THIS FREEDOM FOR BABIES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19237, 26 November 1930, Page 10

THIS FREEDOM FOR BABIES.

By LEE VINCENT, Ph.D., Psychologist, Merrill-Palmer School, Detroit, Michigan. “Spank the baby? Of course not! Spanking makes inferiority complexes ! ” The mother whom I overheard say this does not spank her child, as you would doubtless guess from her statement. I know that child, and I can vouch for it—he certainly has no “inferiority complex”. lie has, in fact, the most unbelievable impudence I have ever seen in a three-year-old child. His mother’s fear of an inferiority complex has produced a child who, at three years of age, thinks he has never failed in anything, and who is convinced that his opinion and his performance are as good as or better than anyone else’s, regardless of age or experience. That mother’s remark, and what I i happened to know of her child set me to thinking, and the line of thought recalled a similar remark I recently heard from anTother parent whose/ child I also know. ' ' “Oh. no, one must never take a child from his play until he has exhausted the interest he has at hand. I never change the course of Bobbie’s interests because I realise that if vou repress a child you will make him neurotic when he grows up. Even though it often greatly inconveniences his father and me, we feel that any temporary discomfort is unimportant when compared with saving him from neuroticism.” As I said, I know Bobbie. He certainly is not repressed. He is, in fact, one of the most undisciplined, inconsiderate children of my acquaintance. His mother’s conviction that repression of impulses is dangerous has led her to the belief that any interference with Bobbie’s whims will lead him to mental illness. She has no understanding of the fact that children whose every whim is gratified, who know no training in self-control and in consideration for others, are as surely in danger of mental illness as are the children who know no expression. She has failed to realise that children who express every impulse immediately and directly without regard for the effect of their behaviour on other people, are in reality not made free to develop normally as their mothers fondly hope, but are made the slaves of their own .whims. These mothers are not alone in their extreme ideas and practices. They belong to a great army of parents who labour under the impression that they are bringing tfp their children “psychologically”, because they have read one or two cleverly advertised books on child training, and have learned glibly to bandy about a few such phrases as “inferiority complex”, “repression of impulses”, and “liberation of the libido”. ■ ■ ' They do not seem to realise that high-sounding phrases and imperfectly understood principles are a poor basis for daily contacts with growing children. They seem, somehow, to have been frightened out of their usual sense of balance by the dogmatic and threatening statements of a few extremists who publish widely and with a tooconvincing dramatic quality. They seem to forget, these over-conscientious parents, that nothing in the world is so valuable in. dealing with children as plain commonsense.—“Ladies’ Home Journal”.