Is Your Child Really Naughty?

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1058, 23 August 1930, Page 23

Is Your Child Really Naughty?

What is naughtiness? It the question were put to a group ot adults gathered round the tea-table, it is doubtful whether any two would be entirely agreed as to what constitutes naughtiness in children. Of course, there are certain fundamental principles upon which we ar c all agreed, such as it is wrong to lie, Of steal, or deliberately destroy things which belong to other people. There must he a moral code and various conventions, otherwise chaos would reign. But, having admitted that, do we not often reprove a child for doing something that is merely a matter of personal dislike and irritation to ourselves? You are tired, hoping to have forty winks, when in comes your little sou, whistling noisily, and bangs his schoolbooks down. Irritated, you exclaim: • You naughty boy, can't you see 1 am trying to rest?” But the child is not really naughty! He is probably a little thoughtless, but he could not be expected to know you wanted to sleep. Examples on these lines might be multiplied indefinitely. Agaiu. how often a child is called “naughty" when he sends a ball through a window, or falls and soils his clean suit. Neither of these happenings is deliberate, and that should be the acid test of naughtiness. One child is punished for the “naughtiness" of going into the sea to paddle, while another is reprimanded because he will not face the cold water. It is a matter of the parents’ particular point of view, when all is said and done. Wise parents will see the sense of these remarks, and will quietly ‘‘think hack" about the times they have rlnbbed their children naughty. Then ihey will realise how often they- have really been justified in using the word.

The wrong application of a word, at first so full of sinister meaning to a child, is apt to make that word lose its import, or else it breeds a sense of injustice, which is equally bad for the moulding of his character.