MOTHER LOVE

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 2, Issue 6, 1 December 1923, Page 52

MOTHER LOVE

ELIZABETH SLOAN CHESSER, M.D

The Child of the Future

TO understand child psychology, it is first of all necessary to love the child. There are women who prefer dogs, and women— large number of them— love themselves. To the latter, especially, the child makes no appeal. Their outlook is infantile, and they belong to the self-indulgent, dissatisfied, unhappy members of the community. The masculine woman, also, is bored by the child, in its helpless stage at least; and we must not forget that the masculine type psychologically may have all the secondary characteristics of the feminine sex in a completely feminine appearance. It is the normal woman, the feminine and mother type, upon whom child psychology makes an imperative demand. From the egocentric, helpless infant through the exquisite stages of childhood, to six or seven years, perhaps, the child belongs to the mother. During these early years external impressions and stimuli mark for all time personality and character, and later impressions are relatively of little importance. Ihe mother’s thoughts, her feelings or emotions, make their indelible impression on the 'subconscious mind of the child, It may be that the mother, pleasure loving or engrossed with “work,” is not available for the only work, biologically speaking, that matters, and so the servant takes her place and becomes the mother-substitute. And that is one reason why the mothers of Mayfair so often fail to receive and retain love to the same extent as the mothers of Shoreditch, who feed and wash and love intensely their dear and dirty little offspring. We can never gain from the child of fifteen what we so carelessly let go when our children were ours—at the mother phase.

Woman’s Hidden Power

Women have so much “power” that they neither cultivate nor enjoy; so much pleasure, physical and psychical, that they never dream of.

Mother love, the keenest passion and pain of normal feminine existence, is a feeble, flickering flame in the lives of too many women. They escape the suffering, but they miss the joy. Every woman, unless she is diseased or insane, should suckle her own child. She should wash it and tend it and watch over it during the first seven years of life, and no other work in the world counts beside this creative mother work. She must attend the child physically and study him psychically if she is to adjust herself to life and to live harmoniously. A more enlightened method would save the new generation of children untold suffering and make for a happier family life and less matrimonial discoid. To satisfy curiosity, to give to the child opportunity for selfexpression, for creating new things, to stimulate his sense of beauty, his love of Nature—birds and flowers, trees and sunshine—on these lines the parent interested in psychology works on behalf of the child. The old idea of repression, of domination of the child by stupid adults, is giving way before a new ideal of liberating energy and latent power in young people. ' ‘ & It is the Western people who need to study child psychology most. Among primitive people and in the East, in Japan especially, there is more intuition, insight, more understanding of the child mind. So one finds in the East less repression and regression, and their consequences in after —hysteria and neurasthenia. The study of child psychology will not only prevent neurosis, it will help us to deal more wisely with delinquency because we shall have greater knowledge of motive and its influence on conduct. There is so much good in human nature which never gets a chance. Sin, like disease, is ignorance. Quarrelling, discontent, and unhappiness are the visible signs of conflict, of sickness in the subconscious, as the rash and headache of measles are significant of physical illness, infection of the blood stream.

Study of the Child

The child of the future must have a better chance of health and happiness. It is for us to provide healthy occupation, interesting work and play. The study of Nature, of biology and of astronomy, must occupy a far larger share of the educational curriculum of the future. Education is adjustment to life, to discipline, the achievement of a true balance of feeling, thought, and action. We want the child to be a self-respecting, happy, disciplined, independent human being, not a machine, full of repressions, miserable through inferiority, complex, a funk or a bully.

Help the child to face reality, to meet difficulties with courage. The adjustment to sex, in its early stages at least, is the mother’s work, and the shirking of this responsibility on the part of parents in the past brought suffering and disease to millions of human beings, as the medical profession knows too well.

It is not easy to be a parent, I admit. The young generation is often trying, but one has no right to expect wisdom from the young when we fail so lamentably ourselves. A sense of humour is inborn, but we can cherish and cultivate it—in ourselves— its growth will make us more tolerant of youth with all its mistakes, the same mistakes we made twenty

years ago.

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