October 1938 in Home
and School "Readers’ Questions"
Second teething
“A.S.H.” writes: In a recent ‘Home and School’ there was an article on “Dawdling Children”. My elder daughter is of
this type. Briefly, I understand the mother is advised not to wear herself out
by hustling the child, but leave the child to exert herself. I have tried this.
The result is that the child (aged six) - of Celtic temperament - still
dawdles, is completely lost in a world of make-believe, and is quite
unperturbed by the fact that she will be late for school - or anything else. It
is absolutely essential that she be ready to leave in the morning at the correct
time as her father takes her to school by car, and he cannot be delayed.
Therefore, I have to hussle and sympathise with the hypothetical “Harold’s
“mother! She has a long day - living
some miles from the school and she must have her breakfast and she must be
properly dresses. I could write articles on children but - but how busy is a
mother to deal with them? I shall be most grateful for practical help. The
child is not selfish, is above average intelligence (this is her report form
school and not a maternal delusion) but has a dreamy, thoughtful nature, which
simply will not hurry. She is completely uninterested in food and sweets, is
not particularly interested in games; she is insatiable for stories - likes all
children - but loathes anything unkind or ugly. Her greatest punishment would be to stop her playing the
piano. I threatened this: she replied “Well, I can sing”. She is sensitive to
scolding, but this becomes “nagging”. Please, how am I to stop her dawdling?
It is very difficult for the busy
mother when a child seems unable to co-operate in getting through necessary
routine at necessary speed. It seems so
perverse and irrational, and it is natural to feel that the child won’t hurry, won’t give up her
dreaming and attend to what has to be done.
It is natural to see things in
this way, and hence equally natural to urge and remind and plead and scold and
to make wonder what punishments would make the child sensible. But doesn’t your
own experience show that this short cut, of urging and scolding and
threatening, is in fact a very long way round? It doesn’t get the result you
want does it? I have never known a dreamy child made more practical and
co-operative by hustling and scolding. It usually seems to have the opposite
effect, to make her even more exasperatingly slow and unresponsive. Urging and
scolding relieves mother’s feelings, but does nothing to change the source of
the annoyance.
So the apparently longer way
round, of taking time to consider what the dreaminess and dawdling might mean,
may in fact be the shortest way home.
Now it is possible for me, on the
ground of what you tell me in your letter, to surmise with any sort of
exactness or detail what your little girl’s dreams are about, or what feelings
are occupying her mind and distracting her attention form the practical affair
of getting ready for school. But you can be sure that her mind is occupied with something of great
importance to herself; and that these preoccupations are stirred up by the
present circumstances of her life.
Don’t you think, in the first
place, that such a long day of school life, with a journey by car at the beginning
and the end of it, my be a considerable strain for a child of six years? Of
course, that is one of the reasons that makes you so anxious for her to get a
proper breakfast, and get ready in good time - your feeling is that this would
lessen the strain for her. Which is quite true - but that does not alter the
probability that her dawdling and dreaminess is itself partly the result of the
strain of adapting to the pressure of school life.
Many children find the early
years of school a great effort, especially if methods of teaching are too
formal or too narrow, or if too much stress is laid on competing with other
children. And different children show their sense of strain in different
ways - some lose appetite, some have
night terrors, some become peevish, others withdraw into their private world of
dreams. Is it possible that your daughter’s school fails to use her imaginative
powers and natural interests, or drives too hard for marks and stars and
promotions? I would want to know whether some mistake of this sort were not
responsible for the child’s excessive dawdling - whether she were not natural
reluctant to go to school, for reasons of this kind. Again, I would want to
find out, too, whether she were happy or unhappy with other children at school.
You might not be able to find out
these things by direct questioning of the child, but you could let her feel
that you were alive to such possibilities, and interested in her experiences.
And even apart from particular information about her friends or her school
work, it is often of great help to such a dreamy child if you let her talk or
draw from her imagination. Encourage her to tell stories, - not merely listen
to them: and to draw freely. Let her feel that you value her imaginings as well
as those of the story writers, that you care about what she has in her own
mind, as well as what you want her to learn from other people. Do you have a story-time
when she goes to bed? Is she could share her make-believe with you, she might
feel more able to adapt to practical necessities at other times. Give her time
to dawdle on other occasions than the morning hustle, time to dream and to
possess her own thoughts. She will probably then feel less stubborn need to
resist your efficiency when the time is really short and events are waiting.
One other point: in many
children, this dawdling and dreaming, like other difficulties, are partly a
matter of age. They may be characteristic of a particular child, but will show
more strongly at some ages than at others. And your daughter is just now at one
of the special periods of conflict and anxiety - due to the psychological effects of the
experience of second teething. You may have read what I have written about this
in earlier issues. It is when formal and competitive school life coincides with
the anxieties arising from this phase of her development, that the greatest
stress is felt. To get over the difficulties of this phase of life, the child must have time. Her natural recuperative
powers will carry her through - if only we do give time and leisure - time to
dream and play, to find a new emotional balance within herself.
The practical difficulty,
therefore, so trying at the moment from your point of view, is likely to get
much less as time goes on. But you can aid this natural process as of
adjustment more by this wider consideration of the child’s imaginative needs,
than by concentrating your attention narrowly on the question of morning
dawdling.
No comments:
Post a Comment