A TOO CONSCIOUS IDEAL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 August 1938, Page 8

A TOO CONSCIOUS IDEAL

THE PARENT AND THE CHILD. Parents naturally have an ideal, more or less conscious, of what they would like their children to become, and the standards they would like them to uphold. It is when these ideals are held consciously, and the parents worry unduly about their achievement that we find the over-anxious parents who are for ever fussing over the child. They realise, for example, that perfect health needs the direction of the child’s fundamental habits, such as eating and sleeping. They take the child to the clinic and religiously fol-, low the clinic methods. As the child passes through each stage of his development they are consistently exact in doing the correct things; and yet, in spite of all their efforts, the child presents them with eating and sleeping problems. He may refuse food, or he will not feed himself. He may even vomit after meals (a typcial reaction to the overranxious mother). He mayrefuse to go to sleep without a light, or without someone being in the room with him. In yet other directions the overanxious parent is liable to have trouble. She has, in all probability, very high standards of tidiness, cleanliness, good manners —standards that are quite beyond the capacity of any normal child. And, because the children do not attain them, she worries, not only about the child’s failure, but their own inability to force the child into the desired mould. In morals, also, the same ideals are upheld. The parents believe that once a child knows what is the right thing to do, he should do it. They forget that knowing the right, and desiring it, are two entirely different matters; and that the educator’s job, whether as parent or teacher, is to cultivate the desire. But there is this to be considered as well, that knowledge itself has to be gained through experience; and that the lack of experience gives a child entirely different standards from those of an adult. If the over-anxious parents understood this, they would not fear, when the child falls below their high ideal, that the child is drifting towards ultimate evil, and that unless they can impress upon him as early as possible their own standards, they are failing in their duty. On the other hand, they may be so impressed by the theory that the child’s freedom must not be interfered with in any way, because of the possible danger to his ego, that they stand helpless and bewildered, wondering how and when the child will begin to show some feeling for civilised standards. But the whole point about the attitude of the over-anxious parent is that it is not governed by reason, but by emotion only.