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CHILDREN'S RIGHTS

_A BOOK OF NURSERY LOGIC_

BY

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

  "A court as of angels,
  A public not to be bribed.
  Not to be entreated,
  Not to be overawed."


1892




PREFATORY NOTE


I am indebted to the Editors of Scribner's Magazine, the Cosmopolitan,
and Babyhood, for permission to reprint the three essays which have
appeared in their pages. The others are published for the first time.

It may be well to ward off the full seriousness of my title "Nursery
Logic" by saying that a certain informality in all of these papers
arises from the fact that they were originally talks given before
members of societies interested in the training of children.

Three of them--"Children's Stories," "How Shall we Govern our
Children," and "The Magic of 'Together'"--have been written for this
book by my sister, Miss Nora Smith.

K.D.W.

NEW YORK, _August_, 1892.




CONTENTS

  THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
  CHILDREN'S PLAYS
  CHILDREN'S PLAYTHINGS
  WHAT SHALL CHILDREN READ?
  CHILDREN'S STORIES. _Nora A. Smith_
  THE RELATION OF THE KINDERGARTEN TO SOCIAL REFORM
  HOW SHALL WE GOVERN OUR CHILDREN? _Nora A. Smith_
  THE MAGIC OF "TOGETHER." _Nora A. Smith_.
  THE RELATION OF THE KINDERGARTEN TO THE PUBLIC SCHOOL
  OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN




THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

"Give me liberty, or give me death!"


The subject of Children's Rights does not provoke much sentimentalism
in this country, where, as somebody says, the present problem of the
children is the painless extinction of their elders. I interviewed
the man who washes my windows, the other morning, with the purpose of
getting at the level of his mind in the matter.

"Dennis," I said, as he was polishing the glass, "I am writing an
article on the 'Rights of Children.' What do you think about it?"
Dennis carried his forefinger to his head in search of an idea, for he
is not accustomed to having his intelligence so violently assaulted,
and after a moment's puzzled thought he said, "What do I think about
it, mum? Why, I think we'd ought to give 'em to 'em. But Lor', mum,
if we don't, they _take_ 'em, so what's the odds?" And as he left the
room I thought he looked pained that I should spin words and squander
ink on such a topic.

The French dressmaker was my next victim. As she fitted the collar of
an effete civilization on my nineteenth century neck, I put the same
question I had given to Dennis.

"The rights of the child, madame?" she asked, her scissors poised in
air.

"Yes, the rights of the child."

"Is it of the American child, madame?"

"Yes," said I nervously, "of the American child."

"Mon Dieu! he has them!"

This may well lead us to consider rights as opposed to privileges. A
multitude of privileges, or rather indulgences, can exist with a total
disregard of the child's rights. You remember the man who said he
could do without necessities if you would give him luxuries enough.
The child might say, "I will forego all my privileges, if you will
only give me my rights: a little less sentiment, please,--more
justice!" There are women who live in perfect puddles of maternal
love, who yet seem incapable of justice; generous to a fault, perhaps,
but seldom just.

_Who owns the child_? If the parent owns him,--mind, body, and soul,
we must adopt one line of argument; if, as a human being, he owns
himself, we must adopt another. In my thought the parent is simply a
divinely appointed guardian, who acts for his child until he attains
what we call the age of discretion,--that highly uncertain period
which arrives very late in life with some persons, and not at all with
others.

The rights of the parent being almost unlimited, it is a very delicate
matter to decide just when and where they infringe upon the rights
of the child. There is no standard; the child is the creature of
circumstances.

The mother can clothe him in Jaeger wool from head to foot, or keep
him in low neck, short sleeves and low stockings, because she thinks
it pretty; she can feed him exclusively on raw beef, or on vegetables,
or on cereals; she can give him milk to drink, or let him sip his
father's beer and wine; put him to bed at sundown, or keep him up till
midnight; teach him the catechism and the thirty-nine articles, or
tell him there is no God; she can cram him with facts before he has
any appetite or power of assimilation, or she can make a fool of him.
She can dose him with old-school remedies, with new-school remedies,
or she can let him die without remedies because she doesn't believe
in the reality of disease. She is quite willing to legislate for
his stomach, his mind, his soul, her teachableness, it goes without
saying, being generally in inverse proportion to her knowledge; for
the arrogance of science is humility compared with the pride of
ignorance.

In these matters the child has no rights. The only safeguard is the
fact that if parents are absolutely brutal, society steps in, removes
the untrustworthy guardian, and appoints another. But society does
nothing, can do nothing, with the parent who injures the child's soul,
breaks his will, makes him grow up a liar or a coward, or murders
his faith. It is not very long since we decided that when a parent
brutally abused his child, it could be taken from him and made the
ward of the state; the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children is of later date than the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals. At a distance of a century and a half we can
hardly estimate how powerful a blow Rousseau struck for the rights of
the child in his educational romance, "Emile." It was a sort of gospel
in its day. Rousseau once arrested and exiled, his book burned by the
executioner (a few years before he would have been burned with it),
his ideas naturally became a craze. Many of the reforms for which he
passionately pleaded are so much a part of our modern thought that we
do not realize the fact that in those days of routine, pedantry and
slavish worship of authority, they were the daring dreams of an
enthusiast, the seeming impossible prophecy of a new era. Aristocratic
mothers were converts to his theories, and began nursing their
children as he commanded them. Great lords began to learn handicrafts;
physical exercise came into vogue; everything that Emile did, other
people wanted to do.

With all Rousseau's vagaries, oddities, misconceptions, posings, he
rescued the individuality of the child and made a tremendous plea for
a more natural, a more human education. He succeeded in making people
listen where Rabelais and Montaigne had failed; and he inspired other
teachers, notably Pestalozzi and Froebel, who knit up his ragged seams
of theory, and translated his dreams into possibilities.

Rousseau vindicated to man the right of "Being." Pestalozzi said
"Grow!" Froebel, the greatest of the three, cried "Live! you give
bread to men, but I give men to themselves!"

The parent whose sole answer to criticism or remonstrance is "I have
a right to do what I like with my own child!" is the only impossible
parent. His moral integument is too thick to be pierced with any shaft
however keen. To him we can only say as Jacques did to Orlando, "God
be with you; let's meet as little as we can."

But most of us dare not take this ground. We may not philosophize or
formulate, we may not live up to our theories, but we feel in greater
or less degree the responsibility of calling a human being hither, and
the necessity of guarding and guiding, in one way or another, that
which owes its being to us.

We should all agree, if put to the vote, that a child has a right to
be well born. That was a trenchant speech of Henry Ward Beecher's on
the subject of being "born again;" that if he could be born right the
first time he'd take his chances on the second. "Hereditary rank,"
says Washington Irving, "may be a snare and a delusion, but hereditary
virtue is a patent of innate nobility which far outshines the blazonry
of heraldry."

Over the unborn our power is almost that of God, and our
responsibility, like His toward us; as we acquit ourselves toward
them, so let Him deal with us.

Why should we be astonished at the warped, cold, unhappy, suspicious
natures we see about us, when we reflect upon the number of
unwished-for, unwelcomed children in the world;--children who at
best were never loved until they were seen and known, and were often
grudged their being from the moment they began to be. I wonder if
sometimes a starved, crippled, agonized human body and soul does not
cry out, "Why, O man, O woman--why, being what I am, have you suffered
me to be?"

Physiologists and psychologists agree that the influences affecting
the child begin before birth. At what hour they begin, how far they
can be controlled, how far directed and modified, modern science is
not assured; but I imagine those months of preparation were given for
other reasons than that the cradle and the basket and the wardrobe
might be ready;--those long months of supreme patience, when the
life-germ is growing from unconscious to conscious being, and when a
host of mysterious influences and impulses are being carried silently
from mother to child. And if "beauty born of murmuring sound shall
pass into" its "face," how much more subtly shall the grave strength
of peace, the sunshine of hope and sweet content, thrill the delicate
chords of being, and warm the tender seedling into richer life.

Mrs. Stoddard speaks of that sacred passion, maternal love, that "like
an orange-tree, buds and blossoms and bears at once." When a true
woman puts her finger for the first time into the tiny hand of
her baby, and feels that helpless clutch which tightens her very
heart-strings, she is born again with the new-born child.

A mother has a sacred claim on the world; even if that claim rest
solely on the fact of her motherhood, and not, alas, on any other. Her
life may be a cipher, but when the child comes, God writes a figure
before it, and gives it value.

Once the child is born, one of his inalienable rights, which we too
often deny him, is the right to his childhood.

If we could only keep from untwisting the morning-glory, only be
willing to let the sunshine do it! Dickens said real children went out
with powder and top-boots; and yet the children of Dickens's time were
simple buds compared with the full-blown miracles of conventionality
and erudition we raise nowadays.

There is no substitute for a genuine, free, serene, healthy,
bread-and-butter childhood. A fine manhood or womanhood can be built
on no other foundation; and yet our American homes are so often filled
with hurry and worry, our manner of living is so keyed to concert
pitch, our plan of existence so complicated, that we drag the babies
along in our wake, and force them to our artificial standards,
forgetting that "sweet flowers are slow, and weeds make haste."

If we must, or fancy that we must, lead this false, too feverish life,
let us at least spare them! By keeping them forever on tiptoe we are
in danger of producing an army of conventional little prigs, who know
much more than they should about matters which are profitless even to
their elders.

In the matter of clothing, we sacrifice children continually to the
"Moloch of maternal vanity," as if the demon of dress did not demand
our attention, sap our energy, and thwart our activities soon enough
at best.

And the right kind of children, before they are spoiled by fine
feathers, do detest being "dressed up" beyond a certain point.

A tiny maid of my acquaintance has an elaborate Parisian gown, which
is fastened on the side from top to bottom in some mysterious fashion,
by a multitude of tiny buttons and cords. It fits the dear little
mouse like a glove, and terminates in a collar which is an instrument
of torture to a person whose patience has not been developed from year
to year by similar trials. The getting of it on is anguish, and as to
the getting of it off, I heard her moan to her nurse the other night,
as she wriggled her curly head through the too-small exit, "Oh I only
God knows how I hate gettin' peeled out o' this dress!"

The spectacle of a small boy whom I meet sometimes in the horse-cars,
under the wing of his predestinate idiot of a mother, wrings my very
soul. Silk hat, ruffled shirt, silver-buckled shoes, kid gloves,
cane, velvet suit, with one two-inch pocket which is an insult to his
sex,--how I pity the pathetic little caricature! Not a spot has he to
locate a top, or a marble, or a nail, or a string, or a knife, or a
cooky, or a nut; but as a bloodless substitute for these necessities
of existence, he has a toy watch (that will not go)