Just as it is right and possible to guide children to do many worth-while acts, to have many fine feel ings, so it is right and possible to teach them much interesting knowledge. Too often parents speak and act as though this could and should be put off until the child is at least six or seven years old and ready to go to school.
Schooling before School Begins One wonders whether they have never heard that because the child must be mentally active he learns more during the first six years of his life than he ever will learn in any later six years. And in most cases he could learn more than he does, and learn it more easily than later, but for the parents' misun derstanding. How often such parents tell the child not to touch—that is to examine with fingers as well as eyes—some new thing which he has never seen before, and so wants to know about. How often such parents ignore or forbid the child's questions.
Sometimes they give silly, untrue, or incomplete answers. Every time a parent does one of these things to a sensible question, he is stupidly shutting a door through which the child's mind was moving in an effort to know the wonderful and complex world which must be his home. Many children so treated become the uninteresting children that we know. A few children, because of stronger inquiring tendencies, turn to other people or books or things for satisfactory answers. Almost none of them come to have a friendly give-and-take partnership with parents in the enjoyment of what they later learn at school and from newspapers, travel, and books.
Parents who wish to have companionable grown sons and daughters must be companionable with them on their first excursions for knowledge, as well as during their adolescent years.
Imagination and Truth-Telling Besides being curious, hungry for facts, the child's mind can be imaginative. Out of facts it has gath ered about the world its owner can and must build little worlds of his own. These are often quite unlike the world in which the child's body lives. He is often a very wonderful person in this fanciful world.
Sometimes the child's expressed imaginings will seem like lies to parents. A little thought will show that the child may be merely mistaken because his knowl edge of the world is still incomplete and inaccurate.
Or he may picture a plan as carried out just because it is made.
Philip Edward, a boy of six, bubbled over at dinner with the story of the surprise that was in store for his teacher. "The boys had put a kitten in her desk; it would jump out at her when she opened her desk that afternoon." Now it just happened that the teacher came to tea at Philip Edward's house that very evening. Imagine the feelings of his parents when Miss Anna Marie, in answer to the question, " Did the kitten surprise you?" said she had seen none. Then Philip Edward spoke up. " Oh, but that is what the boys are going to do when they find a kitten, and now the plan is spoiled." After the company was gone, father and son had a friendly helpful talk about the difference between a plan made and a plan carried out.
How Children are Made Truthful If parents will remember two principles there will be little danger that imaginative activity will lead to lying. The first is that what the child says is a lie only when he is deliberately trying to deceive some one. The second is that a lie is the tool which an undeveloped mind uses when it can find nothing better to help its owner out of a difficulty. The child can be trained to understand when the exact truth as it is known must be told, and when imaginative tales and jokes are permissible. He can be treated sympathetically in times of accidents or disobedience, so that his mind seizes the truthful way out of his difficulties. When he is older, he builds up from his reading and from conversation pictures of places that are far away; of persons that lived long ago; of events in the future in which he will play an important part ; all because his imagination was not thwarted.
No parent who wishes for his child a joyous and successful life can afford to stifle this making over of the world either in the make-believe of childhood or the dreams of adolescent boyhood and girlhood.
On the other hand, every parent must be watchful of the kind of facts that are being gathered and the kind of feelings that are being tied up with them.
Parents who control by wholesome play and work, study and travel, music and art, companions, and movies, what goes into the makings of a child's imaginary worlds—these parents will control to a very great extent the parts that their children will play in the real world of men and women.