CHILD PSYCHOLOGY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 147, 23 June 1934, Page 14

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY.

ILLUMINATING BOOKLET. •How should a child be brought up— trained, moulded, shaped as it should go? These are the questions that are very fully answered by Miss M. V. Guttridge, E.Sc., principal of the Kindergarten College of Melbourne, in a booklet just issued under the title of "The Child at Home." The book is compiled of a series of lectures and deals very comprehensively with problems that child training presents to the adult. If one could outline the eleven chapters in a brief summary, the answer to the questions asked above would be that the child must not be moulded', trained or shaped, but allowed to develop naturally to its own individual pattern. The author says: "Nature

asks that the child shall have just enough | guidance to keep him from harm. Ho does not want to bo pushed along the path ho should travel, to follow innumerable fingerposts. He does not want the whole route outlined, but he wants enough guidance to keep him from travelling on tlio wrong tracks. It is absolutely wrong to drive a child; if a child is to bo really happy and to develop, he. must have just the right amount of adult guidance, and no more."

Tho child is an intelligent being, Miss Guttridgo says ill effect, but 110 has. vast creative energy. This energy must find an outlet in activity and if the child is wisely guided it will be in activity that is constructive. "There is 110 such thing as wilful naughtiness in children," Miss Guttridge says. "If wc think a child is naughty thot means blame and punishment. We should realise that something has happened to the child to make that particular reaction we call 'naughtiness' possible, and we must find out the cause. A child docs not want to be in a temper. He is reacting to some stimulus, and it is our place to find what that stimulus is, and to deal with that." A parent, Miss Guttridgo says, should rot want a child to bo "good." In other words, to accept everything it is told and to obey like a lamb, without enough courage or character to analyse things for itself. The parent who demands this kind of obcdienco may get it, but the first time tho child is tempted seriously ho will not have tho intelligence to say '110. "The wise parent shows no concern I when a child says 'No, I won't,'" she says, "because lie knows that his child is thinking for himself, and developing a sense of power which is a joyous adventure to a child. He is only exerting a very valuable will power, and tho wise parent will see that this very power is exerted in the right direction. But lie will not try to crush it."

To summarise again, the secret of building a happy and useful life for a cliikl is to fill its days with interest. Not with the toys, the entertainments, the constant external props with which many children are surfeited, but with opportunities for overcoming difficulties. Tho child, if he is to become an intelligent man, must have an inquiring mind; must have initiative; must have confidence; he must have that sense of power that comes from standing on his own legs. He cannot bo over-guided, coddled, protected from every wind, wrongfully blamed for naughtiness, surfeited with

pleasures, crushed at every turn and then bo expected to grow into an intelligent human being.

"Children are growing up in an age of very great change," Mies Guttridge says. "Who knows to what conditions they will have to adapt themselves in 20 years' time? But if the child develops along tho lines of creative ability, of independence and elasticity of thought, he will have a possibility of meeting that change successfully. We cannot know and predict the difficulties, but if we train the child in a constructive way ho will be adequately armed to meet whatever may come his way." '