Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/15

Rh new room. But when once it has grown accustomed to certain rooms it will feel a new room to be strange, and eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. My little girl at the age of seven months and a third gave unmistakable signs of such vague apprehension on changing her abode—a change which involved that of human surroundings also. She looked about her half wonderingly, half timidly, struck by the strangeness of the scenery, of the faces, and of the voices. Later, when experience and imagination are added, a child will show a still more marked shrinking from strange rooms. Thus a boy retained up to the age of three years and eight months the fear of being left alone in strange hotels or lodgings. Yet entrance on a strange abode does not by any means always excite this reaction. A child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused by the odd look of things. Thus one boy, on being taken at the age of fifteen months to a fresh house and given a small plain room, looked round and laughed at the odd carpet. Children even of the same age appear in such circumstances to vary greatly with respect to the relative strength of the impulses of fear and curiosity.

How different children's mental attitude may be toward the new and unfamiliar is illustrated by some notes on a boy sent me by his mother. This child, "though hardly ever afraid of strange people or places, was very much frightened as a baby of familiar things seen after an interval." Thus "at ten months he was excessively frightened on returning to his nursery after a month's absence. On this occasion he screamed violently if his nurse left his side for a moment for some hours after he got home, whereas he had not in the least objected to being installed in a strange nursery." The mother adds that "at thirteen months, his memory having grown stronger, he was very much pleased at coming to his home after being away a fortnight." This case looks puzzling enough at first and seems to contradict the laws of infant psychology. Perhaps the child's partial recognition was accompanied by a sense of the uncanny, like that which we experience when a place seems familiar to us, though we have no clear recollection of having seen it before.

What applies to places applies also to persons; a sudden change of customary human surroundings by the arrival of a stranger on the scene is apt to trouble the child.

At first all faces seem alike to the child. Later, unfamiliar faces excite something like a grave inquisitorial scrutiny. Yet for the first three months there is no distinct manifestation of fear of strangers. It is only later, when attachment to human belongings has been developed, that the intrusion of strangers, and especially the proposal of a stranger to take the child, calls forth clear signs of displeasure and the shrinking away of fear.