Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/116

106 reality, lie is merely objecting to a particular ruler and the kind of rule (or, as the child would say, misrule) which he is carrying out.

Let us look a little into the noncompliant, disobedient attitude of children. As we have seen, the very liveliness of a child, the abundance of his vigorous impulses, brings him into conflict with others' wills. The ruler, more particularly, is a great and continual source of crossings and checkings. The child has his natural wishes and propensities. He is full of fun, bent on his harmless tricks, and the mother has to talk seriously to him about being naughty. How can we wonder at his disliking the constraint? He has a number of inconvenient active impulses, such as putting things in disorder, playing with water, and so forth. As we all know, he has a ducklike fondness for dirty puddles. Civilization, which wills that a child should be nicely dressed and clean, intervenes in the shape of the nurse and soon puts a stop to this mode of diversion. The tyro in submission, if sound and robust, kicks against the restraint, yells, slaps the nurse, and so forth.

Such collisions are perfectly normal in the first years of life. We should not care to see a child give up his inclinations at another 's bidding without some little show of resistance. These conflicts are frequent and sharp in proportion to the sanity and vigor of the child. The best children, best from a biological point of view, have, I think, most of the rebel in them. Not infrequently these resistances of young will to old will are accompanied by more emphatic protests in the shape of slapping, pushing, and even biting. The ridiculous inequality in bodily power, however, saves, or ought to save, the contest from becoming a serious physical struggle. The resistance where superior force is used can only resolve itself into a helpless protest, a vain yelling, or other utterance of baffled impulse.

If, instead of physical compulsion, authority is asserted in the shape of a highly disagreeable command, a child, before obedience has grown into a habit, will be likely to disobey. If the nurse, instead of pulling the mite away from the puddle, bids him come away, he may assert his self in an eloquent "I won't," or, less bluntly, "I can't come yet." If he is very much in love with the puddle and has a stout heart, he probably embarks in a tussle of words; "I won't," or, as the child will significantly put it, "I mus'n't," being bandied with "You must," until the nurse has to abandon the "moral" method and to resort, after all, to physical compulsion.

Our sample child has not, we will assume, yet got so far as to recognize and defer to a general rule about cleanliness. Hence it may be said that his opposition is directed against the nurse, as propounding a particular command, and one which at the moment