CHAPTER 27

MAKING THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT FOR YOUR CHILD

DR. LYMAN ABBOTT recently made this assertion:

"The first lesson to be inculcated in the home is obedience. The child must learn that obedience to law is the very foundation of civilization. We tried to put up a gate at Ellis Island to keep anarchists out. We ought to put it up in our nurseries. Children should be taught the rights of property and of person. Every child is born a robber. He is a highway robber. He has riot yet learned the rights of property. Place two babies on the floor, give one a rattle. The other child will creep to the first, and take the rattle away, if he can, then laugh with joy, while the other child cries."

This looks a little like the old doctrine of inherent depravity. But look a little closer.

Man has been falling upward for uncounted ages of time. In the light of the two theories of evolution and reincarnation it is plain that a baby born into the world is merely an acme of things accomplished in previous states of existence. In the nine months previous to birth the soul goes through the entire process of evolution, from the bit of amoeba all the way up through all the animal kingdoms to the plane of aboriginal man.

It looks as if the stored wisdom gained in countless ages of evolution are recapitulated or re-stated on the subconscious plane, in that nine months before birth.

So the baby picks up his life where the aboriginal left it. Dr. Woods Hutchinson in a magazine article on noses calls attention to the fact that every baby is born into the world with the pug nose, which is the invariable accompaniment of a low order of intelligence. Evidently it takes a long line of intelligent ancestors to develop a bridge to one's nose.

The Greek philosophers had high bridges to their noses; also a vast majority of the people who have made their mark in the world since then.

Since the most Roman nose was in infancy a pug we are led to believe that after birth the child falls upward all the way from savagery to civilization.

A good many of us seem to stop half-way. Evidently we need a few more incarnations before we can develop the degree of inherent intelligence necessary to manifest in a Roman nose.

Perhaps Dr. Abbott is right and the child is born an anarchist or a savage. Probably if any child were isolated with savages he would develop no further in this incarnation, or but little further, even though he might grow up with a Roman nose.

But when a little pug nose comes into the world as a William James Sidis, his environment evokes all his latent intelligence until it expresses itself at the age of eleven in erudite theses on the fourth dimension.

It is true that babies grab anything they can get, regardless of the "rights" of others. If its parents do the same thing, the baby will grow up without sense of right. This is the reason I believe in training parents first, and then children.

Every human being is a storage of latent intelligence, and it is environment which draws that latent intelligence out into consciousness, where it can be recognized and used.

The late Dr. Bernardo, of London, was instrumental in sending out to Canada thousands of the very young children of some of the worst criminals and defectives in the slums of London. In almost every case these children developed into intelligent and useful people. Only an infinitesimal proportion of them have failed to grow up into ordinarily successful persons.

It is my private opinion that the environment was to blame in every case where the child was "lost." There was not enough love and wisdom in the environment to draw out the latent intelligence of the child.

I believe with all my heart that the capacity for good and growth and intelligence is latent in every human being that comes into this world.

I believe you could take 10,000 children, born into the world under the worst conditions, and of the worst parentage to be found on this earth, put those children in some such environment as Professor Boris Sidis and his wife have afforded their boy, and every single child would develop into an intelligent, moral and useful citizen, each according to the peculiar bent of his nature.

No! I do not believe that anybody has an evil bent of nature. Phrenologists say we have forty- two faculties, and I say that every one of those faculties is good, essentially and positively. Give the right kind of environment for the child, and the faculties will be developed to co-ordinate for the good of the individual and the world.

It is a far cry from the savage to William James Sidis, but he has spanned it in eleven years. Professor Sidis says it is because of the intelligence-evoking environment which has been given him. I believe it.

The world is working on this line — that is why we are spreading the schools and bettering them. That is why we are asking for playgrounds and boys' clubs. That is why Oklahoma has a law which compels children to attend school, even if the state has to pay boys' wages to the widowed mothers to make it possible.

But the world is not yet more than half awake on this subject!

We are not yet more than getting one eye open to the possibilities of what may be done with the individual between the cradle and the vote.

Which reminds me that Ben Lindsey was the first to pry that one eye open, Ben Lindsey of Denver, the great man who turned the misfortunes of Mickey into opportunities.

The lives of grown people are more or less fixed, and if they stand a few hardships it doesn't wring my heart. I have stood a few myself.

And I have learned that material needs are of less importance than social and moral needs. This does not mean that I fail to appreciate the social and moral side of the Y. W. C. A., or the Old People's Home, or any other institution.

But it does mean that an ounce of social and moral work done for the child is worth several pounds of it done for grown people. If I had my way I would give a dollar for making the right social and moral environment for children where I would give ten cents for the social needs of grown-ups.

This is merely my sense of economy — taking care of older people practically ends with the individual. But taking proper care of a child means not only its happiness in childhood, but it means making it possible for the child to develop into a great and useful grown-up.

It means so directing every child-life that it will not end in an institution for the poor, for criminals or defectives, nor indeed in an institution of any kind.

We hear much about heredity. But the "heredity" THAT A CHILD RECEIVES IN THE FIRST TEN YEARS OF ITS LIFE OUTWEIGHS ALL THAT COULD POSSIBLY COME BEFORE. With the possible exception of cases where the poor little being was so badly pied before birth that it came into the world an idiot.

After birth the child inherits from everybody and everything it touches, and in ten years' time it develops from the monkey stage to the stage of the intelligent being who is able to co-operate.

He makes this development provided he has the proper environment, to educate him socially, morally, emotionally, as well as mentally and physically.

The schools supply the mental, but they have not touched the outer edge of the most important half of every child's environment. And if the child's parents have to scramble for a bare existence, it is impossible for them to supply the other half of the environment.

Therefore, it is up to us, who have intelligence and love and money plus, to support a club home, where poor boys may come in touch with right moral and social environment. If people only realized the tremendous importance of this the boys' clubs and the public playgrounds would be the best supported institutions in every city.

HOW FATHER AND MOTHER CAN BEST TRAIN THE BABY >

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