it! For here, in this quaint domain of dare-and-do, you see every sturdy little chap, regardless of clothes, creed or family position, standing on his own merits and judged by his own deeds.

Why some mothers persist in Little-Lord-Fauntleroy-ing their boys within an inch of their lives is to me a profound mystery. Can any mother enlighten me on the long-curls cruelty? Is it selfish vanity? Could any mother, for the mere gratification of an egoistic desire, be so unfeeling as to send her helpless boy out into the scene of humiliation and actual physical torture of which the boy with the long curls becomes the pitiable centre as soon as he turns the corner?

I do not like to think so. Rather would I believe, as in the case of the broken window, that the mother's error is chargeable to her never having been a boy. She has a faulty conception of what it means to be yanked about by those boy-hated ringlets of gold, to be harassed and taunted by the inornate but happier hoi polloi.

I recall one afternoon when I took a youngster of three around to the barber's to have him shorn. I returned with the boy in one hand and the curls in the other. He was magnificently cologned and wanted everybody to "smell it."

The mother was waiting with an empty shoe-box in her lap. She was sitting by the window, in the soft half-light of the early evening, and she caressed the golden bronze ringlets before putting them away. And something glistened in her eye and it fell into the box and was packed away with the curls. I shouldn't wonder if it were there yet, for somehow I can't help thinking that a tear like that must crystallise into a tiny pearl and glisten on forever.

But when this mother looked up at the boy, she was smiling, almost proudly; and she patted the shiny, round head, and kissed it, cologne and all, and quoted a verse about having "lost a baby and gained a man," declaring that he really looked much better than she had expected.

And the boy was put to bed and slept coolly and comfortably, and he's had a clean scalp and a clear conscience ever since, I guess.

But here I am, taking up the reader's precious time talking about clothes and curls--neither of which mere man is supposed to know anything about--when all I meant to do was to emphasise the fact that long before a half-dozen of his birthdays have been celebrated, the boy must be taken up as an abstract proposition.

At the age of five, then, let us say, the boy reaches the stage of recognisable and indisputable masculinity. This is the logical time for the properly constituted father to take the helm of the son's destiny. If he does not do so, through lack of interest, lack of time or lack of the faculty for it, the mother must needs go on with the struggle. Her five years of training the baby will not come amiss in training the boy. But she must now reckon with boyhood as a distinct classification of childhood. She must remember that from now on, every year, every month, every day, widens the gap of sex divergence. She will do well to look at the bearded men who pass her door and consider that every attribute of masculinity exists, embryonically, in her round-faced baby boy.

From now on, if she hopes to appeal to the best that is in him, she must not only study the boy, but she must study the world from the boy's viewpoint. The nearer the mother can get to the boy's inner emotions, the more effectively can she direct the trend of his mental, moral and physical development. Herein lies the secret of getting and keeping a grip on the boy.

THE SIMPLICITY OF DISCIPLINE

We are living in an epoch of extremists. This morning the suffering dyspeptic is told that he will find a complete cure in a two weeks' fast; this afternoon he is advised that by eating every two hours he will be forever free from his ills. On the one hand is a sect preaching that prayer will bring us peace, power and plenty, and on the other is a schism pleading that supplication, in itself, availeth nothing. Here we have a group of modern disciplinists teaching that corporal punishment is a fading relic of barbaric brutality; there we find a sturdy school of old-timers telling us that if we spare the rod we shall spoil the child.

With these extremists who specialise in the stomach or in the soul I have no quarrel; but coming down to the subject of disciplining the boy I do want to point out to fathers and mothers seriously and earnestly that there is a happy medium, a middle course--a neutral and natural way.

Nearly every parent possesses the faculty of governing to some extent--greater or less; and all children are capable of responding to it--but in varying degrees. There is, therefore, no hard and fast rule that can be laid down for the guidance of all parents, to be applied successfully to all children. However, by reducing the subject of this article first to boys, and second to the average boy, I think we can get the discussion down to a practicable basis. The little girl is here absolutely eliminated from consideration. I have studied her assiduously and at close range for a number of years and have succeeded in establishing this much only; first, that she is almost too sweetly complex for paternal comprehension, and second, that she is not amenable to the rules by which we discipline the boy.

My boy, then, is the average boy, old enough to walk and talk and understand what is said to him, moderately sensitive, moderately affectionate, moderately impulsive, moderately perverse, of ordinarily good health, and possessed of the usual amount of animal spirits.

How can we attain it? How can we take the child-boy and so mould him that he will respond to a command instantly and unfailingly? Within him there is a natural, healthy instinct opposed to it. Within him is the natural human tendency to think and act independently, to learn by experiment, to venture unassisted and unrestrained into the unknown.

Punishment other than corporal will not always do it, because at the time when this condition must be established the boy's baby mentality is not capable of compassing the long distances between cause and effect. At the early age at which it is necessary to establish perfect obedience, the moral penalties are too slow in action, too complex and too much dependent upon local condition to be effective. There are exceptions, of course. For example: You have a box of sweets and you tell the boy he may take one. He takes two. As a penalty for his disobedience you make him return both pieces to the box and you cast the package into the fire. There you have incorporal punishment that is instant, direct and effective; but this incident is made to order and of rare occurrence in fact. Suppose that the boy swallows the two pieces instantly, or suppose the more usual occurrence that you have forbidden him to partake of the sweets at all and he has surreptitiously eaten one. What then? Casting the remainder into the fire will not impress him at the time because his appetite has been satisfied, the desire is dulled. You may deprive him of his allowance on the day following, but the lapse of time dims the relation of the penalty to the offence. This kind of treatment works well with some of the minor errors but not with disobedience. The tendency to disobey is too constant, too persistent and too frequent, and too early in the boy's process of development.

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