PARENT'S GUIDANCE TO RAISE CHILDREN

THIS is AN ARTICLE about your child's main emotional and physiological needs as they develop naturally from his birth through adolescence.

He cannot develop healthily, however, without care and guidance, so this is also an article about your attitudes and behaviour. We hope that this discussion of current psychological thinking about childhood and child care will help you in the important job of rearing your child to be emotionally healthy.

Because this is an article on emotions, it is likely to awaken emotions in you as you read it.

There is a good chance that you may start worrying or possibly even feel guilty and anxious or angry. We hope that you won't be greatly upset; however, We have not tried to avoid or over-simplify important and complex ideas simply to keep from running the risk of stirring up problems in you.

We confidently believe that parents are seeking straightforward information to help guide them in their jobs as parents, even though some information may stir up uncomfortable feelings in them.

Also, We firmly believe that it is often helpful to have some-thing come along and stir us up inside. We can't all go to see a psychotherapist to help us become surer of ourselves; but we can all benefit from running up against ideas which make us think about ourselves.

It probably will help you keep in mind that this isn't an article  that is trying to tell you how to feel inside yourself but is rather an article that is talking about how to act, how to behave, and how to learn more about the way you feel from observing the ways in which you are acting. 

Please don't expect this article—or any article, for that matter—to help you settle problems which have deep roots within you. But We hope that this small volume can give you new insights into your own needs and your child's, and so provide signposts for sensible action.

A brief list of very general references has been added for those who wish to go on to further study. From experience as a student and with students, We have come to the conclusion that most people don't like or use footnotes or references which in-terrupt the discussion.

And We have also concluded that very few people outside of graduate schools are very concerned with learning the scientific evidence upon which a statement may rest. So We have not included any references to specialized studies.

All the ideas about child-rearing presented in this article have been practiced in real life—this is not an article containing speculations which have not stood the test of ordinary life situations. My own three daughters and many other children I know have been raised in accordance with these ideas; they have grown and developed happily and healthily.

But you must understand that many of the ideas presented in this book have not been the result of strictly controlled laboratory experiments. They are rather only opinions, but the opinions shared by thousands of psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, and other professional people who work with children and parents.

They seem logical and sensible to us. But often it would be impossible to devise experiments to test these ideas rigorously simply because people cannot be used in radical social or educational experiments most of the time, and we can't always extend animal research findings to man.

So, if you feel like challenging some of these ideas, remember that most of us join you in wishing that we could prove them absolutely.

You may sometimes suspect that the examples We have chosen are rather far-fetched, not likely to be the sort of thing that ordinary people are doing with their children. But every example has been drawn from talking with parents outside of my professional dealings with sick children and sick parents.

Neighbours, people met socially at parties, and similar nonprofessional contacts are my source material for problem situations. We have carefully avoided drawing from the very bizarre interactions I've encountered in my diagnostic and therapeutic work with patients. We have done this because this isn't an article about mental illness—it's an article about average parents and children.

This article is meant for both fathers and mothers and is about both sons and daughters, but I've found it easier to speak of the parent as “she” and to speak of the child as “he.” Where it is important to differentiate and to consider fathers or daughters separately, this has been done.

We hope that you will read this article through so that you get the basic philosophy which psychoanalytic psychology offers about normal child care and child development, rather than use it as a handbook in which to look up something when your baby puzzles you or when a new situation occurs.

Equipped with the fundamental psychological approach which this article aims to present, you should find it as easy and natural to raise your child to be mentally healthy as to raise him to be physically healthy.

We haven't tried to hide the fact that this book is based on psychoanalytic ideas because We think people aren't so frightened or angered by this term, “psychoanalytic,” as they were a generation ago.

Also, We think many of you are curious to know the psychoanalytic approach to these matters of child care and will be relieved, surprised, and possibly even made happy to learn that this psychology can speak about the natural, normal, happy child.

Basic Ideas Chapter

We'll GOING to start off by introducing you to a major guiding principle concerning your interaction with your baby. It's very simple, and it should serve as a good rule-of-thumb for you throughout your child's infancy and childhood, right up to the time when he is grown-up.

The rule is: In any interaction between you and your child, he's the boss if it has to do with his own inner biological needs, and you are the boss when it has to do with those things we generally call social or cultural.

Now, quite possibly, you don't relish my using a word like “boss,” but it is an easy word to describe the person who is responsible for leading the way, for deciding when and where and how something is going to be done.

So We use “boss” for that purpose and not because We want to sound extremely authoritarian or lead you to believe that children and parents are forever in one long battle for supremacy and power.

What does that rule mean?

It means that you should let your child be the one who decides what he needs and when about such things as sleep, eating, bowel movements, and body exploration. But you are the one who must set the pace about things like table manners, going to bed, and washing regularly.

Essentially, the breakdown We are making is one between the things which only have to do with your child's private pleasures and the things which have to do with his safety or with the legitimate comfort and safety of those who live with him.

Sometimes it helps to think of this breakdown in terms of: “What does it matter?

Whom does it affect?

Will it hurt him or will it hurt me or my things?”

We are introducing this idea right here because it is basic to most of what follows. It is going to come up often again, so there isn't much point in continuing to explain exactly what it means and how far it goes. But I should explain why We think this is a cardinal principle in child-rearing.

All schools of psychology agree upon a few ideas about human behaviour. One is that all of us have certain needs which must be satisfied.

These needs arise at different times in a person's life, but their satisfactions are all necessary if the person is to be safe and healthy. All of these needs—needing to feel trust, pride, and a sense of confidence, for example—emerge for the first time during the course of childhood.

Another important idea is that the patterns of childhood satisfactions influence greatly the behaviour of the later adult; in healthy children, these needs don’t cause any trouble if appropriately satisfied.

We know that children vary greatly in regard to how intense some needs or others are, but in any case, so long as your child is showing you that he needs certain satisfactions, you need to continue to provide them to him, even though you may feel privately that he has had “enough.”

Now We hope this doesn't sound like the frequently met travesties on psychoanalytic thought which abounded in America ten to twenty years ago. We absolutely don't mean that “you must never frustrate your child” or “you must let your child express him completely.”

Social living demands many different frustrations of all of us, you as well as your child. No one of us may express himself completely much of the time, because we all live in a social world where the other fellow wants a chance to express himself, too.

But, once again, let's leave fuller explanations for later and go on to summing up what these ideas mean. Briefly, the fol-lowing discussions all depend upon faith in the ability of your child to lead the way for you so that you will know how to satisfy his private needs easily and completely.

You can—you have the capacity to satisfy his real needs. When you do this consistently you will be making it easy for him to learn and follow the social rules he needs in order to take his place in grown-up life later on.

He won't take advantage of you, he won't be spoiled; nor will you be exhausted or unable to feel that you have a life of your own, separate at times from your child's.

Lulling   and   Feeding

In this section, it concerns your “brand-new” baby and how you become acquainted with each other during his first few weeks of life.

As soon as you first cuddle and feed your baby in the hospital, you start influencing his life. You start giving him help in getting vital needs satisfied; you start supporting the idea that being alive, having been born, is going to be pleasant.

Certainly, as new mother, you yourself feel that way. Behind whatever feelings you might have about the tremendous accomplishment of giving birth, there probably is a pride in yourself and your husband and your new child.

You want him to be happy and well, and you're eager to start shouldering your responsibilities to him.

But, perhaps you feel slightly anxious about holding him, and then you become additionally distraught because he screams or because he doesn't want to nurse or because he's so sound asleep that he can't nurse or even because he nurses contentedly, only to bring everything up when you try to burp him.

Demand Schedules

There's one way while you're in the hospital to help reduce such anxieties of yours as well as his for your right in believing that he can't be very happy if he's crying so much.

Probably the simplest first step toward reducing your anxieties is to prevail upon your doctor and the hospital to let you feed your baby on a demand schedule. That means that when your baby wakes up and starts crying, he's diapered and burped and put back into his bassinette in the nursery.

Then if he signals by going back to sleep that those were the sorts of things he needed, that's the end of that. But if he continues to cry for more than a few minutes and if about two hours have passed since he last nursed, then he's brought from the nursery for you to feed him.

You can see that behind the demand-schedule idea there are just a few assumptions. One is that your baby should be fed when he's hungry. Another is that all babies don't get hungry at the same time.

Another is that most babies, fed well, don't empty their little stomachs before about two hours, so that crying shortly after a meal means that something other than hunger is troubling him.

And another assumption is that the things your baby needs in his first few weeks of life to make him contented are relatively few—he needs to be warm, he needs to be full, he needs to be rested and free of painful stimulation.

The demand schedule idea isn't new; we've known about it and used it for almost fifteen years (and, of course, womankind has used it throughout history). But some hospitals find it difficult to have such an arrangement for all mothers.

If this is the case in your hospital, try asking your doctor to arrange things for you. In most hospitals, the nurses in the newborn nursery are happy to cooperate with a mother who wants to do her best for her child.

Even though the demand schedule isn't a new idea, I still find many mothers bringing up questions about it. It may be a good idea to answer some of them right now, before going on, since the answers themselves provide a partial explanation of why demand schedules are thought to be good.

CRYING.

One of the questions We have heard most frequently is, “Don't new babies need to cry to exercise their lungs?”

Certainly it is true that crying and struggling are your baby's ways of expressing tension. And since the new world into which he's been born is full of so many things that can cause pain and increase tension, your baby probably will cry for stretches during his first few weeks.

The hospital staff helps by keeping the nursery at a constant temperature and by routinely changing your child's clothing and by tending to all sorts of things like lighting, soundproofing, and the bassinette's position.

They can't keep every source of irritation away from your child; probably you couldn't either, even if you had your baby with you all the time.

Prolonged crying, however, is a sign that something is wrong—contented babies who are healthy don't cry for extremely long times. They don't need to cry to “develop their lungs.”

Their respiration will get evened out as they mature— crying doesn't help matters at all. I'm going to go back to that point about maturing and how you can help your child learn to release tension in less exhausting ways, but let's take up some other questions about demand schedules first.

REST.

What happens if your baby is brought to you each time he's hungry?

Do you get a chance to rest?

We think the answer is “Yes,” but We qualify my answer by adding that you get your rest when your baby is having his. In other words, in this regard as in so many others, your baby is the boss.

Later on, when his eating apparatus has matured, his mealtimes will be more predictable and they won't interrupt your activities so much. But right now, when he's newly born, his immature gastrointestinal tract doesn't operate smoothly and rhythmically.

Since he's unpredictable, you have to exercise your own greater intelligence and catch a nap when you can so you won't find yourself exhausted and angry. Your baby needs about twenty hours sleep when he's first born, so you have plenty of opportunity to fit in your own demands for ten hours of sleep, even though they aren't in one single stretch.

ROOMING-IN.

Another somewhat different question is, “Wouldn't it be better to have the baby at home instead of in the hospital, or at least have a rooming-in arrangement?

Then I could take care of him immediately when he needs attention rather than waiting until the nurse brings him in.”

We know that several hospitals are presently using this system of having the baby sleep in the same room with the mother. The reports are that it works well.

We certainly are not opposed to it. We just want to point out that from your baby's point of view, it probably doesn't make so much difference who diapers him or bathes him as when does he get taken care of and, most importantly, when does he get fed and when does he get cuddled.

The rooming-in arrangement ensures that your child doesn't find himself unhappy and temporarily neglected if the nursery staff is busy with other matters. On the other hand, the nursery arrangement ensures your child against being foolishly over-stimulated by slightly anxious, if well-meaning, efforts on your part to play with him.

It is up to you to decide which method is better for you if you find both available in your hospital. Probably your main consideration should be given to recognizing your own inner capacities for responsibility immediately after giving birth.

To the child, it won't matter too much whether he sleeps next to you where you can smile fondly at him or in the nursery where you have to strain to see him through the glass windows.

HOSPITAL SCHEDULING,

What if you can't arrange a demand schedule in the hospital?

You might ask, as have mothers I've known, if your child is seriously damaged, psychologically, by having to be on a four-hour schedule, the ordinary hospital routine.

The answer is, of course, “No.” It just means that maybe, if his habits are not fairly regular, he will have a somewhat additionally uncomfortable time for a while. Obviously, the four-hour schedule was arrived at in the first place because most babies fit it.

But if your baby does seem to get hungry more often you can still help him: you can request your doctor to increase the formula if your child is on the bottle; if you are nursing, you can be especially careful of your diet and rest so your milk supply may increase and become richer.

Chances are that your baby won't be put out too often by being kept to a schedule. And you can always keep in mind that your stay in the hospital is not very long, so his occasional discomfort won't last too long.

Lulling and Stimulating

Now let's get back to my point about helping your child release his tensions in a less exhausting fashion than through screaming. We want to stress that the method We are going to talk about won't work magically to quiet your child immediately every time he's unhappy from too much stimulation.

But it probably will help him to relax slowly, to find the world comfortable again—comfortable enough so that he can afford to stop fighting it and sleep easily.

The way you help your child is by the old fashioned method of lulling. By that We mean rocking him slowly and evenly while singing or crooning gently and softly to him. Usually you hold him in your arms, but rocking him in the buggy or his crib is also lulling.

Why does this help?

We think that it's probably because your child's greatest difficulty when he's brand-new comes from not being able to sort out into some kind of predictable pattern all the stimulation he receives from such things as light, noise, temperature changes, his own body weight, etc.

When these stimuli bombard him, it's as if he were unable to turn off his attention to them and to relax. You’re lulling him enforces a rhythmic pattern that gradually makes order out of the random stimuli that have not been clearly rhythmic before.

Your child, then, begins to react to this pattern you're offering him and he pays attention to it, not to the chaos he was noticing before.

When you continue long enough, he finally relaxes. It's almost as if he can realize that the world isn't all mixed-up and it won't overwhelm him, but rather that it's somewhat predictable and he can make sense of it. Be sure your motions are slow and rhythmic—don't shake and jiggle, just rock.

The singing or crooning probably isn't noticed when he's only a day or two old, but he will soon begin to hear and associate your voice with your presence, and he will derive pleasure from both.

WHAT HAPPENS INSIDE-REPRESSION AND RETREAT.

Some specialized words may be used to describe what's happening to your child. When he develops the ability to keep from reacting to every little stimulus, We say he's repressing associations to the random stimuli and thereby inhibiting his random discharge through screaming and thrashing around.

When he finally relaxes completely and goes to sleep, or into a kind of blank-stare trance state, We say he is retreating into autism.

We are bringing up these words because I'm fairly sure you've heard some of them before and may have the mistaken idea that repression is “bad” and that all inhibitions should be “lifted” and that it's not “healthy” to retreat.

Such negative associations stem from the fact that when a person is mentally unhealthy, he uses these same mechanisms, as they're called, but he uses them at the wrong times for the wrong reasons.

Actually they are necessary for everyday normal life, and since you want your child to grow and develop healthily, you need to be sure that you help rather than disturb his own inherent capacity to develop these mechanisms for use when appropriate.

Since we're not sure how early a child learns or becomes able to use such mechanisms, it is wise to get into habits right from the start which prepare you for helping him when he's ready for your help.

Your child develops some extremely important attitudes at this time. He learns tolerance for frustration and he learns how to relax. He learns that someone will help him when he can't figure out how to control what's happening inside of himself, and he learns that the world is not so startling a place. In short, he learns trust.

We don't mean, of course, that he learns to trust you, as a person. He probably doesn't even know you're alive. But he begins to develop a sense of relaxation and trust in being alive.

He begins to know that disruption isn't so terrible and that he'll live through it, and that he doesn't need to become desperate before someone will come to help him.

You create difficulties for him if you consistently delay the lulling he needs until he's almost exhausted. He'll be learning that he has to be practically worn out before he ever gets any help.

He'll be learning that he can't manage things within him-self. He'll be learning that being alive and alert and attentive only brings pain in its wake. So he'll conclude that it's wiser simply to retreat away from life and repress his needs—out of unhappiness, not the “retreat” of falling to sleep contentedly.

Professional workers see many disturbed patients who suffer greatly by using retreat into autism and repression inappropriately. I'm not saying that if your child cries for ten minutes because you're in the bathroom or trying to finish up dinner, he will grow up to be a schizophrenic. 

We are suggesting, rather, that long-continued, frequent frustration of legitimate needs for comforting, when a child is over-stimulated, seems to be related to the development of very serious mental illnesses, in the opinion of many of us who have studied such cases.

We are going to say it again because I think it's so important: If you help your child when he needs your help, you will be helping him develop self-reliance. You will not be spoiling him.

Later on, when he can tolerate noises and lights better, he won't need so much help from you. But so long as his senses are relatively disorganized, he'll call on you for help in making order for him by lulling him.

So, up to now, there are two things you should be doing: You should be feeding your child whenever he's hungry, and you should be lulling him whenever he's unhappy.

THINGS TO AVOID.

Let's point out some of the precautions you have to take lest you create other problems than the ones of over-frustration that I've mentioned. You have to be sure you don't feed your child every time he cries.

You have to be sure you don't try to ”kid” him out of crying when he's hungry by trying to rock him and sing to him. You have to be sure you don't start cuddling him or feeding him at a time when he’s perfectly content by himself.

 

A.            Food Isn't the Only Want. I've seen parents whose first action whenever their child cried was to offer him the breast or a bottle. In fact, there are whole societies where this is the usual routine for mothers.

Anthropologists who have studied such societies believe that this over-dependence on what we call “oral pleasures” causes many of the individuals in these societies to be passive and to lack initiative.

Such people are “easygoing” and optimistic, true; but carried too far; these aren't necessarily good attitudes to have all the time. They keep people from trying to make things better.

Since it's easier to avoid trouble than to try to correct problems, it seems wisest not to assume that food is the only thing your child is crying for. Take a tip from the nursery attendants and make certain that he isn't cold or in need of burping or a shift in position before you offer him food.

(By the way, I've been talking both about your actions while still in the hospital and then when you arrive home, rather than making some artificial break between the two times, since this all applies to both times.)

B.            Hunger Can't Be Joked Away. What about the second caution, trying to ease hunger by playing with your baby?

Here the danger is that you're simply adding one more relatively intolerable source of over-stimulation to your child's bewilderment. You may inwardly believe that it's “wrong” for him to want to eat every three hours in the morning, for example, and only every five hours in the afternoon and evening.

You may try to “even things up” by attempting to delay the earlier feedings and then interrupting him in his sleep in the later part of the day.

But you need to understand that, from your baby's point of view, this amounts to being teased when he's in pain and then being startled when he's contented. He needs to eat when he needs to eat, and at this tender age, nothing is a substitute for eating.

When he's a bit older, he'll believe that you're on his side, and he'll wait patiently while you prepare his food if meanwhile you tell him that it's coming soon. But when he's newborn, he interprets cajoling as teasing and becomes additionally fretful.

C.            Contentment Doesn't Need Interruption. The third caution has been discussed to some extent already, but it's such an important point that it needs more discussion. When your child is content by himself, either asleep or awake, you do him a disservice by going up to him and picking him up.

As his feelings about you grow in intensity, he himself will signal when he wants to be sociable, using the tried and true method of fretting and crying. But unless he's showing you that he wants attention, you should permit him the privacy he's enjoying.

If you start off by “innocently” picking up your child when-ever you feel like it, you may well end up by complaining that your child won't ever play by himself. This is spoiling—it's exactly that: corruption of something good.

Your child has his own capacity for enjoying the world on his own, so long as he's suffering no pain. When you disturb him, you're teaching him that enjoyment of the world and of himself is accompanied by you most of the time.

And then, when he does have the world and himself open for his own private inspection, he is confused because a part of the picture that he's come to expect is absent.

We know full well how pleasant it is to cuddle a little baby. And sometimes a baby is so very attractive that the urge to disturb him by picking him up is very tempting. But if you regard him as a separate individual and not as a plaything, you will be able to resist this temptation.

You'll have plenty of chance to cuddle him when he asks for it. Don't indulge in what psychologists call “projection”; that, believes that someone else must feel the way you think you'd feel if you were in his shoes.

Many new mothers, feeling lonely themselves, justify their over-stimulation of their children by saying, “But he looks so lonely there, just lying and looking at nothing.

We are sure he wants to be picked up.” The only response to that is the one we've talked about already: If he really wants to be picked up, he'll signal to you. The moral is: Let contented babies lie.

SWADDLING.

So far, I've discussed stimulation and eating patterns of the newborn. These are the major needs of your baby during these first few days after birth. There are some other things that might come up while you're still in the hospital, though, and perhaps it would be a good idea to discuss them here.

You may notice the nurse's method of wrapping your baby. Many hospitals wrap a baby especially tightly during the night, with arms and legs kept securely within the blankets.

This is a useful thing to remember if you find your baby unusually sensitive for some reason and extra prone to develop the jitters.

Swaddling the baby in this way seems to bring about the same sort of state that lulling does. By making it impossible for him to thrash around, it sometimes helps calm him down when he's fretful. And, of course, it keeps him extra warm and that's generally helpful when he's tense.

We will not recommending this as a steady pattern. Again, We think we ought to take our cue from the studies of anthropologists who have examined the societies in which children are kept on cradle boards or swaddled tightly most of the time.

There's a curious combination of intense rage and passivity which seems to be characteristic of the individuals who have been so restricted in bodily movement when young—and you don't want your child to grow up to be ostensibly gentle and independent but ruthless and cruel when he gets a chance.

So swaddling isn't a recommended procedure for every-day, all-day use. It does come in handy, however, on those occasions when your baby has some special reason for being on edge and twitchy. You yourself may notice that you hold him extra tightly sometimes when you want to calm him, and this has probably the same effect as swaddling.

TALKING TO THE BABY.

Another point to mention about these very early times is your own behaviour with the baby; particularly you’re noticing him and talking to him. 

We have often observed the somewhat strange phenomenon of a new mother spending a great deal of time looking at and talking about her baby, obviously proud of her new child, while her husband is visiting her in the hospital, yet almost not noticing the baby when he's brought to her for feeding.

This is likely to occur, of course, with a mother who's nursing since she generally needs to watch her newborn baby carefully to keep his nostrils from being closed by the breast.

But many mothers can bottle-feed their babies while staring silently at the bedclothes. We have watched women complete an entire feeding, including burping, without addressing one word to their child.

Of course, if you're the sort of person who has difficulty in making spontaneous conversation with little children who aren't going to understand you or reply to you, then you can't very well force yourself to make strained, artificial talk with your baby.

But if you just haven't given it much thought, or maybe if you thought that your baby just wants to eat and isn't interested in anything else, you might consider another kind of behaviour for yourself and try making talk with your baby.

We all seem to like praise, even when it's uttered in a language we don't understand. Babies aren't any different from grown-ups in this respect.

They seem to thrive and wax fat and contented when they receive talk and caressing—not so much caressing that you interfere with their sucking, of course, but enough so that they know that they're loved and admired.

They won't smile at you or coo, but you can notice their breathing becoming deeper and calmer and more regular, and that's a good sign they're contented.

We think talking to your baby is important because, as adults, we generally find that talking is an extremely easy way to ex-press our feelings.

The child who's cared for by someone who is glum and silent has no example to pattern himself after and wiz probably find difficulty, therefore, in appreciating just how easily feelings can be expressed by talk.

Since you want your child to be sociable and self-expressive, you need to stimulate and support his growing abilities. Then, too, talking or singing helps you relax; your baby can recognize this and relaxes along with you.

HEAD-RUBBING AND CARESSING.

Babies especially enjoy and need having their heads rubbed gently. This has an extremely beneficial effect upon such things as breathing and circulation.

So while you're waiting for the nurse to come to take your baby back to the nursery, try stroking his hair and telling him what a magnificent baby he is. It isn't silly or un-necessary, in some cases, its vital.

Babies who don't get enough cuddling gradually weaken and become listless about eating, sometimes spending their time in a kind of vacant stupor. Now I don't want to alarm you by citing extreme examples; We merely want to emphasize the point by taking an extreme position.

There's a specific cure for such a reaction: lots of tender, loving care. Some hospitals even import “mothers” to care for new babies and play with them and cuddle them to make sure that children who are separated from their mothers for extended periods of time don't sink into this state.

This is an extreme example which serves to highlight how important it is that you spend some time cuddling your baby. You may be surprised that a mother might need to be instructed in what seems to you to be a natural bit of behaviour.

But it's often helpful to keep this in mind for later on when the pressure of mealtimes with your family and other tasks may make you want to get the nursing over as quickly as possible and get the baby back into bed.

At such times, you'll need a reminder that your first responsibility is to your baby and that other things can wait five or ten minutes while you relax with him and just cuddle him.

INCUBATOR BABIES.

Since we've mentioned children who are separated from their mothers for extended periods of time, perhaps we should also consider the special case of an incubator child. 

we are quite certain that in most good hospitals, incubator children are cuddled conscientiously by their nurses, within the limits of the babies' physical condition.

But this same smallness of size or early delivery which necessitates the use of the incubator also means that these babies are additionally sensitive and immature, so that their needs are more intense and the difficulties they face are greater.

If your baby has been in an incubator, you'll need to be sure that you don't skimp on the lulling and cuddling once he's strong enough to be with you for the usual periods of time. Give him as much as he can tolerate to make up for his previous greater degree of isolation.

Be sure to follow your doctor's advice about guarding against too much stimulation which might tire your little one. But be additionally aware of the need to give a lot of praise to your baby and to greet him gladly when he wakens.

Of course, don't let you go overboard and start feeling guilty because he needed an incubator. Don't become the mother who still tells her child of ten, a husky hulk of a boy, that he needs to be careful when he's playing because he was an incubator baby. Incubator babies just need additional help for a while.

So, right after you “get” your baby and until he's caught up on his weight, give him an extra portion of devotion.

Feeding, we have mentioned both breast feeding and burping, so let's discuss these more fully.

BREAST OR BOTTLE.

The choice between breast feeding and bottle feeding isn't so crucial psychologically as it might seem to be if you've read some of the alarmist literature. The important thing is that your baby receives love and attention with his milk and he can receive that whether the milk comes from breasts or bottles.

You need to be sure that you are not making your decision on the basis of guilt, whatever your choice may be.

Some mother’s breast feed their babies because of feelings of guilt over resentment about being mothers; they are at-tempting to prove that they really aren't bad mothers. That kind of complicated reaction obviously doesn't make anything easier for them or for their children.

Many mothers comment that they feel guilty for not having breast-fed their children, even though they had very sound reasons for using the bottle. Again, such guilt is unnecessary and has no proper place in a healthy feeding relationship.

There are lots of medical arguments about the two types of feeding, arguments outside our province as a psychologist. Your physician is the one to discuss such medical or physical aspects with you.

In making your decision, you need to take into consideration the many practical differences between the two methods of feeding, thinking over how they will fit into your ordinary routine and situation.

Once you have these kinds of facts sorted out, you need to explore your own feelings. Then you are able to decide which method to use so that things will be as easy and comfortable as possible. Remember that cuddling is the important characteristic—not the milk container.

BURPING.

Whichever method of feeding you try, you will find yourself encountering the problems of how to burp, when to burp, and so on. You may find yourself becoming frantic about this routine of burping, going so far as to pound your baby resoundingly in an effort to bring up a bubble.

Or maybe you have become too systematic about burping, and you interrupt your hungry baby's absorption in his feeding in order to burp him at exactly the halfway mark. Your physician will tell you the best way to hold your baby for burping, but it may help in general to understand why it is necessary to burp an infant.

Your baby swallows air along with his milk because his throat apparatus isn't mature. If this air is expelled while he's lying down, some milk is generally brought up as well. If the bubble isn't brought up, it can cause stomach distress; and if it's very large, he may mistake his temporary feeling of fullness for satiety, only to become hungry after a short time.

These are the sound reasons for burping; but you need to remember that they might not all apply all the time to your baby. If, for example, he nurses contentedly for ten minutes or more on each breast at a feeding, it is unlikely that the air bubble is creating a false sense of satiety.

Consequently, you might well forego the in-between burping, especially if it seems to enrage your baby. You can probably leave out the halfway burping, too, if he can drain his entire bottle in one round of sucking.

Burping at the end of the feeding is still necessary, of course, unless you know from experience with him that he doesn't seem to swallow much air and it doesn't seem to cause him any discomfort.

If he does have a bubble, but doesn't burp easily, you may find it easier to place him resting flat for several minutes— when he's picked up afterward, he may burp easily and with-out spitting up.

The important thing is to approach burping in such a way that you and your baby aren't made uncomfortable. There should be no feelings of despair or rage or frustration.

Perhaps the easiest and wisest way to approach burping is to let him suck as long as he wants to, and then, when he has stopped sucking, to pick him up and try for about two or three minutes to bring up a bubble.

After this time, whether or not he has burped, offer him the breast or bottle again and allow him to suck once more until he has stopped. Once again, try for several minutes to burp him, and if you don't have any success, relax and go on about the things you were planning to do.

One final comment about burping: remember that the quantity of milk that is brought up is seldom great, so you need not worry unduly about your child not getting enough to eat if he does spit up often during the first few days.

HOLDING WHILE FEEDING.

You can see that it's important for you not to feel anxious while you're feeding your baby, for your anxiety communicates itself to him, possibly because your muscles grow tense, and then feeding becomes less pleasurable.

Also, it's necessary, of course, for you to hold him in such a way that he feels secure and warm; otherwise he will feel anxious and isolated. That is why you are counselled against leaving him to take his bottle by himself, except for very rare emergencies.

And that is why it isn't advisable to hold your baby out on your knee, feet toward your stomach, facing you while you hold the bottle.

Such an arrangement, while technically fulfilling the requirement of “holding your baby while he takes his bottle,” actually doesn't make your baby feel close and snug—and it's these feelings which you should be trying to promote.

One mother has told me that she likes to feed her baby in this face-to-face fashion because “he looks so cute when his lips are all puckered up and this way he can be seen more easily.”

Since your baby isn't a sideshow, your primary reason for choosing a procedure with him should never be because it gives you some pleasure you would otherwise miss. Always, the cardinal rule is that your baby's needs must be considered first.

So hold your baby close to you when he's taking his bottle, in the same way you would hold him if he were breast-feeding. That way he's bound to feel warm and secure.

HOW MUCH MILK. Probably the major anxiety relating to feeding is your concern about whether or not he's actually receiving enough milk. Women under the pressure of this anxiety resort to forcing their children to finish bottles, to waking them for a feeding, and even to changing to a bottle from the breast.

If you feed your baby when he tells you he's hungry and you let him eat until he's full, you can be fairly certain that he's getting as much milk as he is able to use.

There's nothing magical about the amount of milk in the bottle. Your doctor has suggested a certain number of ounces because he knows that most babies can digest this amount easily.

Your baby's hunger is not the same for each mealtime, so let him be the judge of how much he wants. The time interval between meals will be smaller if he wants more for a given feeding.

If you notice a pattern like this, you can ask your doctor to let you give him more at that feeding, or you can go along with your baby's desires and simply feed him again sooner. In either case, your baby will be comfortable and will not be doing something he doesn't want to do.

In some ways, this problem is easier for mothers who are breastfeeding for them, of course, cannot see how much milk the baby is getting. Other anxieties pop up instead, however, and need to be dealt with and removed.

Most mothers who are nursing can simply assume that their babies are getting as much as they want—the actual number of ounces is not important for the mother to know.

But if your baby seems to be waking at the same time each day, shortly after a feeding, and appears to be hungry, you might consider weighing him before and after nursing to find out how much he actually gets.

Sometimes hard-working mothers forget to rest during the afternoon or go for long stretches of time without taking enough fluids, and this cuts down the milk supply.

So you may find, for example, that your baby who cries during your suppertime for a few days in a row is actually hungry because you haven't been producing much milk during the afternoon.

Your doctor will advise you on ways to take care of this. If you can't spare time for a nap and a snack during the afternoon, giving the baby a bottle for the early afternoon feeding will allow you enough time to produce sufficient milk for the suppertime feeding.

Or you might simply give him a bottle at the feeding when your supply is low, counting on starting to produce after you've had the pick-up of a meal yourself.

Supplementary and Complementary Bottles. It's important for you to recognize that giving your baby either supplementary or complementary bottles while he's on the breast is in no way a reflection upon you as a woman or a mother.

The idea is not to feel competitive about how your child is fed. You don't need to compare yourself to other women you know.

If you can't produce sufficient milk for your baby to be breast fed without bottle feedings too, this means only one thing—you can't produce sufficient milk for your baby to be breast-fed only.

It doesn't mean that you're inferior to other women who don't need to use bottles. Many physicians actually believe that it is wise for the nursing mother to introduce a bottle to her child, as well, for this allows her baby to learn to accept bottles in case the mother should be ill or absent and it permits the nursing mother to go out for a visit in order to keep her spirits up.

So don't start feeling miserable and unworthy if you find your milk supply is low. If you think your work habits are causing you to be too exhausted to produce much milk, you can consider letting some things slide for a few months while you take a rest before feedings.

Or if you have some emotional turmoil about something else, try to get it sorted out quickly or try to put it aside temporarily until your baby is weaned. However, remember that the ideal mother isn't someone who nurses her baby—rather, she's someone who takes care of her baby's needs.

So don't insist on nursing if in consequence your baby is truly going hungry. If you think your milk supply will revive, nurse for a few minutes and then give a bottle at each feeding until enough time has passed for you to decide whether or not your milk supply has returned.

GETTING SUCKING STARTED.

All this gets back to another point about feeding, and that's concerned with stimulating your baby to suck. Some mothers are extremely eager to breast feed and are anxious because their babies don't respond to the offered breast immediately.

To some extent, most babies, on breast or bottle, have a little difficulty in sucking during the first few days after birth. One mother I know has called her task seducing her baby into sucking at this time. I think this is a very apt description.

Your baby needs to be teased and stimulated into doing the work necessary to get the milk into him. He comes into the world with a neuromuscular apparatus that is perhaps better suited to spitting-out than to sucking-in.

He needs help in stimulating his sucking apparatus to work properly after he is born. So you can think of yourself as courting him, getting him to want to respond to you. If you think of yourself this way, you can spare yourself a lot of disappointment and anxiety during the first few days of breastfeeding.

You wouldn't have expected your husband to feel despondent and worthless because you didn't kiss him the first time you met him. So you needn't feel despondent and worthless because your child doesn't immediately respond to the nipple. Don't think, “He doesn't like me, I'm no good.”

Instead, you can regard your baby realistically and think, “He's not very happy about this idea of having to do some work in order to get what he needs.” Then you can start teasing him with the nipple, stimulating him with a drop of milk squeezed into his mouth.

You can be sure that not too much time will go by before he decides that he wants to suck. Your baby's body is equipped to handle this interim period before sucking becomes vigorous, and your own body is also equipped to withstand the delay.

In most cases, about the time that your baby decides he wants to suck vigorously, your milk supply has just begun to come in.

Certainly you should not decide to abandon breast-feeding simply because your sleepy, lazy, little child doesn't seem interested in sucking during the first few days. Remember that most of the time it isn't because your nipples aren't shaped properly or your milk isn't “good.”

When he starts sucking, he rapidly shapes your nipples since they are made of tissue which responds in this way to being drawn upon. And you can hardly believe that somehow he knows your milk isn't any good for him when he hasn't even tried much of it.

These feelings aren't so great among mothers who are bottle-feeding. Instead, they start worrying about the kind of rubber nipple being used or about the way they're holding the baby, and so on.

All mothers need to remember that a newborn baby doesn't know he has to work to gain pleasure. Even when he condescends to giving one suck, he seems to expect the rest to flow smoothly and without effort on his part.

So you have to continue to stimulate his desire to take the next suck and the next. After he's a few days old, the pleasure he gets in sucking will offset the effort he's expending, and you won't need to worry about this any longer.

Most of the things discussed so far claim your attention during his first few days of life. Once you're home from the hospital, you find yourself meeting new challenges: diapering, dressing, bathing, etc.

The principle that governs your behaviour in regard to lulling and feeding during the first few days of life will still continue to govern your behaviour in regard to these new challenges. So, in the next chapter, let's see how this rule fits. Let's continue to explore how to let your baby and his needs determine your behaviour.

Comfort and Care

WHEN YOU RETURN from the hospital, you finally assume complete responsibility for your baby. From this time on, most of the decisions regarding your baby are going to be made by you —at least for quite some time.

You'll be listening to a lot of advice from friends, relatives, and your doctor; but the final way in which this advice is followed or disregarded will be your choice.

Your biggest problem, then, is to figure out on what basis you choose one course of action or another. You need to outline the criteria by which you judge advice•

How to Evaluate Needs

The best criterion to use in determining what you should do with your baby is: Does he need this?

We've seen how, when your baby was still in the hospital, you already used this criterion to decide when to feed him and cuddle him. For such simple situations, you won't go too far wrong in interpreting what is meant by “need.”

But as your baby gets older, you may find that there are some things your baby wants that he doesn't need. So you should be prepared to encounter such difficult choices and be wise and informed ahead of time in order to make the correct choice.

In later chapters, many of these choices will be brought up for discussion. Right now, I mention this matter only because it helps direct your attention to what you should try to accomplish in your behaviour with your baby. You should try to behave in such a way that his legitimate needs are all fulfilled; although he may not get everything he thinks he wants.

OTHER CRITERIA.

What are some other criteria that might be used in determining a parent's actions with a baby?

Well, some parents decide in accordance to whether or not something is comfortable for them to do.

If they are at all astute psychologically, they may cover up this real reason for their choice by saying, “If it isn't comfortable for me, then it's not going to be good for my baby because he'll sense how un-comfortable I am.” You can easily see, though, that this can be just a rationalization for failing to consider the baby's needs first.

It is true, certainly, that a very immature mother will make her child feel how disturbed she is when she finds she has to become reasonably grown-up in her actions in order to care for him.

But most psychologists agree that it's still better for the child to be treated right, even though he may suffer indirectly because his mother doesn't want to treat him right, than it is for the child to be ill-treated mechanically as well as emotionally.

And we believe that if the mother inwardly resents needing to grow-up because she is now a mother, she will demonstrate that resentment even if she's allowed to behave the way she says she wants to behave because it's “comfortable” for her.

In other words, if a woman doesn't like being a mother, she will show it. But at least if she is treating the baby right in mechanical things like feeding and diapering and making an attempt to consider her baby's wants first, before her own pleasure, he won't suffer so much directly.

There are other variations on this theme of comfort. You may do something because it amuses you or because you want someone to think you're an efficient mother, and so on.

So long as the major reason is to prove something about yourself, that you're superior in one way or another, the chances are that your baby's wants won't be given the proper amount of consideration.

Organizing Yourself

HELPERS DURING THE FIRST WEEKS AT HOME.

Let's for the time being, assume that this is your first baby, so we don't have to consider the complication of the reactions of your other children. We'll talk about that later on, in another chapter.

And let's assume that your husband is taking a few days off from work in order to help you out. It may be your mother or a maid rather than your husband, but with you is some other adult and capable person whom you can rely upon and feel friendly with.

I mention reliance and capability and friendship because your own emotional reactions to your baby are going to be complicated by your emotional reactions to others, so you should try to lessen any anxieties or difficulties with other people.

If, for example, your husband is just not very handy around the house, you should consider getting someone else there for the first couple of weeks as well, who will help you with such things as diapers and shopping for food.

Don't think this is an insult to your husband. You know from experience whether you can leave to him such things as making the beds and shopping and cooking. And if it isn't easy, if there's a lot of pull-and-tug to get his help, then consider him just a friend and not a helper and get someone else to help.

The same thing goes for mothers or maids. I've seen new mothers who looked forward happily to having their own mothers visit with them for the first few weeks, counted on not having to worry about the ironing and the cooking and such things, who became tense and depressed after a few days be-cause their mothers were not fitting into their hopes and plans.

If you know from experience that your mother is going to resent being asked to leave the baby to you and being asked just to help with the housekeeping, then, again, forestall her visit and get someone else to help you out, someone you can ask to run out for bread without having to make a big production out of it.

I don't think it's wise to get a nurse who will care for the baby while you take care of the house and of visitors and so on. This is your baby and he will never again be so easy to take care of as he is at first, so you might as well enjoy him. 

We put forth that reason, beside the more meaningful reason of wanting to cement the emotional tie between you and your baby, just in case you think a nurse would be best because you don't know very much about taking care of babies.

There are mothers, certainly, who, out of their anxieties about caring for a newborn, feel it would be best for the baby to be taken care of by a trained nurse while they sit in the back ground and hope they'll catch on soon. In actuality, the my chances of child care are not so complex.

If you drive a car, ride a bicycle, or even carry groceries home, you're capable of the kind of control that will keep you from dropping him or drowning him. And if you've ever baked a cake or mixed a cocktail, you know enough to be able to make his formula.

So don't turn over your womanly birthright as the mother of your child because of such fears. You'll soon get the hang of holding your baby easily and bathing him easily. Assign the nurse or the maid or your relatives or your husband to the things that concern the house.

TAKING IT EASY, it's nice to think that you have everything so well organized that you don't have to worry about such details as the extra loaf of bread, the tube of ointment for diaper rash, the bottle brush, etc. You can, with careful attention, of course, reduce such things to a bare minimum.

You can have diaper laundry service so you won't have to worry about the laundry; you can eat frozen prepared meals so you won't have to worry about cooking or shopping; you can let the housework go so you won't have to worry about the beds and dusting.

But chances are that you want the house to look pretty, be-cause you're expecting visitors to come to see the baby, and you want to eat home-cooked meals.

So try to arrange things so that the only chores you have to be concerned with are the ones of taking care of your baby and the cooking. Get someone else to help do the cleaning and shopping and serving and dishwashing.

Don't set up an ideal in front of yourself of the pioneer woman who did everything you do and more, without help.

She probably was as exhausted as you think you'd be, and you should remember the statistics about infant and mother illness and death rates in those days—her hard work probably contributed to the reason these figures were so much higher than they are now.

Be happy that you live in an age when you can avoid over-straining yourself immediately after childbirth; forget the pioneer woman, and take it easy.

The reason for taking it easy isn't so much a medical matter, however, as it is psychological. We know that when people are fatigued, they tend to become upset more easily.

And we also know that the new state of motherhood imposes an additional emotional strain upon even the best adjusted, most healthy people because there are a lot of glandular changes that increase fatigue for a while after childbirth, and because childbirth and parenthood bring up a lot of almost-forgotten ideas from the part of your mind that still is living in your own childhood.

So the wisest thing to do is to avoid becoming fatigued be-cause this will only increase the likelihood that you become unhappy, and then you aren't able to take care of your baby with the peace of mind you need in order to take care of him best.

GETTING UP AT NIGHT. During your first few nights at home, you may find your baby sensing your fatigue and your tension as well as feeling additional tensions himself because of his new surroundings.

So he may not be quite so contented about sleeping through the night as you had hoped he would be.

You face the choice, then, of who's going to comfort him, you or your husband?

(Of course, you don't need to make any choice about whether or not to comfort him, since you've already decided that so long as he needs extra attention, you're going to give it to him.)

While I know you'd probably like to have a full night's sleep without interruption, I think it's wiser for you than for your husband to get up with your baby. Chances are that you'd be lying there awake while your husband struggled to quiet the baby anyhow.

But a more important reason is that your baby knows something about your body contours and how you hold him and he can more easily relax with your familiar rocking than with a comparative stranger's, even if that stranger is his father.

If you feel lonely in the middle of the night and want company, your husband can wake up and sit with you. But if you feel vindictive, sort of “why should he get a chance to sleep while I have to get up,” you need to examine what's going on in you a little more closely.

Beware of the rationalization, “The baby has to get used to him, and he's so eager to be a real father.” Once he begins to know that he's alive and there are people around him, your baby will have plenty of time to become acquainted with his father. Right now his big need is to be comfortable. And he's going to be more comfortable with you than with anyone else.

If you find yourself becoming rattled because you're trying to wake up completely and the baby is crying and the bottle isn't getting warm in a hurry, your husband can probably help by tending to the bottle-warming while you comfort the baby.

If you're breast feeding, you have the advantage of not having to worry about warming the milk. (This offsets the disadvantages of not being able to feed your baby while talking with friends. It all balances out nicely.)

The Meaning of Clothes and Baths

What about the mechanical tasks involving your baby?

You might ask, is there some deep psychological significance attached to this way of dressing him or that way of bathing him?

I think the answer is “Yes.”

Your baby came from an existence in your uterus where the temperature was beautifully constant, always at body heat. Now, in a world that deviates greatly from the customary 99° F., his own body temperature must adjust to contact with drafts and surfaces that vary in temperature. So you need to dress him in such a way that he can maintain a constant body temperature easily.

WHAT CLOTHES TO DRESS HIM IN.

You also need to remember that his uterine existence allowed him fairly free play. He could float in all sorts of positions, feeling little encumbrance for most of nine months. Now it's up to you to change his position in the crib and to dress him in such a way that he can exercise and move about easily.

This means that his clothes must not restrict him while they are keeping him warm and safe from cold drafts. They must be easily put on and off so you can keep his skin surface dry and warm with minimum annoyance.

Modern baby clothes are admirable from all these view-points. If you keep to the many knit garments that are being sold today, you can be fairly certain that you won't be encumbering your baby.

The only way you can run into trouble is to hark back to the good old days and start buying the kind of clothing that used to be the only kind available. Frilly dresses, starched petticoats, and stiff shoes aren't fair to your child because they are not flexible enough to permit him to move easily.

And of course, they impose an added burden upon you, because they mean much more work in laundering and ironing. You might want to dress him up, infrequently, for very special occasions.

Keep in mind, however, that a starched shirt front or dress looks much worse once it's crumpled than a knit sequel or kimono does; so if your primary goal in dressing him up is to show how cute he looks, you may find yourself more apt to be disappointed with the frilly clothes than with the knits.

For every-day at home, certainly, you should keep clothing to a minimum. Your doctor will advise you specifically if you ask him, since the clothes your child wears will be determined by his size and the climate.

In general, though, it is easier for your baby to wear close-fitting booties that still leave him free to kick than to be encumbered by a blanket; a shirt that can be snapped or pinned to the diaper will keep his trunk and shoulders and arms warm and free of drafts; and then a sequel or kimono will serve as additional covering in the house if the weather merits it.

If he seems restless with only this clothing on, you might try either a light-weight sweater or a receiving blanket wrapped loosely around him.

The swaddling talked about in the last chapter is only for those times when your baby seems additionally irritable, and it should never go on for more than a few hours.

So long as your baby is small and not too much of a kicker, you can add just blankets and a hat when you take him outside. When he becomes more vigorous, he’ll have to wear more clothing in order to keep warm outdoors.

You can see that keeping the clothing to a minimum is easier for you as well as for your baby. This outer clothing probably will need more frequent changing if your baby doesn't wear wet-proof pants over his diapers, so you might want to have him wear pants, too.

Be careful, however, that there are no signs of rash while he's wearing pants. They tend to keep the diaper warm and moist longer than if the other clothing were absorbing moisture, so they create a perfect breeding ground for the germs that cause diaper rash.

For the first months, until he can shift his body position, you might find it simpler just to use a wet-proof pad on your lap while you're feeding him and a similar pad under his hips on the bed, rather than using pants.

You still have the advantages of emerging dry yourself from a feeding and of having the bed sheets dry, without the disadvantages of risking a rash.

The important thing in clothing your baby is that he be comfortable and safe. Too much clothing makes him unable to move freely and also tends to turn him into a hot-house flower that can easily catch cold.

Too little clothing makes him restless and irritable and anxious. If your baby's colour is the rosy pink generally associated with soapflakes ads while his hands and face and feet are still free of perspiration and are slightly cool to the touch, he's probably dressed adequately.

It has been difficult to convince mothers to keep from over-dressing their children. But don't go to the opposite extreme and decide that he should only wear a diaper.

You may think this will help him learn early to be tough; but when he grows up, he'll be best able to tolerate trouble if he feels inwardly secure—and that security is being built from the very start. if he suffers because he's cold, he can't very well feel secure.

I've known several mothers—people having personal difficulties of their own and trying to be independent of their own parents—who under-dressed their babies and rationalized by saying that this permits complete freedom of movement.

They disregarded the signs of discomfort, the constant fretting and restlessness, and talked about how their babies were just “sensitive.” It can't be proved, of course, that their babies weren't just especially sensitive; but if they were, they probably would have benefited from having sources of irritation reduced to a minimum, and one of these sources was their chronic search for warmth.

DIAPERING, another problem is how often to change clothing, especially diapers. Outer clothing needs to be changed when it has become uncomfortable for your baby or when its state offends you.

Ordinarily, once or twice a day is sufficient. If you aren't regarding your baby as a little doll to be dressed and undressed at your whim and pleasure, you probably won't create any difficulties by changing his outer clothes.

Diapering, however, often creates difficulties. You need to be concerned both about how often he should be diapered and about how you regard diapering him.

For your child's comfort, it is probably sufficient to diaper him after each feeding. The only other time he needs diapering is when he's active and throws off his covering and gets cold. If he has a bad diaper rash, you need to change the diapers whenever you notice that they are wet or soiled until the rash clears up.

Don't assume that every time he cries, he is wet and un-comfortable. You can get him accustomed to too much diapering just as you can get him accustomed to too much nursing. It's very unlikely that a wet diaper causes any discomfort unless he has a rash or the diaper has cooled greatly.

You can, then, use only about six or eight diapers a day. But you probably want to diaper him before each feeding, too, so he isn't too uncomfortable for you to hold; so count on two diapers per feeding per day.

This diapering before a meal increases his discomfort slightly, of course, because it means waiting for that all-important milk until you get through diapering him; but this amount of frustration he can tolerate—and having him dry certainly makes feeding him more comfortable.

You need to develop a system for diapering that enables you to get a diaper off and on, with proper cleansing in between, in a very short time. But unless he is extremely unhappy, as he may be before meals, don't rush at this task as if it were completely distasteful to you and were something bad.

Diapering babies, like preparing meat for cooking or washing a dirty floor or digging in the garden, is something to be done—not repugnant and repulsive, not demeaning and disgraceful. It is just a task which will ultimately lead to something pleasant.

Your raw meat turns into a delicious pot-roast, your floor turns into a gleaming expanse, and your garden turns into flowers and vegetables. Your baby, too, will turn into a man. And you want him to be a man who is free of neurotic feelings about himself and his bodily functions.

You don't want him to think there's something fantastically fine about being clean, any more than you want him to feel there's something fantastically bad about getting dirty. You want him to be matter-of-fact about the sweat of his brow.

Now, a lot of things you'll be doing later on about letting him learn to use the toilet and letting him explore his genitals will have a great influence on this matter-of-fact, acceptant, self-respecting attitude.

But you can set the stage for later difficulties by your reactions to diapering him now. Don't be like the woman who always had her husband (fortunately, a man who worked at home) diaper the baby because it made her gag.

If you have such disturbed feelings about making your baby comfortable and clean, then you should attempt to understand and eradicate them now, before they cause greater complications in your own life and that of your baby later on.

The opposite extreme to dashing through diapering as if it were frightening is getting over-involved in cleaning your baby scrupulously. Morbid fascination is no better for your baby than anxious avoidance.

Your baby needs to be oiled and cleaned after he has had a bowel movement and he probably would appreciate being oiled when he has urinated. He doesn't need to be scrubbed or spanked or patted.

A cleaning tissue dabbed with mineral oil does an excellent job of removing faeces without inflaming your baby's skin. Once he's clean, unless its bath time, diaper him and let him continue with his other activities.

You need to remember that he has no real control over elimination. When enough waste products build up, he defecates or urinates. You should not react in such a way that he begins to associate these acts with your reaction, whether of relief or tension, for that places an implicit demand upon him to be responsible.

So don't be miser-like about diapers and become annoyed if he uncooperatively wets just as a new diaper is being put on. And don't squeal with delight if he urinates while the wet diaper is still on just before you're ready to remove it.

Your baby's defecation and urination are part of his privacy and don't need any comment from you, lest he begin to feel that what is going on inside of him doesn't belong to him anymore.  

Feeding and Straining. During the first few weeks, you will often notice your baby defecating while he's nursing or taking his bottle. You don't need to stop feeding him. Most babies are very adept at grunting and straining while still holding tight to the nipple.

Nor do you need to worry about his seeming uncomfortable while he's defecating. Because the stool is loose, he needs to strain more than when solid foods have been eaten and the stool is firmer. If your baby seems extremely uncomfortable, you can lull him and wait patiently for him to resume feeding.

If you believe something is seriously wrong, your doctor can observe him while he's moving his bowels. But remember that straining and hard work are natural, and don't give way to unfounded fears and anxieties because your baby is working hard.

Certainly, never on your own, without medical advice, use suppositories or enemas in your effort to make his work easier.

One of the ideas behind all this advice is that you need to avoid having your baby pay too much attention to the genitals and buttocks area at this time.

As he matures, he progressively becomes more interested in this part of himself, but this interest is something he needs to develop after he has established other interests; you should not be stimulating him precociously.

BATHING. You do have a job of stimulation at this time, however. You need to stimulate your baby's over-all skin surface and sense of balance and weight so he gradually becomes aware of where he stops and where the world begins.

Bath time is an excellent time to help him do this. Caressing him while you soap him, letting him float, kicking his feet and hands for him—these are all ways in which you help him learn that he's there.

The technical phrase for helping your child get fun from being touched and learning to recognize his body limits is “developing skin and body erotic.” This is the beginning of his ideas about himself, and he needs your help.

You can see the results of his pleasure immediately; his breathing deepens and quickens, and his colour tones up. He's refreshed and pepped up by his bath, just as you are by yours.

If he starts crying in the bassinette, take him out if a few kind words don't immediately reassure him. But be sure to try again the next day and the next. After a few days, most babies enjoy their baths greatly.

If you're not sure of the mechanics of bathing him, your paediatrician will answer your questions. Everything you can do to make bath time pleasant and easy should be done, so put your ingenuity and your husband's to work.

One handy idea, by the way, if the bassinette is not in the bathroom, is to get a long enough piece of hose to run from the faucets to the bottom of the bassinette, an adapter to fit the hose to the faucets, and a clamp.

You can then run the bath water into the tub right through the opening usually used for drainage. Once the bath is over, removing the clamp will permit the water to drain easily into the bathtub.

Resist the temptation to start poking into his ears and nose to remove the mucous and wax. It isn't necessary, because nature has provided an admirable mechanism for keeping these passages clear; the tiny hairs within the nostrils and the ear canals do a much more efficient and safe job of clearing these passages than you can do with a swab.

And in addition, poking around with a swab is another intrusion upon your baby's body privacy and so to be avoided. Washing the external ear and wiping off the nostrils with a washcloth are as much as you need to do.

After the bath, powdering and oiling are other ways in which you create pleasure for him. So, too, is brushing his hair—a happy situation where the social effect and the effect upon him are both good. All of this type of stimulation contributes to his developing pleasure and recognition of his body limits.

*When to Bathe. You can soon learn the time of the day when he is most likely to get bored and restless and to want company. Use part of this time for his bath, and make it as relaxed and happy a time as possible.

Don't, during the early weeks, try to fit his bath time into your routine, but rather arrange your routine around his bath time. By all means, avoid trying to economize on clothing changes by giving him his bath in the early morning when he is most wet from his long sleep.

He cannot tolerate the delay before getting his breakfast. Instead, wrap a receiving blanket around him to keep him warm until he has eaten and you can change his clothes.

TALK WHILE BATHING AND DRESSING.

Just as you talk to him while he's eating, you need to talk to him about his bathing and dressing. He appreciates listening to your running commentary, “Now let's wash one arm, now the other little arm,” or “Now let's put on the shirt and this bootie,” etc.

If you merely dress or bathe him without talking, you're not any more company to him than a mechanical baby-tender would be.

You can, of course, talk about other things. But by talking about what you're doing you're teaching him all sorts of things about what are arms and what are ears and you're also making all this into a happy kind of ritual. Your baby hears you say “Splash, splash” when you're slapping his arms or legs against the water, and he enjoys this way of adding two and two together, associating the word with the act.

Children I've known whose mothers talked like this to them seemed able to assume responsibility for bathing and dressing themselves very early in life probably because they could “think” about what they were doing; most thought requires words.

Feeding

Feeding him goes on just as it did at the hospital—feed him when he wants to eat and as long as he wants to eat, with burping attended to so he's comfortable and full of milk.

One thing is going to be different at home, though; you have the choice about where to feed him and under what conditions. Alone with him in his room, with your husband and other people present, or just how?

WHERE TO FEED HIM.

For the first few days, you probably will feel more comfortable if you make feeding a private thing between you and your baby. In that way, you won't have to become self-conscious or worried about paying attention to a conversation with someone else when you just want to relax. 

We don't mean barring your husband or someone else close to you, of course, so that feeding your baby becomes a secretive thing. I just mean that it's easier to do one thing at a time until it gets to be more of a routine.

You'll probably find it somewhat more difficult if you are breastfeeding than if you give your baby a bottle. When visitors come over, you'll need to leave them alone while you nurse— and that often means they'll be on their own for as long as an hour.

But the alternative is to nurse with an attempted casualness that you probably don't feel. We think that is a bad alternative for many reasons—some of them not having a thing to do with your baby, directly. Your baby senses, of course, any tension you feel about baring your breast publicly.

But you also run the risk of having your husband feel that something private to him has been made public, and there's always a good chance that your visitors also feel uncomfortable, without to admit this to you.

It's true; of course, that there's nothing sexual about nursing, and that in many countries of the world it is ordinary for a woman to nurse in public. But in America, it generally isn't done.

And if you're mature enough to be a sound mother, you don't necessarily want to be the person who flies in the face of convention in order to prove how “advanced” you are. Your feelings of modesty are quite appropriate and you shouldn't worry about having them.

SUCKING TIME.

While we're on the topic of nursing, we should discuss sucking. I mentioned before that you might be nursing for as long as an hour. Of course your baby isn't sucking vigorously on the nipple all that time.

Much of the time he's just giving occasional suck, although if you attempt to release the nipple by picking up the corner of his mouth, he may resist strenuously and start crying.

Babies need this kind of added sucking time. Some babies on the bottle whimper when the bottle is finished. Many babies chew on their hands or suck thumbs immediately after they finish eating.

Of course, not all babies have such an intense need to suck; many are satisfied by the amount of sucking they do to empty a bottle or in nursing for 10 minutes at each breast.

But if your baby does seem to need additional sucking time, and you aren't restless about letting him continue to nurse, his sucking needs can probably be satisfied without resorting very often to the use of his hands or thumbs.

Be sure, of course, that your nipples don't start to become painful. If they do, call your doctor and curtail the nursing time to a safe number of minutes for a while after they've stopped being painful.

*THUMBS AND PACIFIERS.

However, what if your baby is on a bottle or you want to keep nursing time down to a half hour or so, and he still wants to suck?

Obviously, you aren't going to try to stop him from sucking his hands or his thumb. You know by now that if he needs to suck, he needs to suck. He'll become a chronic thumb-sucker in later life only if he's then extremely unhappy and he's not given enough sucking gratification now.

But you may be asking the wise question of which should it be his thumb or a pacifier?

Even a baby a few weeks old can suck a pacifier for long stretches of time, just as he can suck his thumb. What are the pros and cons of the two sucking “tools”?

If he sucks his thumb, his thumb as well as his lips and mouth cavity will be getting being able some sensation. If he sucks a pacifier, his hands will be free later on to explore each other and to play with such things as cradle gyms.

Both kinds of sucking seem to give the same amount of gratification; your new baby will accept either. With the pacifier, you need to be around to give it to him when it drops or when he starts fretting for it.

His thumb, however, is always around, although he may have similar difficulty in get-ting it into his mouth.

I think the choice can be settled by your baby. When you see him trying to suck his hands, you can offer him the pacifier. If he takes it, fine. If he loses it and starts to whimper, you can give it to him again.

If he violently propels it out of his mouth and goes back to his thumb, then that's that. Right then, he likes his thumb better. You can try the pacifier another day.

Some children seem to use the pacifier intensely during the first few months, only to reject it most of the time after they're a bit bigger and their thumbs are big enough to fill their mouths.

So if your baby decides one day he doesn't want the pacifier any more, you may find him occasionally sucking his thumb. Conversely, some children settle on the pacifier when they get bigger. There's no steady pattern.

The only thing that can be said is that most babies from time to time seem to want to suck just for the fun of it.

You've probably heard that thumb sucking is a sign of emotional disturbance. Sometimes it is, when we encounter it in a school age child. But in a healthy and contented newborn infant, it's the most natural thing to do.

If your baby doesn't seem to need additional sucking time, it doesn't mean he's sick, of course; it just means he doesn't have as much sucking need as other infants.

The thing to remember is that thumb sucking or the use of a pacifier from time to time by a very young infant, not yet weaned to the cup, is natural. It doesn't mean that you're failing to supply enough love, that you're failing to supply enough sucking with meals, or that the nipple hole is too large.

After all, when your baby is frantic with the need for milk, you can't tease him by giving him a bottle with a microscopic hole from which he needs to drag the milk out drop by drop.

This would only make him need to suck more afterward, to make up for all the tension and frustration of his more fundamental need for food. So if your baby is taking a reasonable amount of time to empty his bottle—that is, 15 minutes or so—the nipple hole is probably small enough.

If he still wants to suck, then you can't blame the hole. Nor can you blame your breasts for flowing too freely or worry about the way you're cuddling him or worry about a million and one other possible sources of frustration.

You don't need to blame anything, in fact. Most of the time you can just relax and realize that your child wants to suck because it gives him pleasure, and that doesn't necessarily mean that he's trying to make up for some other unhappiness—not when he's still an infant.

If you help your baby get his sucking pleasure by giving him a pacifier or helping him find his thumb, you are reducing the chances that he'll want to continue to suck once he's weaned. You are giving him a satisfaction he needs when he needs it, when it's most intensely pleasurable, and you are paving the way for him to develop healthily.

How Your Baby Reacts— Incorporation and Turning Inward

There are two psychological terms which I use to refer to the way the baby approaches reality and deals with his needs during this time. 

We use the word incorporation to describe the way babies get their main joy in life from sucking, from taking things into them. And I call the working off of tension by sucking and other similar devices turning inward.

It's awfully important to make a proper distinction between these two reasons for your baby's sucking. If he seems to be happy and he sucks his thumb or pacifier, then he's incorporating, that is, he's getting pleasure because he seeks pleasure.

But if he's fairly often fretful and he resorts in despair to sucking his thumb or pacifier, then he's turning his rage inward, turning it upon him.

After all, short of wearing himself out by fretting, he can't do anything else, can he?

He can't make you stop mistreating him or over stimulating him. He's a passive, totally dependent little thing, pretty much at your mercy.

So when he resorts to sucking in that kind of situation, he's doing almost the same thing an older child might do when he's angry but unable to express his anger. He's doing something like biting himself in rage because he can't make the world behave the way he needs it to behave.

This is the exception to my former statement that sucking is natural and healthy. It's still natural since it's the only thing your baby can do with his displeasure and rage, short of wearing himself out by constant crying; but it's no longer a sign that he's happy, healthy, and satisfied with the state of the world.

You can decide for yourself what kind of thumb sucking your child is doing by examining the way in which he resorts to his thumb or the pacifier. Most babies like to suck when they're going to sleep.

They also want to suck for brief minutes during the day. But if he's always sucking away, seldom at ease and relaxed when his mouth is free, and if he shows other signs of restlessness and discomfort—poor eating, poor sleeping, etc.— then it probably means that somehow you're failing to comfort him and take care of him in the way he needs.

Don't take the pacifier away, of course. But do, by all means, examine the situation realistically and try to remove the legitimate sources for his discomfort and rage.

Maybe too many people are stimulating him at mealtimes, or there is too much rushing. Once you discover and remove the source of discontent, he will once again be happy, using his sucking in fun instead of because he's mad at himself for having such a mother.

Let's leave further discussion of sucking needs until a later chapter when we consider the question of weaning.

Sleeping Arrangements

We've discussed getting up at night, but we haven't discussed where your baby is sleeping. Perhaps, before we get to playing with him, we ought to talk about sleeping arrangements briefly.

Probably, during the first weeks at home, you'll want to have your baby sleeping near you in a bassinette. That way, you are sure to hear him when he wakes for his nighttimes feedings and you are able to reassure yourself about his breathing and so on.

But you need to make provision for some other permanent sleeping place, some place removed from your own bedroom, even though it might be the sun-room or the dining room or a corner of the hall surrounded by a screen.

HIS PRIVACY.

There are two reasons for giving your child a sleeping place of his own, removed from his parent's bedroom: his privacy and your privacy. He needs to sleep alone and untroubled by the activities of adults.

His trust in you is great enough so that he can relax by himself, aware dimly, inside of himself that he'll be taken care of if he needs care. He isn't lonely or scared of the dark or anything like that.

He's naturally relaxed and sound asleep because he knows you are taking care of him. If you upset this by keeping him near you, he won't be able to test his faith in himself and in you, and as time goes by hell have less and less inclination to brave the big world by him.

By keeping him sleeping near you all the time, you're doing the same thing as if you were feeding him whenever he become tense—you're keeping him from developing a natural tolerance, and you're spoiling him.

YOUR PRIVACY.

You and your husband need to sleep alone, too. After several weeks, you and your husband will start sexual coitus again. And you want to be free to make love without anxieties about the baby being awakened by your activities.

Also, you probably need some help in returning to this part of being a wife instead of regarding yourself only as a full-time mother. If your baby is sleeping next to you, it will be more difficult for you to be in a frame of mind for love-making.

I'm not going to talk about such things as the “primal scene,” because in this connection, at this time, it doesn't apply. Your baby doesn't even recognize you yet, completely; his eyes don't focus, he can't turn his head or raise it easily.

So he obviously can't understand (misunderstand, really) what love-making means. This isn't the time when we have to be concerned about your child becoming sexually aroused by the sight of intercourse. But you have your own needs for private intimacy, and your baby needs his privacy, too, so you might as well start off as soon as possible.

If you can, while he's still so young that you want him sleeping at night by your bedside, try to arrange to have your baby sleep in his permanent sleeping place during the daytime, so he will be acquainted with it.

Then place him there for the nights, too, several nights before you think you and your husband will resume sexual intercourse. That way, you'll have a chance to get used to listening, and he'll have a chance to get used to sleeping there before the time comes when you won't want outside distractions.

By the time he's six weeks old, everything should be arranged and your child should be sleeping comfortably and easily in his own bed-place at nights.

COMFORTING AT NIGHT.

Always avoid the serious error of taking your baby to bed with you. The same reasons apply as for having a sleeping place of his own, only more so. Unless you want a permanent intruder into your bed, you should never take him into it. And I assume that you do not want such an intruder on a permanent basis.

Your child is probably not going to face any dangers like tigers in his bedroom or wolves in the hallway.

If he wakes with such a complaint when he's much older, you'll be able to say to him what you implicitly show to him now: “Mommy's here and she'll take care of you. Now you just go back to your own bed and sleep. I won't let anything hurt you.”

It's confusing, to say the least, for a baby to be a part of a lovely big warmth and then to be shut out. He doesn't like losing something after he's gotten used to it. So reassure and comfort your child outside of your bed and you need never face trying to sort out that kind of confusion and disappointment.

I have known complicated and disturbed child-parent relationships where one of the chief problems recognized by the parents was that their children refused to sleep by themselves.

In one such complex situation, the mother finally succeeded in getting her son to allow her to sleep alone with her husband by giving him, when he was eight years old, a telephone of his own, connected to one by her bed, on which he would call her, literally at all hours of the night.

Now in that case, as in others, taking the baby to bed with them was not the only failure of the parents, but it was one of the things that they did wrong. And it can be avoided.

In fact, there are so many problems you can avoid. By thinking carefully about your infant's rights and about your rights, then fulfilling your responsibilities to yourself and to him, you can avoid a whole host of problems. And it's so much easier to avoid the development of a problem than it is to correct it!

Keeping Him Occupied

Just about the last thing you'll need to worry about for a few weeks is how to play with your baby, what to do with him when he's awake.

He isn't awake much of the time at first, of course. Most of his schedule is taken up by sleeping and eating. But gradually you can notice that there is one long interval between feedings when he may seem more restless.

This is the time to be truly sociable with him. Bathing takes up part of the time. Then you can take him for a walk in the fresh air, so that both of you can benefit from the change of scene.

Your doctor will advise you about how long both of you can be out, but it's important to get started with daily outdoor exercise because it gives both of you a new outlook. He'll probably go promptly to sleep once the buggy wheels start rolling, but as he grows older he'll begin to look around and appreciate the differences.

Once you're back from your walk, he may signal to you that he wants cuddling or company. He enjoys being in the same room with you and, if he gets additionally restless, being carried around by you. You shouldn't be doing too much more actively with him.

You'll only make him anxious if you swing him through the air, and you'll exhaust him if you start baby-calisthenics with him. He's just a little one who wants some sociability, baby-size. In a few months he'll enjoy patty-cake and rattles, but not now.

For the next few months then, with the exception of the addition of different foods to his diet, he'll continue on much the same pattern. His wants won't change dramatically.

If you can feed him when he's hungry, let him sleep when he's tired, talk to him and lull him when he wants company or sympathy, keep him warm and still free to move, take him for a change of scene around the house or the neighbourhood, and caress him while he's enjoying his bath or being dressed, you will have tended to most of his needs. He'll be a contented infant who will be making you happy and proud.

Beginning Independence

Eating Solids

Probably the only dramatic change in your baby's life between two and four months of age is the addition of solid food to his diet. There are changes going on in his muscular development, in his sleeping rhythm, in his sociability and awareness of other people. But these are not so much difference of kind as differences of degree.

The introduction of solid foods, however, is a complete difference. He's been taking different fluids—milk, juice, water, vitamin drops—and these have all been things he can swallow easily.

The introduction of cereal and fruit and other strained foods during the next few months presents him with a totally new experience. He has to learn to roll the food back from the tip of his tongue and then deliberately swallow it. And he also has to accommodate himself to a host of different tastes.

Your doctor will tell you which foods to introduce, when, and how much. He'll probably caution you to take it easy, to give only a taste at first, gradually building up the quantity, and to stick to one or two foods that are generally accepted and tolerated well by most babies.

He will also probably tell you not to force your baby to eat. What he may not describe is the emotional climate in which you introduce solids.

ATTITUDE TOWARD SOLIDS, if mealtimes cease to be cosy times for the baby to exercise self-determination and enjoy himself, he soon sets up an association between solid foods and displeasure—and you may have the beginning of a feeding problem on your hands.

I think most problems related to food originate in the same attitudes on the mother's part that we have touched on before: being indifferent to her baby's wants by asserting her wants over his or being indifferent to his wants by failing to offer him sufficient patient and tactful stimulation.

These lead to somewhat different results in actual behaviour, both in the mother and the child, but the net result is the same—the baby fails to learn how to eat enjoy ably.

A mother who approaches this new experience with the idea that her child is going to be difficult but that he is going to have to learn that she knows best will be forcing him to accept against his will something that he might otherwise have welcomed willingly.

And the mother who shies away from presenting him with this difficult situation will be failing to offer him the chance to learn to enjoy solids; she will not be providing him with the necessary stimulation.

BENEFITS OF THE EARLY INTRODUCTION OF SOLIDS.

The idea behind the early introduction of solids is that the baby benefits physically from them. It has gained support because most babies do not have too much difficulty with solids.

You can be sure that if babies reacted very negatively to solids in the first few months, doctors would not continue to advise this course of action.

Psychologically, too, the early introduction of solids has great merit. It helps the child to become tolerant of many new tastes, slowly, at a time when he still intensely enjoys getting his primary satisfaction from a more passive, dependent, feeding relationship.

If we wait to introduce solids until he's weaned, however, he has nothing to fall back upon for deep satisfaction if he has rough going with solids. It's too much for him to integrate. By letting him get used to the idea of not being so completely passive while he still has perfect freedom to be passive, you make it all much easier for him.

Simultaneously, learning to eat solids lets your child explore a kind of independence in a “safe” way, in a familiar way, through his mouth, with a minimum of chance that he's going to get hurt.

Later on, when he starts being truly mobile, there will be many limitations on his exploration and he'll have to juggle within himself what things he may do and what he may not do. Right now, he only has to worry about what he wants to do or does not want to do.

He needs only to swallow if he likes being more independent, he needs only to spit and close his lips if he doesn't want to be; in this rejection, he is exercising his own right to determine an independent course of action.

When he gets around to sitting and creeping and standing, other parts of his body will help him learn even more about independence.

Even now, there are signs of developing independence in that his hands can find themselves or the cradle gym, his eyes can easily focus on objects across the room, and his head and shoulders are relaxed from the tonic neck reflex of early infancy and now turn easily where he wants them to go.

In many ways, he's growing up—and that means growing out away from the narrow circle of dependence upon you. He is learning to take and to reject actively on his own, where before he just received passively; and he starts this independence first, primarily, with eating solids.

HOW TO INTRODUCE SOLID FOODS.

What can you do, then, to make eating solids pleasurable? By now, of course, you can anticipate me and know that the answer lies mainly in letting your child tell you what he's ready for.

However, you have a more active role to take as well. You are the one who's going to introduce him to a whole new world of pleasure, to things with different textures to feel with the tongue, to sweet things or bland things or tart things.

But since all these adjustments to the new require slightly more effort on his part if he's going to enjoy them, you're going to have to stimulate him to want them. Once again, you are seducing him into enjoying something new.

Just as when he was newborn, he failed to suck vigorously at first, he may now fail to swallow vigorously at first. His tongue pushes out, signifying that he doesn't want this funny stuff. He may cry and become extremely angry about having been insulted in this strange way.

That's your signal that he's had enough for that one day. It isn't your signal that he's had enough for weeks or months, however. Next day offer him a taste again.

Perhaps this time he may not be so shocked; he may swallow experimentally and even go so far as to finish the entire spoonful. If he chokes, you need to wait for him to get his swallowing apparatus under control again, of course, but this is no indication that you should stop the feeding. You only get that signal when he pushes hard against the spoon or closes his lips.

A. When to Offer Solids. He may cry if you try to give him his solids before he's had his sucking and his milk, that are still all-important. Babies vary in this reaction. Some can tolerate being fed before nursing or taking the bottle; others feel frantic and show it by crying and thrashing about.

Your baby may vary from one feeding to the next, needing to suck in a hurry first thing in the morning but willing to play along with this solid food routine before his milk at lunchtime.

After a while, you get to know your baby's reactions, and you are able to prepare accordingly. If you know that he always falls asleep soundly toward the end of one feeding, you should avoid trying to give him his solids after his milk at that feeding.

If he gets you coming and going, being too frantic before the milk but too sleepy and full after the milk to take solids, then there's your cue—no solids at that feeding or else solids sandwiched in between one long go at the bottle and finishing up the bottle.

Generally you want to aim at having him take his solids before his milk, since eventually that is how he will be eating, and since it lessens the chances of his refusing the solids or regurgitating them.

He's in the habit of sucking until his stomach is full, so there's a fairly good chance that he'll need to spit up some of the solids if he takes them after he's finished nursing or having his bottle.

You may find it advisable, at those feedings when he needs his milk in a hurry and even resents having the solids in-between milk, to let a half hour pass after nursing before feeding him, if he's awake.

B. Mopping Up and “Shaving.” Your baby isn't very adept at swallowing, so you can expect to find a lot of what he takes into his mouth being spilled out through his partially closed lips as he swallows. “Shaving” this off his face with the spoon and offering it to him again isn't force-feeding.

Don't view this spilled food as proof that he doesn't want any more and stop feeding him long before he's gotten tired of eating. When he doesn't want the food, he's able to push it out very vigorously; he truly spits it out. It doesn't run out slowly.

There will be less mopping up and shaving to do if you can place enough on the spoon and hold it so that he sucks the food in, strongly. Once he gets used to the taste of his cereal or fruit, he quickly becomes an expert at sucking in big globs of it from the spoon.

At that point fill the spoon heaping high each time so he doesn't take in too much air with each suck. An alternative is to use a small enough spoon so that you can place the food toward the back of his tongue where more of it will go backward and downward when he arches his tongue and swallows, but I have the idea that this tends to produce more choking or gagging; I think the other way is easier for your child.

C. Position and Equipment. Since your baby will probably be eating solid foods before he is able to sit up comfortably by himself, you will find it easier to give him these foods while he is in the same position as when nursing or taking his bottle.

Until he is able to sit up in a high chair, a bib or a cloth spread beneath his chin will serve adequately to keep his clothes from becoming too messy as he experiments with swallowing.

When he's gotten this new kind of eating down to a fine art and can sit up, a bib which covers the front of him is in order. These can be chosen according to your own personal preferences for terry cloth, plastic, or linen, but try to get the kind that has a wide pocket on the bottom to hold spilled food and liquids.

Another item of equipment at this time is the spoon. It really doesn't matter whether it has a long handle or a short one, so long as you can use it comfortably.

Many mothers have told me that they find demitasse or coffee spoons ideal; the handle is long enough to reach the bottom of baby food jars easily; the bowl is small enough so that a baby does not choke when he pulls such a spoon into his mouth.

Your baby will not try to use the spoon seriously for several months, however, so you can decide upon the easiest spoon for you to use right now without being unduly concerned about its shape.

D.  Reintroduction of Previously Rejected Food. Your doctor will advise you on how to handle reintroducing certain foods that your baby seems to digest with difficulty or that cause rashes.

If it's merely a matter of taste, however, so that he spits out a newly-introduced food, the task is pretty much the same as when you first introduced him to solids. That is, you let him make up his mind that he doesn't like it, but you let him taste it again the next day and the next day.

Never offer more than one taste at a time if he seems to reject it, but keep offering the same food for a few days in a row. If, after about three trials, he still refuses it, wait for a few weeks and then try again.

Young tastes change and develop rapidly. He may go on binges with certain foods, eating them avidly for meal after meal for a few days, only to push them away impatiently once his passion for them has waned and he's found a new love for something else.

If you continue to offer him a fully balanced meal at each feeding time, even though he doesn't seem to like a certain food that week, he will select a fairly well-balanced diet over the long run; his body will dictate what foods he needs —and, of course, his body needs all of them. 

We don't think you're likely to run into these food crushes until he's ready to be weaned, somewhere from six months on, but if you do, keep track of what he's been eating over the course of a month, and you'll find that it adds up to a fairly well-balanced diet.

E. Burping after Solids. You need to be attentive to burping still, but by the time he's three or four months old your baby will generally be burping easily. Part of what he's doing, now that he's on three meals a day, is learning to store up enough food to last him through the intervals between feedings.

He may not be very skilled at estimating how much he needs, so there are times when he spits up the surplus. If you give him time and freedom to experiment, however, he soon learns to judge better, and these regurgitating stops.

Seeing and Grasping

I've mentioned that during this time his muscular development is going along rapidly, and this means that part of your job is to provide him with things he can look at and start grasping.

The bumper pad on his crib can occupy him for hours if you've bought one which has a brightly collared pattern on it. He stares at a mobile or rattle hung over his crib or buggy with fascination and greets it with joy when he's put into his crib, talking away to it happily.

A cradle gym can keep his eyes busy long before his hands reach out to it, but the hands follow soon enough.

His developed vision makes it easier for you to keep him contented because it lets him be in contact with you while you're performing some household task nearby. He's sociable now, although this sociability is easily satisfied if he's just near things and people he can look at.

He doesn't need to be held or played with actively any more of the time than when he was very young. But he isn't quite so content for long periods of time in the same place.

Don't get confused and think he wants cuddling whenever he frets. It might be just a change of scene that he needs. If that doesn't work, you need to cuddle him, of course.

Sociability

He's so sociable—smiling at new faces, looking at them with intense fascination—that it's easy to grant him this widened range of people. Now is a time when he's very flexible and likes everyone, and you can help him further this liking and trust by letting others take care of him. At last father can truly take over, without causing the baby any discomfort.

You can almost see a direct relationship between this newly developed sociability and his readiness for solids. In each case, he's accepting or taking in a part of the world that's beyond dependence on Mommy and milk.

A sign of his increasing independence of you comes when he trustingly nuzzles with Daddy or a friend. Now, when he becomes irritable, someone else can help calm him, too. His nervous system is fairly well organized by now, so it isn't crucial that he be comforted by the most familiar person, so long as he's comforted.

By making sure that you give him opportunities to be with others, you're helping him begin to set up a new relationship to you. It lets him discover you as a person, separated from him.

Just as solids are more easily liked and tolerated when he still gets most of his pleasure from drinking, new friends are more easily accepted while he still gets most of his loving from you.

As he goes from you to your husband, he develops knowledge that there are “people” and that there is even more than one kind of people. When this gets too bewildering, he still can easily return to you and lose his consciousness of the separateness of himself and the world as he cuddles in your arms.

Experimentation

In a way, I think this time, before he learns to crawl, is a time when he's playing with the world. He's not terrifically serious about understanding it, as he will be when he can crawl and explore.

It's more a sort of happy amazement with all of it. He stares and smiles at an object on a table near him and then looks at it with surprise and delight when you help him sit up for a better look—it's something new, not the same object at all.

He enjoys discovering how many different ways he can see things. Although he may get tired of sitting, he does enjoy it for a few minutes at a time; and part of this enjoyment seems to be in the difference it makes in looking at familiar things.

You notice, too, when he's nursing, that he tries to see things over his shoulder or in front of you, dropping the nipple, looking, frowning, returning for a suck or two, stretching to see something new, and then finally settling down to some serious sucking.

Toward the end of his nursing, he experiments with leaving the nipple; now that he's full, he seems to be more interested in playing a game with you than in exploring the world. He grins at you and enjoys being teased with the nipple, grabbing for it as you touch his lips with it.

All of this seems to be a preparation for weaning himself away from sucking. He's making sure he can return if he wants to, but he's also making sure he can leave it if he wants to.

Safety

Not only are his eyes and neck muscles stronger now, but his entire body is developing the strength and coordination and skill that lets him roll and turn over. You must be careful from now on to guard against falls.

From the time a baby is two months old until he's old enough to climb up and down from low places, until he shows that he understands the notion of being up on high places by sitting still on them, he must not be left unattended on any surface from which he might fall.

Other safety precautions must be taken, too. It's a wise idea to make a check list of all the possible hazards in the house and safeguard against these, constantly revising the list as the baby grows.

Until he begins to crawl, the problem of safety is not so much a matter of what he can get into as it is a matter of what he can be gotten into. If he is never taken near the stove, for example, there can be no danger that a pot will tip over upon him.

Testing the food or milk or bathwater for temperature beforehand prevents accidents of shocking cold or heat. For bathing a baby, I recommend a bassinette which has a sling upon which he can rest or in which the water level is so low that he can rest on the bottom with his face free of water.

The easiest and safest way to tote a young baby is to carry him and any bundles in one arm, supporting his head with the free hand which can then grasp for a hold in case of a slip. Nails should be cut with blunt-tipped scissors.

Diaper pins can be put into a pincushion hung on the wall or into a bar of soap so they won't accidentally get caught up in his clothes. These are just a few of the ways in which the clear minded and farsighted parent can avoid accidents.

Your peace of mind is increased if you develop good safety habits. And the baby's contentment isn't disturbed, either by awareness of your anxiety or by the pain he might suffer if he should have an accident.

Your doctor probably has a list of safety precautions in addition to the foregoing, and he'll be happy to know you're wisely paying attention to them.

Sleep Habits

I've mentioned that your baby is more sociable, stays up for longer stretches, sleeps in shorter naps during the day but for a lengthier stretch during the night, but I have not discussed the child's tolerance for stimulation while he's asleep.

During the first few weeks of your baby's life, you probably were very aware of the fact that he slept soundly between feedings, so that you never thought about shushing people when he was asleep.

Now that he's older, however, you may develop the mistaken notion that his shortened naps are the result of noise. You may consider turning the radio off or walking on tiptoe or bringing him in from outdoors, for example.

Most people sleep soundly if they are happy—this goes for your baby as well as for you or other adults. When a baby is restless, the answer isn't to go around on tiptoe. Rather, it is necessary to discover what tensions are building up while he's awake which keep him from relaxing completely when he goes to sleep.

If these sources of tension are removed so that his waking time is contented, he'll be able to go to sleep happily and easily and will sleep soundly.

In any case, most babies of two to four months of age take little cat-naps instead of long sleeps. If you remember this, you'll easily recognize that it wasn't the radio or those garbage cans down the block that awakened him. 

We think you do your baby a disservice if you try to arrange a soundproof existence for him. The human body learns to tolerate ordinary noises easily once the nervous system is able to sort things out and repress adequately.

If you upset this learning process by keeping him free of sounds, his capacity for tolerance will never develop; the child then becomes over-stimulated by quite ordinary noises.

Unless your baby is physically ill and thus prone to being more easily disturbed by all sorts of stimuli, the sentence, “Keep quiet, the baby is sleeping,” should not be heard in your house.

REST AND ISOLATION, if at all possible, have your baby get used to being put into his crib or—preferably—his buggy outdoors as soon as he starts to whimper with fatigue after his lunch.

He may not always sleep, but he is learning that this is a quiet time during which he can relax before taking up his vigorous activities in the later afternoon. A pattern like this can be continued through the first three years. Your doctor will tell you about outings in direct sunshine, high winds, or low temperature.

Although a sleeping baby does not require a graveyard-still house, be sure that you avoid the other extreme. Don't try to toughen your baby by putting him next to the equivalent of a riveting gun.

Ordinary noises like the radio, talk, typing, even carpenter work and adult parties, can be tolerated, but very loud noises will cause pain or tension.

These few months are very relaxed and happy one’s for you and your baby. You no longer are worried about how fragile and tiny he is, you're back to a routine with your personal life apart from the baby, and you've got a responsive, alert, cuddly baby to be with.

The coming few months entail some very big changes as your baby develops, but they can be just as happy.

Freedom, Praise, and Protection

FROM ABOUT the time your baby is four months old until the middle of his second year; his life is a crowded series of all sorts of wonderful things.

He begins to sit unaided, to creep, to stand, to walk, to feed himself with his fingers, to hold his cup, to handle a spoon, to help dress and undress him, to bang his toys around and play real games with them and with you, to say a few words, and to understand many that you say to him.

With his accomplishment of each of these skills, his under-standing of the world and of himself grows and grows. He becomes a real person; he becomes acquainted with himself.

In order for him to do any of these things, his muscles need to be strong and well coordinated. And even after he begins a new activity, he needs to practice over and over again before he can perform it confidently and successfully.

All through this time, your primary job is to permit him the freedom to experiment with all these activities, to give him a helpful and safe setting in which to try, and to praise him for each try—then to praise him even more for each success.

Attitude Toward New Skills

The attitude of a child's parents toward his learning may influence him to want to go on trying and to feel that he's wonderful or it may make him give up in despair, feeling that he's nothing but a little baby and there's no point in trying to grow up.

Not only does a parental attitude of praise and respect, or of contempt and belittling, make a difference to his eagerness to develop; the way in which he is kept out of danger and trouble also makes a big difference.

For example, if he gets seriously hurt when he tries something new, he’ll be just as confused and anxious about becoming independent as if he had not been permitted to try in the first place.

Over-protection, inconsistency, over-discipline—almost all the words you have ever heard in regard to bringing up your baby—now start to mean something real. Parents need a very clear idea of what they are doing if they are to help children through this adventurous time without serious emotional or physical scars.

To begin with, they must be aware of the baby's capacities, aspirations, and limitations. Let's take a look at the simplest kinds of gross body movements first, such things as rolling over, sitting up, and creeping.

Your baby shows you when he's ready to do these things; he doesn't need to be forced by you or teased or cajoled. When his body can do these things, he starts. Having started, he practices.

But you need to be there, on the alert for his first experiments, ready to help him out of trouble, prepared to keep him from other troubles.

A baby wants to practice these new activities, but he gets tired easily at first. He rolls over, then becomes fatigued and bored, only to find that he can't do anything to get himself back into his original position.

He sits until he's almost hopelessly tired of sitting, yet he is not quite able or does not quite dare to relax enough to get back into a more restful position. So he starts complaining.

This is when he needs a mother who is aware of these possibilities of fatigue, who can tactfully help him find and accept a more passive pleasure while his body takes a little rest.

He does not need someone who will impatiently say some-thing like, “Well, if you're so tired, why you keep roll over, for heaven's sakes! Stay still now!” He does not need to be picked up to a refrain of, “Poor little boy, oh my darling, that's too much for you, isn't it, you shouldn't try to do things like that until you're bigger.”

All he needs is a lot of quiet, patient, helpful sympathy. Someone to turn him over and say something about how tired he must be because he's doing such wonderful things and being such a big boy.

Someone to give him a quick cuddle and a word or two about how she's sorry he wasn't happy but she's sure he feels better now. Someone who respects his difficulties but is confident that he can work them out himself and who tells him and shows him so.

These are the big ingredients in being a mother through all this time: helpful action, praise, sympathy, and a tactful presentation of some other activity if he seems to be getting involved in too much difficulty.

Freedom and Safety

If you remember that your baby's activities are the natural result of his maturing and growing, you will be less inclined to try to stop him from being active and more willing to try to create around him a world in which he can be active safely, without greatly inconveniencing the rest of the family.

Now is the time to get the gates up at the stairways, the kitchen entrance, and the bathroom. Now is the time to put fragile belongings away, to be careful about cigarettes and matches and ashtrays, to track down electric cords, to remove things that hang down from tables.

A baby cannot get to all these things at once, of course, but everyone will be more comfortable if ready in advance for the great day when he starts to creep and get around his world on his own.

I want to stress one important idea: no child should ever be allowed to play with anything which, in the ordinary course of events, can harm him physically. This means an absolute taboo on electric cords, gas jets on the stove, sharp instruments, matches, and the multitude of other such things which you can easily list for you.

He must not play with these sorts of things even if the match has already burned or the electric cord is disconnected. He cannot make such distinctions. When he is much, much older, he will learn the proper use of such things.

But not until several years of living have proved his ability to understand and follow complicated directions should you permit your child to have anything to do with potentially lethal objects.

With the exception of electric cords (which may be difficult to remove), it is simple to put these things out of reach. This is not as inconvenient as it might seem at first.

The habits of stepping over the gates at doorways to the kitchen or stairs or latching and unlatching them and of placing cigarettes and matches in a pocket or on something high are quickly acquired.

The ever-present electric cords demand stern and consistent statements on your part and a quick removal of your baby from them each and every time he goes near them, until he shows you that he's learned and accepted your idea about them and no longer goes after them.

There's little point to trying to fix “baby-proof” sockets—even if they are complicated enough to make it difficult for him to put things in sockets, they still don't stop the current going through the cord. The wisest approach is simply to outlaw all electrical devices.

There is a general idea behind this kind of help and discipline. Your child is in no way being directly destructive in his activities; he is simply trying to explore the great world he now finally has access to.

But he hasn't any experience which will guide him in choosing how to be active, so he needs you to keep him away from running into trouble. And the easiest way is for you to do just that: keep him away from trouble.

Another general idea is that your baby is still very dependent upon you. He hasn't what psychologists call a firm sense of personal identity. He isn't too sure of himself. But he is sure of one thing—he loves you and he enjoys your loving him.

Your praise means as much as food and drink to him. Your disfavour, your disapproval, your “No” is things he doesn't like.

GUIDANCE AND DISCIPLINE.

He is inclined to repeat acts which gain your approval, and he forms other associations to avoid things which bring forth your “No!” But in order to do this, he must understand, at his simple level, exactly what elicits your disapproval.

A. How to Say “No!” For example, what about those electric cords?

What should you do and say when your baby starts crawling over to them? I think the easiest thing is to wait until he makes tentative gestures towards them; then goes over to him, hold his hands firmly with one hand while picking up the cord with your other hand, say (and say it as if you meant it, because you should mean it) “No! no electric cords, I don't want you to play with electric cords, mustn't touch!”

Then give him something else he may play with, a toy or any other object that he can explore freely, saying, “There, you can play with the pan. You're a big boy and you can play with the pan all you want.” If you repeat this every time he tries to touch a cord, you’ll quickly find that he stops going toward them.

After a while you'll be saying only, “No,” and handing him a toy with a smile, but I think it is important to add the extra words at first. Otherwise your interaction may begin to resemble training a puppy to leave your slippers alone, i.e., it becomes dehumanized.

We have watched mothers, who have sincerely believed that they were saying “No,” who ask in great perplexity why it hasn't worked; their babies are driving them wild because they aren't obeying.

These mothers in actuality have not been doing this at all. It makes a big difference if you simply sit saying, “No, no,” in a quiet voice to your baby when he starts to crawl toward the cord. In that case, he doesn't have the faintest idea what you're talking about—and he shows it by continuing to try to crawl in the direction he's headed.

After all, surely you can't mean that he mustn't crawl, although that's what it sounds like to him. Eventually, if you keep up this foolish ambiguity long enough, he shows his confusion by sitting still and whimpering. There are three brief rules for your well-chosen No's: Be specific; be immediate; be firm.

Remember that your baby is a baby. He needs to have one and one added up for him many, many times before he can put them together for himself. So be sure that you're specific about what you want him to conclude.

Don't tell him “not to crawl.” Tell him “not to play with the electric cord,” And you'll only be telling him that by waiting until he almost starts to play with it and then reprimanding him directly and showing him that this is something you won't let him do, you don't want him to do.

B. Trying to Cajole Obedience. Another mistake in discipline is to try to make it falsely palatable by such devices as picking your baby up, smiling at him lovingly, while you say some such meaningless stuff as, “Oh, no, you don't want to play with that nasty electric cord, now do you?”

This approach is often embroidered with such additional confuters as, “You'll get hurt, and then Mommy will be so sad, and you don't want to make Mommy sad, do you?”

My reason for thinking this kind of approach is very bad is simply that it isn't true basically, and so it's confusing to your child. The added bit of appeal to presumed “finer feelings” is confusing because your baby doesn't know what you're talking about.

And even if he did, it violates one pre-eminent truth about child-parent relations: your baby is only responsible for himself, barely responsible for himself; he hasn't the wherewithal to be responsible for you, too, for your happiness or un-happiness, which is what you imply in asking him not to make you sad.

Obviously, if your baby is starting to play with an electric cord, he certainly does want to play with it. There's no point to trying to tell him otherwise. So stick to the absolute truth, namely, that you don't want him to play with it because you don't want him to hurt himself.

Your child will accept limitations if they are generally few in number, if you are consistent in your reprimand, if you don't humble him unnecessarily but instead immediately present to him something that he can do, and if he isn't too upset and unhappy and resentful and angry about the rest of his life— that is, if his dependency needs, when he shows them, are promptly and lovingly satisfied.

These may sound like a lot of conditions, but they really aren't. His other activities continue, just as easy-going and happy as they always have. He's getting his food and his rest and his cuddling and his outing and his playtime.

You've re-moved most dangers from his reach, so you don't need to say ”No” too often. You're concerned about his welfare so you watch him when he's near any unresolved dangers; you are genuinely angry about the thought of his getting hurt so you don't ever permit him to run the risk.

And you love him so you don't want him to feel he's no good because he's too young to play with the electric cord; consequently, you have something else up your sleeve to present to him that he can play with because he's such a big boy.

This is the time when your baby learns by reward—not by punishment. As much as possible, you need to avoid all sorts of punishment, including the “No” and the frown because to the child it represents a momentary loss of your love.

He becomes confused and anxious, and it's harder for him to make sense of himself and the world. This is why your primary aim now should be to remove dangers and temptations. In a year or so, your baby will be able to understand reprimands in their intended meaning.

(By the way, these times will probably help your housekeeping, unless it's already perfect. For example, you don't want your baby to creep near the outside entrance door because it's too draftee—only to realize that it's unfair to expect him to understand such a complication, so you end up by putting weather-stripping along the bottom of the door as you've been meaning to do for so long.)

PLAY PENS AND SPRING CHAIRS.

Essentially playpens and spring chairs provide safe ways for your baby to explore certain body freedoms and skills. When he sits in a chair that jiggles up and down, he's enjoying a kind of body play, actively initiated, that he felt before only when you pushed him in his buggy.

His back muscles get a workout and he's having a fine time. The playpen also provides him with sturdy rails to hold onto when he starts to stand and to cruise. Before then, it's a relatively large area in which he can practice sitting and creeping and can even take a brief nap if he tires of so much strenuous activity.

Both playpens and spring chairs can be safe and enjoyable. Neither is a substitute for mothering, We think that's where difficulties arise in the use of chairs and pens. When a mother wants to use them to “imprison” her baby, he reacts to them accordingly and clamours for release.

But if he is otherwise receiving sufficient attention from her— that is, getting her attention whenever he asks for it—he accepts the chairs and playpen as fine places in which to enjoy himself.

We don't think you'll find your baby unwilling to stay in a playpen or chair out of your sight as you go about your business of being a housewife if you have avoided the two cardinal errors: failing to give him attention when he needs it or failing to permit him to enjoy his privacy.

Only a child who feels extremely unhappy because he's been neglected or spoiled has sharp views about the playpen or the play chair during the first few months that he uses them.

There's just one qualification to make here—but probably every mother can recognize the difference between a child's beginning to whimper after he's played contentedly for an hour or more in the playpen and a child who sets up a fuss the minute he's placed in it.

Your baby may fall asleep sitting in his chair or lying in his playpen. You don't need to move him; he may not look particularly comfortable, but he's probably sufficiently relaxed so that he will not become stiff as might an adult.

If it happens regularly, however, you may prefer to watch for the signals he gives as he gets tired, removing him, if you want, to his bed before he falls asleep.

Psychological Development— Identification and Introjections

In beginning this chapter, I said that a parent's primary job was to permit the child freedom to become acquainted with his small world and himself. All along, throughout this period, the baby is also observing the people he lives with. He engages in two processes which psychologists call identifying and Interjecting.

Identifying means two different things. It means learning about the objects around him, finding out what's in his world, including the people whom he now sees as separate from him-self.

And it also means a kind of imitation, not necessarily conscious, of the people about whom he feels the most intense emotion. So when your son goes along with your ideas about what he should or shouldn't do, to some extent this is because he's identified with you; he's doing this because in this way he becomes like you.

Introjections are a slightly more abstract, more mature, sort of thing. After primary identifications are made, the baby begins to believe that he has the same ideas, wants, attitudes, and so on, as the people around him.

He pulls their values and standards and codes into himself. He will continue to do this throughout all his formative years, with many people. This taking-in of ideas and attitudes is called introjections.

This is the beginning of his conscience and of his ideal of himself. As he begins to interject more and more firmly, he doesn't need someone always standing by, telling him not to hurt himself.

He himself, consciously, doesn't want to hurt himself because he has unconsciously interjected the idea that he shouldn't hurt himself, told to him so often by the people he has identified with; he avoids a situation that looks or has been dangerous to him.

Introjections also operates in regard to hurting others or hurting and destroying things; in many ways, it's one of the most important things we do—it's the basis for all truly civilized behaviour.

But until he has firmly identified with you, he cannot interject your standards. So prior to the time when he shows his identification with you, at about twelve to twenty-four months, you should not expect any automatic remembering of what you've told and shown him.

FLEXIBILITY.

The attitudes your child interjects will linger for life. So you need to be especially careful to present flexible attitudes to him, particularly if you imagine that these attitudes will need to change as he grows older. Where you hope attitudes will never need to change, you can be equally careful to present inflexible attitudes.

For example, you can hope and believe that he will never have to change his attitudes of self-regard and self-protection. So you want him to learn, once and for all, that he must not hurt himself.

Thus, when you caution him about doing some-thing potentially dangerous that will probably always be dangerous, you make it a general rule without any “time-binding.” For example, you say, “No, I do not want you to hurt yourself, so stop that.”

But where it is something which he may in the future be allowed to do and be able to do successfully, you indicate this to him by time-binding it. Thus, you say, “No, you may not play with the ashtray now, but when you are a grown-up, you may smoke as Daddy and I do.”

You are the one who makes explicit for him the distinction between now and the future, between his present capacities and his future capacities. Doing this keeps his interjected standards flexible enough to meet the altering demands of his future life.

We all know people who are still afraid to light the oven when they are married because they were so over-cautioned against going near the stove when they were children. Such a complication is easily enough avoided by the process of time-binding a cautionary statement.

Interjected standards need to change particularly during adolescence; those inflexible attitudes which a child gains during early childhood must, therefore, rest on sound and enduring values, rather than superficialities, if a child is to pass through adolescence easily.

More examples of the meaning of flexibility will be discussed in later chapters, so perhaps it would be best to leave this until later.

SENSE OF PERSONAL IDENTITY.

We do, however, want to point out that as a result of identifying with those who are near and dear to him, and interjecting standards, a baby begins to build up his own personal sense of identity. He can start to think about himself.

If all he gets, day in and day out, is a bunch of impatience and frowning and restriction and censure, he'll think that he's worthless, he's bad, and he should be condemned.

If, on the other hand, he receives lots of praise and respect and patience as well as consistent and realistic limitations, he'll think that he's a pretty fine fellow, although, of course, he knows he can't do everything just yet. He'll love himself and respect himself.

If he doesn't like himself, he can't very well admire and be interested in and cooperate with the world. If he likes himself, he joyfully goes along with many, many suggestions because he has a happy feeling of expectancy—he's eager to find out more and more about the things he can do to make himself and others more comfortable.

Problems at Increasing Muscular Development

We have talked about limiting and yet encouraging your crawler, almost as if your baby went from tasting his first solid food to crawling—and that isn't true, as you know.

In between these times, from a few weeks to about nine months of age, your baby is practicing all sorts of smaller muscular movements, and these all may bring some special problems in their wake.

His rolling over and sitting up make it difficult for you to bathe and dress him as easily as you did when he just lay there. You can save yourself a lot of impatience and difficulty if you accept the fact that your baby has learned to do these things and he's got to keep on practicing hard all the time.

He isn't being uncooperative or trying to tease you. Nor, actually, does he resent being dressed. He just doesn't like to have you try to keep him from enjoying his new-found skills.

BATHING AND DRESSING.

The thing to do is to figure out a way to wash him and dress him while he's sitting up. If you cover yourself with a plastic apron, he can splash to his heart's content in the bath without getting you wet.

Toys will keep him occupied temporarily while you use the soap and washcloth. If he doesn't show any fear when the water drains out, you can save some trouble by letting him stay in the bath until its empty, drying him in the tub.

That keeps him from feeling that you're taking him away from something wonderfully attractive since all he's leaving is an empty tub.

You can learn the knack of plunking him down on a diaper so that all you need to do is to lift up the corners and pin them. Once he learns to creep, it is more difficult to keep him still long enough to get the pins closed, but again a toy can keep him occupied while you diaper him upside down.

The big idea is to suit your dressing methods to his muscular development. It really isn't necessary to diaper him only in a flat position. If you attempt to make him conform to this kind of expectation or demand, he soon regards getting dressed as a wholesale nuisance and insult.

By changing your ways to suit him, you make it easier for him to give you a little cooperation so that when you say firmly, “Now hold still for a minute while I get your pins on,” he can hold still for a small fraction of a second.

LEARNING TO RELEASE.

Another muscular skill that your baby is developing is learning to grab and then, later, learning to let go. He isn't trying to drive you mad by dropping every-thing the minute you pick it up for him. He's just practicing letting things go. 

We don't want to emphasize anything else in regard to learning to grasp and release than just these simple motor skills. I don't know how much he learns about gravity and such concepts as he watches things disappear toward the ground.

Nor do We know how much he learns about how things can come and go. I suspect that he learns more by seeing you leave and enter a room or by playing with his toys when he's sitting on the ground.

But in emphasizing these skills, I do want to point out that he can't learn so easily if you stick to some rigid idea like telling him that if he drops a rattle once more, you won't pick it up.

If you find yourself becoming weary after picking some-thing up ten or twenty times, use your ingenuity to think of something else he can do, until you once more feel you're up to the stoop-and-fetch routine.

Don't punish him by getting angry or by letting him try to figure out why you aren't picking up his rattle again when it's right there in plain sight. Get around the problem. Maybe a suction toy will keep him occupied for a while or he might settle for a drink of water and a cuddle.

You probably will find yourself much more willing and able to keep on picking things up if you remind yourself how important it is for him to learn to grab and let go and that he won't want to do things so much of the time once he's sure he can do them. So the more practice he gets, the shorter the time hell be practicing.

Your final consolation knows that as soon as he learns to do something newer, he'll lose his old fascinations.

Weaning and Teething

All of this gross muscular movement is an obvious sign of your baby's growing independence. But perhaps the biggest sign of emotional independence is the other extremely important activity which he starts and learns to do during this time before he begins to walk: he weans himself and he starts helping you feed him.

It is necessary for you to remember that he weans himself— he is not weaned by you. Leaving infantile ways of sucking and going on to the grown-up ways of drinking from a cup are activities which he initiates, not you.

HOW TO HELP HIM WEAN HIMSELF.

Weaning isn't some-thing he accomplishes without help from you, however, so you need to know how to help stimulate him and provide him with the necessary implements.

A. Early Acquaintance with Cups. About the time that you notice his lessened absorption in sucking, signalled by lots of turning and twisting, you can start offering a small amount of milk in a “training” cup which is provided with a spout and a cover so there is a very small flow of milk from it.

Offer this cup whenever it's convenient during the feeding—before, during, or after the solids or the sucking. If your doctor has suggested that you give your baby fruit juices, you can also offer part of the juice in the cup.

Your baby's reaction may be much like his reaction to sucking or to solid foods when they were first introduced—he may take a few days to accept the new idea.

Gradually, however, he will begin to finish the amount of fluid. Equally gradually, you can increase the amount you offer him. He should always be permitted to suck from the bottle or to nurse as soon as he shows impatience with the cup.

You may find that he takes the cup more easily at that feeding when he is least hungry or, if he's being breast-fed, when he has been accustomed to taking a bottle.

Gradually increase the amount of milk in the cup until he is taking an adequate amount of milk per day from the cup. By this time you may find that he vigorously resists the notion of nursing. If so, see how it goes for a day or two if he doesn't nurse at all.

If there are no changes in his other habits of eating and sleeping and playing, you can consider him weaned. If, however, he becomes cranky or resorts to a great deal of thumb-sucking, you need to permit him a chance to suck at each meal for a few more days.

Then you can see how he reacts to no sucking once again. After a month or two on the cup with the spout, gradually shift to a regular cup, observing the same precautions.

B. When Cup is Accepted. There's usually a difference between bottle-fed and breast-fed babies in relation to the ease of weaning them to the cup. Probably an important factor is that the breast is not freely transportable, while the bottle is.

With his developing necessity to be free and active, a baby resents the enforced passivity of breast feeding and happily welcomes the opportunity to drink from something which permits him to sit up and turn his head while still drinking.

The cup doesn't have this kind of advantage compared to the bottle; however, so bottle-fed babies tend to stay on the bottle longer. We know of no studies of reaction to the cup by babies who are not permitted to hold their own bottle, but I suspect that a baby who had not been allowed to sit up and control his own bottle would find the cup just as welcome as the breast-fed baby does.

The importance of drinking from a cup is that it allows a baby to separate himself from the very passive acceptance involved in sucking and to progress to a more active and aggressive method of obtaining nourishment.

Because it's the act of sucking which needs to change in order to establish the more aggressive and active pattern, I don't agree that a child sucking a bottle is showing the same sign of maturation that a child drinking from a cup shows.

Thus, while an important factor in differentiating the breast-fed from the bottle-fed baby may very well be the characteristic that breast feedings demand a more passive body position, We think that this factor cannot be the only one involved.

Rather, we are convinced that there is probably some heightened intrinsic satisfaction which a breast-fed baby obtains that is not available so readily to a bottle-fed baby; the sucking need, thereby not so completely satisfied, thus tends to persist longer in the bottle-fed baby.

However, such an abstract discussion of the criteria for maturation isn't of much importance to you. You need only remember that if your baby is being bottle-fed; you will need to introduce the cup more gradually and with greater patience than if he is breast-fed.

Even if the cup is introduced early, you cannot expect him to be completely weaned to a spouted cup at about the age of six to eight months, as you can if he's breastfed.

TEETHING.

Before discussing how your baby learns to feed himself solids, we need to consider another biological event which is occurring at just about this age: teething.

Your baby's teeth may not erupt until much later, but it is probable that he has begun to bite down on his gums and enjoy having pliable rubber rings and bones to exercise his jaws on and relieve the tingling of his gums.

Fortunately, his desire to bite becomes intense at about the same age as he shows interest in sitting up to look at the world while he's taking his milk, so if you have been breast feeding him, you are not likely to be pained greatly by his biting before he's weaned to the cup.

Teething used to be regarded as something very unpleasant and painful. It was assumed that when children of this age began to wake during the night, began to push away their food and to fret and whine, it must be due to teething.

We are getting away from looking upon teething as a horrendous affair, the cause of all difficulties during, at least, the first year of life. Rather, it has been realized that teething does not cause an inordinate amount of tension in a happy and healthy baby.

If he is fretting or whining or waking at night for more than a day or two, he is probably doing this because of some other kind of pressure—not because of his tingling gums.

Tensions. Since teething most often occurs when he's beginning to be more active muscularly and when he's weaning him, it is likely that something having to do with roiling and creeping or with weaning is the real cause of his emotional distress.

One thing is certain—normal, healthy, biological growth seldom occasions pain in an emotionally balanced child. Your doctor will help you take care of the occasional real difficulties with teething that seem to run in a few families.

If your baby begins to fret and whine after a few days of the cup, you would be wise to assume that this is because he misses his sucking rather than to leap to the erroneous conclusion that he's in pain from “teething.”

If the fretfulness doesn't coincide with weaning, you need to look further. Maybe he isn't being given enough opportunity to explore things freely. Maybe you are putting too many booby-traps in his path, and he's upset over the constant “No” that rings in his ears. Try relaxing and rearranging to see if he eases up and becomes more joyful.

You may find it quite difficult to discover the primary source of his tension, but you can be fairly sure that it is present somewhere in the emotional-physical environment created around him.

WORKING AND WEANING.

Another event sometimes occurs during this period which may be involved in the fretfulness mistakenly attributed to teething: the return to work of the mother. This is likely to happen particularly with a breast-fed baby since nursing ends at about the time that the mother wants to go back to work.

So if you are breast feeding your child, be sure that weaning is slow and gradual and complete before you return to work. Don't wait until the last week, before offering the cup.

Your baby needs more time to adjust than this. If you have a dead-line to meet and weaning isn't complete, you can still nurse early in the morning and after your return in the evening. This will give your baby some familiar satisfaction in the midst of a lot of change.

It will probably take him longer to switch to the cup completely in this sort of situation, of course, but you need not rush. So long as he shows that he wants to nurse, he should be given the opportunity—at least until he takes from his cup the quantity of milk which your doctor thinks is sufficient for his age and growth rate.

Early Independence

Perhaps you wonder why there need be any weaning at this early age. Children a generation or more ago nursed all through their first year, often into the second; but we must remember that in those days it was customary to thwart early independence in many ways.

The answer is that we do not arbitrarily decide that weaning should begin at about six months; this is when the typical baby signifies that he is ready for it. He also shows that he isn't unhappy afterwards. Apparently it follows in the natural course of development.

You may greatly prolong nursing if you don't go along with the child's natural inclination. Some children who have not been encouraged to wean during their first year go on with their sucking for several years.

(We have known of an entire family of four girls, ranging in age up to ten years old, where all drinking was from bottles with nipples!)

Leaving aside all thought about “what the neighbours may say” about this sort of situation, being dependent upon a bottle for drinking at the advanced age of three or four is quite an encumbrance.

It means automatically that a child cannot get the fluids he needs in an economical amount of time but instead needs to divert part of his energies and time into sucking.

Some psychologists believe that if the mother stifles her child's desire to be weaned, she can easily foster dependency, the feeling that initiative and self-sufficiency are beyond his grasp, the idea that he can't do anything. People who present a pattern of over-expectation and inner passivity, that is, who believe the world owes them a living, are often known to have suckled well beyond their first birthday.

This doesn't mean that all these people have simply leaned back and done nothing for themselves, but they do tend to try to manipulate others into giving them unwarranted considerations.

So, since you don't want to encourage over-dependency, you are wise to let your baby push his way up toward independence as soon as he is able. By letting him proceed at his own speed, you are giving him the best preparation for adult life.

SELF-FEEDING.

Learning to feed him starts at about this time, too. Just as he learns to grab his toys, he also learns to grab the spoon and to hold a cookie or a cracker.

He doesn't learn to feed himself all at once, any more than he changes any other pattern overnight. So don't leave him to his own devices once you are sure he can connect the spoon with the food and with his mouth; that's asking too much of him.

On the other hand, don't try to prolong his babyhood by holding his arms so he can't try to use the spoon. Until he is well able to sit up in the highchair, feeding is a rather messy business.

Before he can sit comfortably, he needs to be fed in your lap; and he may have started to grab for the spoon several weeks before he sits well. A full length plastic apron for you is some help during this time.

If your doctor approves, let your baby feed himself pieces of food like bananas, string beans, potatoes, and chicken. Let him have a bone to suck on. Particularly if he has teeth, he will enjoy having these foods to bite and gum upon and swallow.

Cover him with a bib and let him have one of those baby spoons you received as gifts when he was born. Tactfully introduce your spoonful of food whenever his spoon is away from his face.

Count on preparing some extra food so he can experiment with holding his spoon upside down and with finding out if the food on it still gets into his mouth when he moves his arm over his shoulder.

You need to dip his spoon in the food for him until he becomes better coordinated. If he's in the highchair, a safe place is behind him where you can guide his arm to the plate and to his mouth without running so much risk of having him reach toward you with his laden spoon.

ATTITUDES TOWARD SELF-FEEDING.

The important thing is to make sure you don't inhibit your baby's efforts to become independent in feeding. He won't be completely able to feed himself until he's well past a year in age, probably, but he needs these long months of practice and fun.

If you make him feel that you dislike him for trying to feed himself—by frowning and being angry as you clean up the mess, by refusing to let him help, by insisting that he eat one thing before he eats another—he will regard self-feeding with anxiety, and this anxiety will probably eventually spread to eating itself.

He can be enjoying his food and his prowess both if you simply once again remind yourself that he won't be plastering himself with food forever and you let him go to it without scolding him.

There's a different and very subtle kind of damage that's created if you keep finding a great deal of fun in his getting food all over.

He begins to believe that he gets more attention for failing to connect the food with his mouth successfully, and he starts deliberately playing with his food, hoping to get a bigger and better hand from you each time he dreams up a new way to make a mess. Of course, he doesn't do this when he's very hungry.

We want to call your attention to this difference between enjoying eating and feeding himself and enjoying playing with his food. You can easily distinguish when he is trying to feed himself, and being sloppy because of that, and when he is simply bored with eating and has begun to play with the remains of his food. 

We think when that starts happening, you are wise if you say something like, “OK, now that you're all full, let's wash off your face, and you can play with your toys.”

We think this is wise, first of all, because it saves you difficulties later on when you have ceased to find the messing adorable and you want him to quit. If you've never applauded him for playing with his food, you never have to wean him away from this heady applause back to just simple joy in eating.

Then, too, We think this sort of thing can easily be used later on by your baby when he's feeling angry with you or you've been feeling angry with him. And the chances are very slim that it will be a suitable way of expressing anger or resentment toward your anger.

You'll have a harder time making this distinction between one kind of messing and another if you yourself inwardly enjoy the idea of wasting food.

For example, a mother who in her childhood seldom enjoyed eating because of her mother's attitudes towards feeding her may be living out all her old, childish dreams of flinging food around by encouraging her baby to do this very thing.

If you recognize this sort of feeling in yourself, at least curb yourself from grinning and talking appreciatively when your baby starts to play with his food. Food isn't holy, true enough.

Some can be wasted even if your own mother never permitted you to waste it. But food isn't a plaything either; it isn't to be devalued by tossing it around promiscuously.

We think it's important to understand this difference between promiscuous dissipation and delighted experimental efforts, whether applied to food, to sex, or to toilet matters.

It's a distinction you, as a parent, will need to help your child make continuously as he grows up. It's a distinction you'll still be helping him make when he starts serious dating in his teens. So, if you're going to be able to help him interject values that won't corrupt his later life, you're going to have to get these values straight for yourself.

I'm mentioning this here because so often I've heard mothers remark that they don't think they ever will have to worry about feeding problems because they've never forced their children to eat.

This is probably a carry-over from the mistaken notion that the only problems we have spring from excessive inhibitions. That simply isn't so. A child who is never forced to eat won't develop certain kinds of feeding problems, but he can still develop others.

In order to avoid all sorts of eating problems, you must keep in mind and teach your baby that eating is pleasurable and food is to eat or to try to eat. Eating isn't a duty or the only pleasure in life; food isn't a plaything or something awful and dangerous.

If your baby appreciates this kind of value early, he will be better able to comprehend such distinctions later on. When we talk about toilet habits and sex play, we'll go on with this kind of thinking, so perhaps it would be best to leave it until then.

In the next section, as we consider walking and speaking and toilet habits, you'll see that the attitudes and the role you've had during the time we've considered in this chapter don't change drastically.

Essentially, from about four months of age until two years, your baby needs you to give him the freedom to try out new things, to protect him from the real physical dangers around him, and to praise him for each and every small accomplishment.

He doesn't need someone who will try to push him forward into doing things before he's ready for them, and he doesn't need someone who will try to push him backward into the “good, old days” when he was just a little, totally dependent baby. He needs respect and love and freedom, the psychological necessities for anyone's happiness.

Unreasonable Expectations

BY THE TIME your baby is approaching his first birthday, he has had the opportunity to take in, to interject, many of the basic attitudes he'll have for the rest of his life. He has resolved part of the problem of dependence—independence by recognizing that he can have both.

He knows that he can be passive and yet be active. He has begun to learn that some things he can best learn by experimenting and figuring out a way for himself but that other things he can best learn by trying to copy the way you do it.

He is well on his way toward a future adulthood when he'll be self-respecting and self-loving and at the same time able to respect and love others.

Perhaps that seems like an awful lot for your little one-year-old. Perhaps you feel that I'm expecting too much from so young an individual. I can only comment that this seems to be what I see when I look closely. This is not expecting; this is merely describing something that is.

But, while I'm using the words “expecting too much,” it might be a good idea to explore some of the things that you cannot reasonably expect to find your baby doing until much more time has passed.

Probably the two biggest areas in which you may tend to expect too much from your child are the areas of toilet habits and sex habits.

And these expectations most typically arise when he seems to be so matured in many other respects, when he can begin to walk and to talk.

Toilet Training

Let me state categorically, without any hedging, that I firmly believe no baby needs to be toilet “trained” By that I mean that I don't think he needs you to place him deliberately on the toilet or the potty, needs you to tell him when to go to the toilet, or in fact needs any conscious, deliberate training.

At the very most, he needs you to (1) provide the footstool by which he climbs to the toilet, (2) exchange his supply of diapers for a supply of so-called training panties, and (3) put these in a lower drawer or on a shelf so that he can change his own pants.

When he's about two years old, the nerves that control the sphincters restraining and releasing the bowel movement and urine finally mature. By that time, he'll be able to crawl up on the toilet with a footstool or he'll be able to seat himself on the potty chair.

By that time, he'll be able to distinguish by his own sensations when he is becoming uncomfortable and needs to urinate or defecate. By that time he will have had lots of opportunity to watch others using the toilet.

So, if you never do anything deliberate whatsoever about your baby's toilet habits, by the time he's about two years old, of his own accord, he will usually start using the toilet or potty the “way the grown-ups do.”

And once he starts using the toilet on his own, he'll rapidly become reliable; there won't be much backsliding. He will truly have his toilet matters under his own control. You need only, once again, let him proceed at his own natural pace.

There will be no long arguments, no disappointments, no nagging, no frenzy, no breaking of wills. There will be no use of toileting as a weapon or a favour. Your baby won't deliberately wet the floor when he's angry at you; he won't come running to you every time he needs to go wee-wee, expecting you to get all excited.

In short, if you leave him alone, he'll start handling toilet matters the same way you and your husband do, privately, independently, and efficiently.

Of course, he needs praise when he first starts using the toilet and making dabs at wiping himself, just as he needs your praise whenever he does something wonderfully new. But he won't need to have that praise to keep him using the toilet, any more

then he needs you to praise him every time he walks across the room, once   he   is   able to and knows he is able to. The primary bad result in toilet training instead of waiting for natural development of toilet habits is that your child may no longer feel safe within himself.

He may feel that his privacy has been invaded, that his needs are being denied. He may feel that he's being expected to feel something he doesn't really feel just because someone else thinks he should feel it He's quite accurate; this is exactly what's happening.

Other people are asking him to deny his own sensations and instead accept as his own the sensations they project onto him.

IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES, in the mildest of reactions to this sort of training, he can just be left unsure of himself.

Where previously he has felt confident that his needs will be met and that other people understand him, now he can feel that maybe he isn't such a good judge of what's going on inside his body after all, or maybe instead he just feels that other people are pushing him around and don't understand him at all.

He may lose some sense of confidence in himself and in you. Or there may be other effects which can cause later difficulties.

The most immediate ones fall into two different groups, those connected with the children who give in and those connected with the children who fight you tooth and nail.

The babies who become frightened over what you may do to them if they don't give up their claim to self-government of toilet matters can become so accustomed to denying what they feel and to doing what you think they should that they feel lost inside; they can become no longer sure of themselves as individuals.

Then, they can start to feel angry over being pushed around; but that means they may become additionally frightened of your finding out how angry they are, so they may start to deny that they're angry just as they deny their right to take charge of their own bodily functions.

And as the tension builds up in them, they start hunting around for reasons to blow up. They may start reacting explosively to little things, because they’ve started to distort or project what is happening to them.

You may end up with a child who's compliant in toilet matters but a bully about others. If there isn't any way in real life in which he can blow up, he may start dreaming about blowing up. He may begin to day dream about pushing other people around and destroying them.

If this process of denial and projection and fantasized aggression becomes sufficiently complex, you end up with a child who shows the thinking habits of an adult paranoid schizophrenic

Patient. Now, I'm not saying that children who are toilet trained rigidly are paranoid. I'm merely saying that most paranoid schizophrenic patients are extremely anxious about moving their bowels and hiding their angers.

We aren't sure about the causes of serious mental disease—but it's wise to take the safe path, I think, and avoid possible contributors or causes.

What about the other type of serious immediate reaction— the long-drawn-out warfare? The most immediate result is that suddenly moving his bowels can become the most powerful thing your baby can do.

If he does, he's your master because he can make you so happy. If he doesn't, he's your master because he can make you so angry. Simply by withholding or complying, he can control you. There's another side to it, too, which he's also aware of. And that side is where he's completely enslaved by you.

So long as you keep pressuring him, you're trying to make him do something he doesn't necessarily want to do, and that means if he does, he's your slave.

He forms a pattern of rebellion for its own sake which causes tremendous trouble for both of you. He gets to where he isn't doing something because he wants to, but because he knows you either want him to or don't want him to.

Psychologists see people who are extremely afraid that they will “let go” when they think they shouldn't. Their attitudes toward toilet matters gradually irradiate to everything concerned with anger and effort and dirt.

Some develop weird rituals for making sure they haven't really messed when they shouldn't have. Others simply avoid contact with anything which symbolically represents effort or anger to them.

All these complications, these compulsions and obsessions and phobias, I believe, can be traced back to original difficulties in toilet habits.

This all sounds extremely complicated. I want to assure you that it is. So many problems seem to spring from this business of toilet training that you can begin to understand why so many authorities on child-rearing advise against toilet training of any sort.

POSSIBLE LONG RANGE EFFECTS.

As a mother, you're probably not as concerned about possible long-range effects of this loss of self-confidence as you are with such immediate results in your child's behaviour. But you might occasionally like to engage in speculation—as I do sometimes.

For example, I'm frequently troubled that so many people regard the laws of their communities as things to be followed and to be upheld only when others are around but to be dismissed when alone.

You probably are acquainted with people who go through a red light once they've made sure a policeman isn't around. These people seem to be confused about the relationship between authority—which the law stands for—and safety for themselves and for others—which the law also stands for.

They seem to be showing the same kind of confusion a child feels when he suddenly realizes that his authority-figures, his mother and father, are telling him to do something which cannot possibly result in either his comfort or theirs by telling him to defecate at a certain time instead of when he feels a need himself.

Other frequently-seen bits of adult behaviour are things like our failure to vote, our littering our streets, our buying products because of a sales talk rather than because of our need—all of these things seem to be linked to a built-in need to have someone tell us we must do something which supersedes our deeper need to be ourselves and enjoy our freedom and its responsibilities.

We don't think it's farfetched to link much of the behaviour I deplore in adults to the kind of toilet training they received as children.

NOTIONS ABOUT TOILET TRAINING.

With such an easy and good way of developing toilet habits, why is there so much mistaken “training”?

Why do so many mothers regard the second year of life as the time when they must toilet train their children?

A. “Catching.” One reason, given to me by mothers who in many other respects are very well aware of the dangers of toilet training, is that babies begin to get fairly regular about moving their bowels after they start sitting up.

Some of these mothers decide, therefore, that they might just as well put their babies on potties as change extra diapers. They assure themselves and others that they aren't expecting anything to happen, necessarily and so they can't see any reason not to do this.

This may be the way you think you feel about toileting. But if so, I honestly don't see how you can avoid expecting some-thing to happen or how you can avoid feeling disappointed when it doesn't.

It is, after all, only human to feel chagrin if you have just picked your baby up after waiting ten minutes for him to move his bowels on the potty and then you find him starting to defecate just as the diaper is pinned. You start thinking, “OK, next time I'll wait five more minutes.” Or you become cross with your baby and scold him for fooling you that way.

Particularly if you've been extremely lucky for a few days and have caught him with the potty each time, your hopes and pride must take a serious tumble when your luck runs out and he doesn't perform the way you want him to.

The result of this sort of hopeful “catching” is just about the same as if you have deliberately decided that your baby is going to be toilet trained. The same tensions are built up, the same bad results accrue. So it probably would be “easier” to be direct and deliberate about toilet training, if you feel strong convictions about it.

B. Training for Neatness and Tidiness. So far, the only reason We have offered for why some parents commence toilet training is a mistaken belief that this can be done casually, without really meaning anything. There are other more direct reasons.

Probably most prevalent is the idea that toilet training is the major way in which you train your child to be neat and tidy.

Leaving aside the dangers of following through on this belief, let's just examine the fundamental fallacy here.

The thing that helps a person develop into a clean, decent, law-abiding citizen, whether or not someone is going to peek into his ears to see if they're clean or watch to make sure he pulls up to a stop sign, is consistent practice in cleanliness, courtesy, and following rules—and then only if the individual's private needs are being met so that he's content inside.

It follows that if you're treating your baby right, taking care of his legitimate needs, and slowly encouraging him to copy you —and if you are clean and courteous and law-abiding—he will develop into a child and an adult who shows all these estimable qualities.

You don't need to force him to develop this way. He will naturally as he patterns himself upon you through his identification with you. In any case, there's a lot more to courtesy and neatness than just being able to use the toilet.

C.  “Breaking His Will.” I think some other parents toilet train their children because they recognize that here is an area of will clashing with will, and they insist upon conquering the wills of their babies. These parents aren't thinking in terms of toilet training, rather, they're thinking in terms of “breaking.”

They visualize child-parent relations as master-slave relations, all the way. So many people lead their lives according to this doctrine of force that toilet training still exists. As we help bring up our children with genuine self-respect and respect for others, probably the cautions against toilet training will disappear from childrearing books because they won't be necessary any longer, D. Smearing.

Finally, some parents probably try to toilet train their children early because they are intensely disgusted by such things as “smearing.5’ I'm not suggesting that it is pleasant to wash faeces off the crib and mattress if your child experiments in this way, usually early in the morning.

But if you don't make a big fuss about it, he will soon stop this kind of exploring. Strange as it may seem, this smearing is a sign of his developing liking for himself and for what he can produce. It's probably a healthy step toward his growing up to be a person who takes pride in his work.

So don't interfere with him and unreasonably expect him to have your standards. He will soon start to prefer other plastic materials, which you need to provide, like sand and clay and finger-paints.

Other Unreasonable Expectations

I don't want to give the impression that toilet habits are the only area in which parents have unreasonable expectations. As I mentioned earlier, sex play also calls forth similar expectations. So does walking and talking.

Before going on to pressures about sex and walking and talking, let me emphasize the major difference between the dangers of your attitudes during the first year and then during the second year.

We think most parents fail to provide their children with sufficient opportunity to practice their developing skills safely during the first year. Parents can be efficient about some things so there's a general tendency to keep the babies from doing such things as feeding themselves.

Or else there isn't sufficient attention given to praising the children or keeping them from dangers as they practice their new skills. During the second year, the general failures seem to lie in the other direction.

Parents start expecting their children to grow up in a hurry. They punish them for not developing. Parents see so many signs of maturation that they become impatient and start demanding that their little children become miniature adults overnight.

Because this seems to be the general failure, I'm talking about examples of it first. But I want to point out that the other tendencies are still there and need to be guarded against—the tendencies to keep your child from practicing something he's ready to learn. We'll come back to that when we talk about dressing and bathing.

The wise rule as always is simply: don't force your child to develop skills. When he's ready, he'll develop them.

Learning to walk early or to talk early won't matter a bit; it won't prove a thing. Most adult’s do both with ease, so sooner or later you can count on your baby developing these skills, just as hell learn to use the toilet and hold his fork properly. In the next chapter, we'll talk about forcing your child to cease practicing certain skills—that does come up.

But for the present, let's consider further how your over-expectations can corrupt your child's happiness.

SEXUAL EXPLORATION.

Since we're going to be discussing sex play more thoroughly in following chapters, perhaps the only thing that needs to be said at this point is that your child's privacy in sexual exploration of his own body must never be invaded by you.

In a happy, healthy child, masturbation does not become a “vicious habit.” You don't need to punish your child for finding that his genitals are another pleasurable area of his body.

If you notice your young child feeling his genitals often, recognize that this is a clue that something else is wrong. He doesn't become excessively concerned with providing himself such an intense sensation unless his other needs are not being met.

Consider such things as cuddling and exercise and feeding and toilet training. Remove the pressures that are too much for him and satisfy his needs, and you will notice that he no longer masturbates frequently and regularly.

Your one-year-old baby is interested in his body, so he explores it. But he'll only retreat into a precocious over-indulgence in masturbation if other things aren't right.

In any case, you have no right to keep him from finding solace in his own body. If you regard masturbation as you regard thumb-sucking, you can save yourself lots of needless anxiety.

HURRYING WALKING. 

We don't think too much serious dam-age is caused by a parent's impatience about walking. Your child might become additionally clumsy with his body, he might become extra dependent and babyish, trying to prove to you that he really can't do the things that are being expected of him.

But such inhibitions, while they might cause him to be a poor athlete or an awkward dancer, aren't too well understood and probably aren't too serious.

Perhaps the greatest danger of your impatience with his slow walking comes if you start urging him to hurry up and then threaten to abandon him if he doesn't move along.

The usual result is a tantrum of sorts—he seldom hurries. He becomes paralyzed with fright that you might actually leave him there, alone in a bewildering grocery store or on the sidewalk. This hurts his trust in you and in himself. So never resort to such threats.

If he isn't making the time you want him to, pick him up, after first explaining to him patiently and kindly that you need to. Don't belittle him by picking him up in annoyance and without sufficient introduction to what is about to happen.

“SAY SOMETHING.”

The pressure about talking is some-thing else, however, particularly if you are generally expecting too much so that he is not only being teased and pressured to talk but is being toilet trained at the same time.

Psychologists believe that this situation is one that leads to lots of difficulty in speech behaviour, including such difficulties as stuttering and lisping. Permit your child to learn speech at his own speed—if you talk to him, he'll learn to talk to you,

NO MESSES.

Keeping clean seems to come in for a large share of attention by some parents during this second year. They seem to decide that if their babies can walk and can talk a little and seem to understand many things, then they should also be able to keep from making messes and should keep clean.

Even if they don't actually expect fastidiousness, their attitudes seem to indicate that inwardly they wish this could happen. They scold their children for being dirty. They rush after them with wash cloths in their hands. They are often heard to say, “Dirty, dirty, not nice.”

There are probably lots of reasons why these parents behave foolishly about their children getting dirty. Maybe they like seeing them look all neat and pretty like magazine ads. Maybe they're morbidly afraid of common household germs.

Maybe they have some idea buried deep inside themselves that getting dirty is a sin, since they've learned that cleanliness is next to Godliness.

Whatever the reason, however, it is obvious that you cannot expect to have your baby clean all the time unless you are also simultaneously willing to have him be anxious and miserable and inhibited.

A. Reasonable Cleanliness. What is a reasonable expectation about cleanliness, particularly for your one-year-old?

I think it's quite appropriate to help instruct your baby that his hands and face get washed before and after he eats. You teach him this by gently and humorously washing his hands and faces yourself, commenting on it as you do it.

Also, by reminding him time after time, you caution him against rubbing his eyes with dirty hands, and you try to help him under-stand that he should avoid putting dirty hands into his mouth; you suggest washing up first.

He probably has a grand clean-up twice a day—right after he's awakened and signalled to you that he's bored with playing in his crib by himself and again either before or after supper-time.

You probably will wash him at these times because you want him to be comfortable with himself and comfortable for you to have around. If he isn't too soaked in the morning, that clean-up may not be necessary.

With these exceptions, your child is probably quite comfort-able the rest of the day without any additional wash-ups. If he's been playing with something particularly sticky or messy, you want to wash him off before he starts climbing around the furniture.

But when there are these exceptional times for washing, keep it light. Don't scold him for not being as neat as you are—after all, he's a lot younger and less skilled.

B. Dirtiness Is No Virtue. But don't praise him for being dirty, either, since this is no particular virtue, I mention that because I've seen mothers who do seem to encourage their children to be additionally dirty in playing because of some mistaken notion that it's therapeutic.

Of course, a child who feels extremely worried about getting dirty, as a result of long-standing mistaken training, will benefit from becoming free enough to make a grand mess. But unless your baby has these complications, you don't need to encourage him to get dirty. He does, all on his own.

You can easily say, “OK, let's get you cleaned up a bit before you start playing with the pillow,” as you see him finish up with something awfully messy. That way, he won't feel hounded about keeping clean all the time and he'll also be learning that dirt is OK in its place, but not everywhere.

“STOP THAT CHILDISH CRYING.”

Another common over-expectation that arises at about your child's first birthday is the way you may be demanding that he take bumps and falls in his stride instead of “being a baby.”

We think you need to remember that he is just that, and so when he falls down, he's going to be outraged or insulted as well as hurt, and his most natural way of reacting is to cry.

If you tell him not to cry, you're really asking him to stop being the baby he is. You're asking him to be as philosophical about pain and suffering and disappointment as you are. That's too much to expect of any child.

You do the same thing when you try to kid a baby out of crying. Some parents try tickling when babies start to cry. If you reflect for a moment on how you would feel if your husband started to tickle you when you're feeling sorry for your-self, We think you get an adequate picture of how confused and deeply enraged your baby feels in a similar setup.

Some parents react very sternly to their baby's crying. They truly scold him: “Now you stop crying this minute. You only got a little bump, and it's not going to kill you, so stop being a baby.”

These parents are trying to teach their babies to be “tough” by thwarting them in their natural desire to express their unhappiness by crying. It's quite possible that all these parents have some emotional difficulties themselves and per-haps feel that if they weren't so “soft” they wouldn't be in the pickle they're in.

By projecting onto their children these kinds of feelings, all they're doing is making it tougher for their children to grow up to be strong individuals. Of course a little bump isn't going to kill your baby, but what kind of consolation is that?

We think the only truly good way to react to a baby's crying is exactly the way you reacted when he was just a few months old. You cuddle him and tell him you're sorry he's unhappy.

If he's treated considerately and tactfully in this way, he'll probably give one or two more shrieks just to show he really meant it, and then he'll promptly go back to experimenting with crawling or standing or walking.

He won't become a sissy if you commiserate with him. He won't become a masochist and get himself hurt just to be cuddled-—for after all, he can get cuddled anytime he wants anyhow.

Instead of growing up to be all tied up in knots inside because he can't express his feelings, either to himself or others, instead of growing up to be afraid to try, instead of growing up to be a foolish daredevil who asks to get hurt, hell just continue to grow up as a happy person who knows that he's strong enough to take most of what happens to him and who knows he's got someone on his side.

Reasoning or Directing?

The examples of the kinds of talk that I've given, as you have seen, don't involve much in the way of what is generally called “reasoning.” Rather, these kinds of statements are directives and they come from you.

In short, most of the time it is easier simply to tell your baby what you want him, or you and him, to accomplish. If you start giving all sorts of complicated reasons and apologies, you may end up by confusing him, and you also run the chance of having him forget or disregard what you're trying to say to him.

He will understand: “OK, let's get you cleaned up now;” but if you say, “Wouldn't you like to get cleaned up now?” or, “Now I want you to get cleaned up because you'll get that messy stuff all over your other toys and then you won't be able to play with them and you wouldn't want that to happen, would you?”

Your baby may only be confused and then, in his confusion, become balky. When your child gets a little older, you will be able to request him to do something by saying, “Now that you're done playing with that stuff, would you wash up a little, please.”

But at no time should you phrase your request in terms of “Wouldn’t you like to do so-and-so?” or “You've got to do so-and-so because otherwise this-and-that awful thing will happen.”

At least, you shouldn't use these forms of address if you really want him to do something. Obviously, if you truly want to know how he feels about something and you honestly don't care one way or the other, you'll be asking him, “Do you want to have some more milk?”

Just as when he's much, much older, you'll have occasion to point out to him the consequences of his acts. Then you will say, “If you don't put your bicycle in the garage, it's going to get rusted.”

But these occasions won't cause much trouble. It may seem improbable to you that your young children can understand enough to know the difference between a question and a statement—but they do, so you need to phrase your directions wisely.

It's the everyday small actions, the things that have to go on if your day isn't going to be chaos that can cause trouble if you get into the habit of requesting a decision about them instead of taking them for granted. You're liable to get tripped up by them if you aren't careful always to be firm and consistent yet considerate of your baby's needs and desires.

NEGATIVISM.

I want to emphasize tact and consideration and decisiveness because I think it's the lack of these qualities in mothers that leads to babies becoming what is called “negativistic.”

You've probably heard that babies go through a phase of being negativistic, of refusing to cooperate, of asserting their own will and balking indiscriminately. However, in a good relationship between a baby and his mother, he gets plenty of opportunity to assert his own will.

If he isn't being pressured by you, there is no undue need to assert his own individuality. He gets to decide what he wants to eat and how much, when he wants company, when he needs to wet or soil his diapers, when he's going to crawl or sit or just lie down and stare at things.

That's a lot of independence; the happy baby is therefore not too unwilling to cooperate with you in your reasonable demands upon him. The negativistic stage does not materialize.

Even so, you need to be tactful and considerate in presenting your demands so that he can pattern himself after you and be tactful and considerate as he grows older.

Much later on, you'll need to get into the habit of saying something like, “You've got five more minutes to play with so-and-such before time to go wash your hands for lunch.” Or you'll say, “OK, you get to run up and down two more times, and then it's time for lunch.”

All of these ways give your baby a chance to save face; they give him a little time during which he can adjust himself to the new idea you're presenting. If you just say, “Come and eat your lunch,” he gets to feeling that he's just a little machine that runs when you say run and hops when you say hop.

And he resents your taking away his feeling of freedom. But for right now, it is sufficient to say that lunch is ready.

This has been a chapter on over-expectations; in the next chapter, will discuss reasonable expectations about such things as sleeping, property, dressing, respecting each other's privacy, mealtimes, and so on.

You need to let his second year of life be a continuance of his first year, a year in which he gradually practices doing more and more things because they're fun for him, they make him happy, and they also earn praise from you.

If you do, you find that by the time he's two years old he'll be doing most of the good things that babies do who've been pressured, but he won't have the bad side-effects in mixed-up emotions.

He'll be using the toilet by himself, he'll be walking and talking, he'll be taking little bumps and disappointments in stride. He'll be doing all sorts of things for himself on his own.

But more important than any of these skills are the feelings inside which he develops simply because you haven't expected too much of him and wanted him to grow up in a hurry. He feels pleasure in growing up, he is proud of himself, and he has a firm loyalty to you, even though he is gradually more in-dependent.

Responsibilities

IN MANY WAYS, although we've been discussing the child under two years of age, we've already covered most of his rights as an individual regardless of age.

We've talked about his right to eat as he wants to, to urinate and move his bowels as he wants to, to be free to move about safely and enjoyably as he wants to, to retreat from company or from being awake as he wants to, to explore his body and enjoy it privately as he wants to.

We've talked about your obligations to care for him, keeping him safe from harm, treating him tactfully and courteously.

But there is another side to all of this, and during your baby's second year of life, you'll be exploring that other side more and more. As time goes by, your child naturally enters more into a reciprocal arrangement with you.

Your relationship stops being so much give on your part and take on his. He becomes more responsive, and consequently, more responsible. And by this we mean responsible for activities other than those giving him immediate physical gratifications as well as for the ones which do satisfy him immediately.

We think it's time for another general rule: Your baby is just as responsible as he can be—if you let him and if you serve as a good example for him and if you've been fulfilling his legitimate needs.

As his capacities for assuming responsibilities mature, he assumes these responsibilities. He doesn't need to be pushed. He just naturally gravitates toward doing what he sees and understands you doing.

Copying Your Pattern

As a result of being so strongly identified with you and his father, he is trying to do everything you do. There probably are times when he seems to be doing more things like Daddy than like you.

This is true for girls, too. It's a necessary step in life and comes about when your baby is trying to make sure to him that he's really truly independent of you, that he isn't a suckling babe anymore.

After awhile, this identification fuses with the earlier one, once he's sure of himself. He once more starts taking you as his major pattern, mostly because he sees you most of the day.

You don't need to worry about his becoming a sissy. When he's about six or so, all his boyhood will come out strongly—we'll talk about that more thoroughly in a later chapter when we discuss sex play and sex roles.

But, getting back to the idea of assuming responsibilities, you need to be careful about many things. You need, as I said before, to be sure that you're serving as a good example. No point in asking him to pick up his toys if you leave things all over.

You also need to keep up a running commentary on what you're doing, so his attention can be focused on it and he can understand what's going on. If he has the idea, once he's mature enough to carry responsibilities through, he starts trying to. Without that idea in his mind, though, he'll have a harder time.

Now I don't mean that you talk about everything you do. Rather, I mean that when you're performing something you want him to notice so he can take over later on; you mention it and the steps you proceed through.

Legitimate Responsibilities

What are the responsibilities you hope he'll assume? I think that until your child is a school child, that is, from about two years of age until he's at least six, the only responsibilities he should have are those immediately and directly related to him.

We've talked previously about his feeding himself. Then there's dressing himself and bathing himself. All along, of course, there's a great responsibility for amusing himself, for playing by him.

There's the responsibility for his own property, keeping it together and put away after use. And finally there are responsibilities involving the comfort of other people and the sanctity and integrity of their property.

Anything else that he does, like getting you a pack of cigarettes from the next room or helping you empty the wastebaskets, should never be viewed by you as responsibilities. Rather, they are favours. You ask him to do you a favour in things like these—-you don't al-ways expect him to say, “OK, Mom.”

If he assumes all his legitimate responsibilities, I'm sure you'll agree he can truly be considered an “independent” child, able to take fairly good care of himself. And that, in the final analysis, should be the major aim.

You take care of your child while he's a child so that he can grow up and take care of himself. That has always been the goal of the healthy mother living in a healthy society. A good mother can be depended upon, not leaned upon.

Perhaps you feel that I've made some mistake; perhaps you feel that no child can be expected to be this responsible for him.

I sincerely believe, however, that the responsibilities I've listed are all ones which your child can assume by the time he's two or two and a half years of age. That means that he'll be practicing them all along once he's able to walk around and talk a little.

They may seem like a lot, but I think if you ex-amine them closely, you can see that they aren't. For example, I don't suggest that your child can cook or serve himself. But once his plate is in front of him, he can manage to feed himself well. Dressing, bathing, etc., all is things he has the motor skill to accomplish.

Let's examine each of these responsibilities to see how they are assumed and carried out.

EATING HABITS.

We've talked already about how, while you're feeding your baby, he is also helping himself to food with his own spoon and his fingers and by holding his cup. He becomes steadily more and more proficient until he is doing the major portion of the feeding. At that point, you bow out of the picture.

From then on, you can view his eating in the same way you consider your own eating or your husband's. That is, he is eating what he wants of what is served to him, eating at his own speed, and he doesn't need your help to get the food into him.

You don't need to worry about fluctuations in appetite. Now as before, there will be times when he won't want to eat too much and other times when he'll be voracious. He'll go through long periods of rapid growth when he'll be eating a great deal, and then, when his body slows up, his appetite will decrease.

He'll go through periods of eating dessert first or all his vegetables at once, then gradually arrive at eating the way you do.

Often I think eating problems are fostered by parents who feel that their two-year-old children should always eat the same quantities of food. They start “helping” their children finish the food on their plates.

Their children become less interested in eating because of their resentment over being treated this way, and after a short time, each mealtime becomes a battle of wills.

With the exception of the aftermath of a serious illness, you don't need to do any coaxing about eating. Your two-year-old, if he's happy and healthy, eats just as wisely as he did when he was an infant—assuming that you are preparing a suitable balanced diet and that you yourself eat wisely.

You can't hope to have your child eat wisely when he sees you catching a meal on the run or habitually picking at your food or never eating vegetables, etc. Your food foibles will be copied by him. So if you want him to grow up without food idiosyncrasies, you have to give up yours.

A. Between Meal Snacks. While we're talking about your child assuming responsibility for feeding himself, it might be wise to mention between-meal snacks.

A child who's healthy and happy will ordinarily eat well at mealtimes and will want very little between meals. Milk and fruit are generally sufficient. Sweets aren't viewed as something out of the ordinary, so they aren't over-indulged in and they can be around the house and not necessarily disappear immediately.

If your child starts craving many sweets between meals, particularly if his appetite at mealtimes decreases, you have a signal that something may not be quite right. Perhaps mealtimes have been too high-pressured, perhaps the difficulty is with playmates or in some other area than meals and food.

But you can be quite certain that something needs remedying. Once you've found out what is causing him to feel additionally dependent so that he's seeking sweets to console himself with, you need to make changes.

If this hasn't been going on for more than a few days, you’ll find your child naturally giving up lots of sweets once he no longer is unhappy.

You can see that what I'm saying is that eating is a self-regulated process, even when your child is old enough to be feeding him completely. The only time you need to interfere is when you see his eating habits change and become erratic and chronically disturbed.

In that case, the only interference, actually, is finding out what is causing the change and then removing these causes. At no time do you need to start coaxing him to eat or depriving him of food.

B. Table Manners. Some feeding problems can start if you start having your child eat with you but aren't willing to let him have his own habits about eating. His speed and table manners are mostly copied from you.

Eventually, your child will be eating at a pace which enables him to keep up with you and he'll be handling his silver and napkin the way you do. So even if you don't do any deliberate “training,” he will eventually develop good table behaviour.

(It probably is necessary to remind an older child every so often about his manners, but this should never be a subject for dispute and nagging.)

If you start expecting too much of your two-year-old in the way of manners, his whole feeling about meals will change, and he'll start developing poor eating habits. He needs to eat in his own way without comment from you.

DRESSING HIMSELF. just as your child naturally starts to feed himself, he also starts helping you while you're putting on his clothes. If you stand back every so often and give him a chance, he can manage quite a lot of dressing by himself before his second birthday.

He can pull up his socks once they're over the heel; he can pull down his shirts over his head; he can pull up his overalls. If you're careful to keep his clothes simple, he can be quite handy.

It's important that you wait patiently for him to get things on. If you forever say, “Oh, let me do it, we haven't got all day,” he soon gives up trying. All this applies to undressing as well, of course.

Once he gets to where he can get all his clothes on—though not necessarily buttoned or snapped by himself—you need to be additionally tactful about his having put things on back-wards. Ordinarily, it doesn't matter a bit.

It's much wiser simply to praise him for putting on his clothes and wait until the next day or some other later time during the day to mention to him how he can tell which is the front of the clothes.

That way, his pride isn't hurt. Most clothes have labels and you can, by repeating it often enough, help him learn that shirts have the labels in back and underpants have the labels in front, etc.

The final step in dressing himself comes when he selects all his own clothes. Be sure that his clothes are within easy reach for him. Have all the drawers in which his everyday clothes are stored low enough so that he can pick out his clothing by himself.

Once again, so far as selection of clothes goes, tact is the big order. If he thinks yellow socks look good with red overalls, it really doesn't matter a bit. If you mention to him when you think a colour selection is particularly attractive, he’ll be careful to try to make the same match next time.

By the way, the same is true for girls. Their clothes for everyday aren't too much different from boys' anyhow, since both wear overalls and tee shirts so much of the time.

Your greatest chance to offer suggestions regarding taste in clothing will be at dress-up times. Then you can make a big fuss about selecting the right stockings and you can talk easily about why people select certain colours to go with others.

Experience with Clothes and Weather. Probably the only point where you need to step in and take a hand with clothing and dressing, once he learns how to dress himself, is at times of weather change.

Your child doesn't naturally know that it's colder outside and that he needs more clothing. Similarly, he doesn't naturally know that he needs to take off heavy clothing when it turns warmer.

You need to help him learn these things by pointing them out to him. Changing clothes to suit the weather is your responsibility because it's an area where he doesn't know enough or have enough experience to be able to help him.

You cannot just lean back and remark that he must know whether or not he's comfortable. He may very well know that he isn't comfortable and yet not know what's causing his discomfort.

I'm making a special point of mentioning that because I've known mothers who were completely laissez faire about clothing, never reminding their children about outside clothing.

Many of these children had to contend with more colds and other illnesses than seemed ordinary. If you reflect upon your own reaction to going outdoors without a coat on in cold weather, you can probably recall that for the first few minutes you aren't uncomfortable.

However, when you do start becoming chilled, you chill quickly. So don't be taken in by your child's impatience to get outdoors and let him go without buttoning himself up just because he says he isn't cold while he's standing at the door.

When we talk about playing and dangers, this point about your child's lack of experience and foresight will come up again. I don't think that it's ever sensible to let a child learn by bitter experience. It's much easier to have him button his coat than it is to nurse a child through a bout of pneumonia after you've said, “OK, go outside like that, you'll learn.”

WASHING-UP AND BATHING.

Washing and bathing himself is fairly easy for your baby once he can climb in and out of the tub by himself. Observe safety precautions like handrails and rubber mats safely anchored in place with suction caps, and be sure to stay with him and remind him about using them until you're completely satisfied that he uses them habitually.

You have to do a check-up on ears and necks some of the time, but if you've been telling him what you're doing and you wash him systematically, he doesn't do too poor a job.

He is accustomed to the idea of “first the face and then the hands and arms and then the neck and then the shoulders,” etc. and he proceeds accordingly. Some household detergent placed in the tub makes interesting bubbles for him to float his toys through and also prevents a ring around the tub.

A spray attached to the faucet helps him rinse away all traces of soap so he doesn't chap easily.

You'll probably run into the problem of how-long-for-a-bath? You need to remember that bath time is playtime for him, so he needs a tactful warning that he's taking too long rather than an abrupt, “Get out of the tub this minute.”

All of these mechanical activities aren't too difficult for him. Each provides him with a nice sensation as well as with a basis for feeling proud of himself. His tummy gets full; he enjoys the water; he likes feeling clothes or likes wiggling around without them.

Maybe we shouldn't even think of these as genuine responsibilities, in fact.

Other tasks which he starts to accomplish, however, are genuine responsibilities in the sense of being means to an end. Keeping his toys put away and picked up, respecting other people's property and person—these are no particular fun for him.

As a social being, though, he needs to learn to carry out these responsibilities, and he starts learning them right from the beginning.

KEEPING HIS BELONGINGS ORDERLY.

When your baby can crawl around and starts to pull toys and playthings around him, he's already beginning to learn something about what happens to them when he's through with them.

We think it's important, both to him as well as to society, for him to learn how to straighten up his own messes. His inner sense of strength is increased as he learns to do this. He learns that he can be a creator, first of the games he's playing while he's causing disorder, and then of order as his puts things back.

He gets the idea that it's safe to act; he won't cause undue damage to himself or to others because he can manage to undo what he has done.

And certainly, for you, his learning to keep his things straight is a great help. Later on, this sense of responsibility he develops will function to help him get his school work done on time, get to the office on time, drive safely, and in general obey the laws.

A. First Experiences with Order. How does he learn? When he was an infant, he saw that you habitually put certain things back in certain places. His glances went over to the top of his dresser when he wanted his pink rattle or went down to the pocket of his bassinette when it was time for his hair to be combed.

Children have a fascinating capacity for expecting things to be the same always. Here, at least, is one area where you can control inanimate objects and thus satisfy his natural need for some outside order.

If, instead, you drop things every-where and then have to hunt for them, you create not only trouble for yourself but also fail to provide a source of reassurance to your baby.

As your baby becomes more and more active, he also learns more about where things go when they get used, where they are when they're needed. He expects his Panda bear to be sitting on his bed; he expects his pull toy to be parked by the sewing machine.

He learns to expect these things in these places because you've been a good little fairy and you've been putting them where they belong when he's done with them. It's just a short step from there to where you start helping him put them there.

B. Second Experiences with Order. As you notice that he's finished with something, you can ask, “Let's get that Panda back on his seat before we have lunch, OK?” As you say something like this, you are doing part of the work and also pointing out to him where he should be helping.

You put one block in the block wagon and he puts the next. He brings the books over to you, and you put them back in the bookcase. He carries the tiny scraps over to the wastebasket, and you're cleaning up the blobs of paste.

You're working together—and that's the finest preparation for him because it means that working is fun.

There's a natural division to most jobs, so you don't need to worry about how to parcel out the chores. All you need to remember is that anything he can do, he can do.

If he gets grumpy about not being able to flit on to some-thing else, you can remind him that it will still be there in a few minutes, and you can point out quite flatly that “We all finish up one thing before we start the next.” He probably won't be happy about this at first, but as he grows older he'll tolerate this better.

Now I know this sounds compulsive. But just as with sitting and standing, where he practiced these skills over and over, sticking to one activity until he finally mastered it and could relax and do something else, so, too, he needs to be extremely compulsive while he's learning how to be compulsive in the areas where compulsivity is required objectively, in order to get where he can relax.

Later on, once he can automatically put things back, he'll be better able to delay and save up for a grand room-straightening before his bath. But if you let him do this now, the task becomes so great by the time he comes to it that he is defeated before he starts.

So let him learn in small ways by straightening up small messes after he's done with them.

We don't think you need to worry about his becoming a fussy little worrier unable to tolerate the least bit of disorder. This would be very unlikely unless you were doing all sorts of other things, like toilet training him rigidly and punishing him for disordering things as he played with them.

C. Active Practice with Order. Eventually there naturally comes a time that you should be expecting when he gets occasional bouts of what appears to be spring-housecleaning fever.

He becomes splendidly engrossed in putting all the blue blocks in one corner and all the red ones next to them, etc. And he is very upset if you cause any disorder by forgetting his temporary ritual for putting away blocks.

If you don't ridicule him or become angry with him for these early attempts to see how far he can go, he gradually becomes more lenient. He forgets one system and develops another and gradually evolves some relaxed plan that's aesthetically pleasing to him.

So that's how he learns to put his things away. First seeing you. Then by helping you. And then finally by putting the things he's “sorted” away as he's reminded by you that “We finish up one thing before we start the next.”

D. Discipline and Learning Orderliness. Now, you'll notice I used the word reminding—not nagging. It's important for you to keep these two separate and straight. If you start nagging and scolding, he also develops a negative attitude to the whole business of straightening up.

Also, while you're doing your work all on your own, you can't be muttering about how your back is breaking—not if you want him to regard work as acceptable and not frightening and awful.

While he's helping you, you can't be irritated muttering away at him because he's so slow or he doesn't understand what you want—not if you want him to grow to understand that he is strong enough and grown up enough to help Mommy.

And finally when you give over the reins completely, you can't berate him for every little lapse, you mustn't scold him and nag him—not if you want him to know that you respect him and his capacity to take care of himself and his business. You need to remind him of an error respectfully, instead of jumping on him.

Obviously, if you trip on a block or on a pair of shoes, you'll I be annoyed and you'll let him know that you're annoyed because he should have put the block away and he should have put his shoes under his bed or in his closet.

But if you just happen to notice the block or the shoes, simply remind him that he's supposed to put them away—don't become as annoyed or as martyred as you would be if you had actually hurt yourself on them.

When something of this sort happens, don't merely scold him or remind him. Instead, ask him to put the forgotten article away, clean up the mess, etc. In effect, you are asking him to do what he is supposed to do.

Don't make the mistake of doing it for him and then telling him about it. If you were to do that consistently, he would never do anything and you would be better off just cleaning up after him in silence.

You may think that I'm asking you to be impossibly cheerful for an impossibly long period of time. I certainly don't think it's impossible—and you have the great consolation that if you do go about instructing him this way, he will soon be relieving you of a lot of work.

RESPECT FOR OTHERS-CONTROLLING DIRECT ANGER.

Another major responsibility which you have a right to expect your child to learn to assume and to carry out is the responsibility for respecting the rights of others—the sanctity of their persons and their property.

Again, this is something that isn't suddenly comprehended by him at one age. Rather it's something he's been learning all along.

“Sanctity of Person” is simpler and your child learns it earlier. This is a fancy phrase to describe the simple fact that we don't hurt other people, we don't hit them, we don't punch or pinch, we don't throw things at them, and we don't kick or bite. Instead, if they've gotten us angry, we tell them we're angry. If they continue to make us angry, we walk away.

These are the rules of conduct which govern civilized man. If he thinks he has a grievance, he recites it. If he cannot effect a change in this fashion, he inwardly shrugs his shoulders and accepts the temporary injustice.

Your child needs to learn to respect the law, even when it doesn't avail him help for some immediate inconvenience. If he is brought up in this tradition, he knows how to go about helping to change unjust rules and laws, and he doesn't need to become delinquent and defy the laws in existence.

We think this is a most important point. When we boil down all the speculations about the causes of delinquency—broken homes, slums, lack of discipline, desire to belong, etc., etc.  we find that they come down to these elementals: the delinquent feels that he has a right to invade the privacy of another's person or property, to defy the law, in order to satisfy some need of his own.

Ideally, you hope that your child will feel that ifs unnecessary to invade other's privacy in order to get his needs satisfied. You hope that you'll be able to satisfy his needs so that he doesn't need to want to take satisfaction in an unlawful manner. . .

But such an ideal situation probably can't be realized by you. There often are times, in his dealings with others, when his needs may not be satisfied. And it's your job to help him learn to tolerate such frustration. It's your job to help him learn that he never has a right to cause harm in order to get a need of his satisfied.

A. A Side Glance at History. Those of you who have read a lot of sociology and anthropology and history might want to argue with my premise and might want to point out how often man in certain situations has to break the law in order to change it or in order to obtain a higher kind of justice for himself.

My only answer to you comes in two parts: First, if the people who make up society, leaders and “the masses” alike, all had the respect for lawfulness which I advocate. 

We'll sure you agree that there would be no need for unlawful activities in order to obtain a greater justice; so the first thing is that we must all aid in rearing our children so that they can comprise such a good society. 

Our second point is that the feeling of guilt is a positive force in promoting not only lawfulness, but in promoting the kind of society in which lawfulness will be the only necessary attitude.

A deep feeling of guilt is appropriate to breaking the law, and your child needs to have the kind of conscience which will automatically make him feel guilty when he breaks the law.

That way, if the laws or rules are bad ones, he will think seriously before breaking them and he will stop his rebellion as soon as his ends of amending the law are accomplished. He won't go on to commit worse errors than the ones he's seeking to correct.

Let us take an example from American history to illustrate the kind of point I'm making. The early Colonists thought many of the laws of England were wrong. They petitioned the King and sought in every way, within the law, to have the Colonial laws altered so that they would be more just.

Finally, with serious feelings of guilt as they examined their consciences, they declared a rebellion against the King and they fought the American Revolutionary War and gained freedom. But the guilt that they felt over taking the law in their own hands was great.

So when they started to frame the new laws under which they would operate, this guilt and concern for the law led to their making sure that the new laws were as just as they could be and could be changed and repealed without needing to be broken first.

As a result of their respect for the law, they set up a Constitution which guaranteed the individual a maximum of individual freedom. The people who led our Revolutionary War did not run hog-wild after the war and decide that, since they had successfully fought and won, they could continue to break the law.

They did not become just different sorts of bullies from the English King. Other countries were not so fortunate: History has shown us many examples of other sorts of leaders who sought to change the laws by breaking them, but who, apparently devoid of this inner sense of respect for the law, did not bring about law and order after their rebellions and instead just became different kinds of unjust rulers and dictators.

B. Conditions of Learning Respect for Other People. Going back to your baby, after this long excursion into something which usually isn't connected to child-rearing, the aims in teaching your child respect for the sanctity of the individual person and property are: first, that he be law-abiding; second, that he be able to tolerate frustration; and third, that he have an automatic conscience and sense of guilt so that he won't go to excessive extremes when his tolerance is tied to the breaking point.

In order for you to accomplish these goals, you need to be sure that the laws you're asking your child to obey are reason-able and just. You need to be sure that he isn't being required to tolerate extraordinary amounts of frustration.

You need to be sure that most of his legitimate needs are being satisfied. And you need to be sure that his sense of guilt is not extreme, that his conscience is not so punitive that he's driven to commit excesses because he gets punished so severely anyhow.

Let's briefly examine the second and third points mentioned above. If you are respecting your child's privacy by letting him eat and sleep and use his body freely, you already have set the stage for ensuring that he won't be faced with too much frustration.

This is why it's so important to let your baby be boss about things like toilet matters and eating and sexual exploration of his own body—so his primary needs will be satisfied and he won't feel double-crossed and imposed upon.

This is why it's important to provide safe and interesting playthings and play space and playtime, so he has the foundations for being able to respect other people's property without having this respect put too much of a strain on his childlike desire to own and possess and control everything.

The first point is just as simple, too. The laws he needs to recognize and respect are few in number, and they're responsible and just: He may not hurt other people. He may not hurt or take things that belong to other people.

TOLERANCE FOR FRUSTRATION.

When he bumps up against situations which are governed by these laws, he probably is unhappy. You need to console him, while still upholding these laws.

You need to say: “No, you don't kick people. If you're angry at Suzy, you tell her so, or you go off and play by yourself, but you don't kick her. I'm sorry if you're unhappy, but you may not make her unhappy just because you're angry.”

You need to say: “No, that's Suzy’s ball, and this is your ball. If you want to play with your ball, that's all right, but you can't take her ball unless she lets you. I'm sorry you're unhappy, but you may not make Suzy unhappy just because you like her ball better than yours.”

You need to say: “You have no right to tear up Suzy’s book. If you're that angry, you go bang your pounding toy or go scream in your room, but you may not hurt other people's things just because you're unhappy.”

Now, maybe to you this all sounds wordy and too grown-up for your baby to understand. But I'm certain from experience that children even beneath the age of two can easily understand this kind of talk.

If you're consistent and remind him that he may not hurt other people, take their things, or hurt their things each and every time he starts to, he learns quickly. And once he's learned these important rules, he can have the added joy of playing with or near others without a lot of tension and strife.

Remember, by the way, that you're laying down the law; you aren't reasoning with him. Don't get mixed up in trying to explain to him “why” since he's too young yet to understand the complexities of the golden rule—especially if he's bigger than Suzy.

A. Discipline and Learning Control of Aggression. Nowhere in this entire have had we talked about punishment. We don't think direct physical punishment is ever necessary.

It's sufficient punishment for your child to have you take him away from Suzy when he becomes unable to control his rage.

He is able to add up two and two and arrive at the conclusion that most of the time it's more fun to control his temper and have someone to play with than it is to lose his temper and have to rely on his own devices.

There is no need for swatting, for the all too familiar, “There, how do you like being slapped?” then you keep your hands off Suzy or I'll slap you again.” All that that does is making him angry at you and angry at Suzy and angry at himself for me not having given her a really death-dealing blow while he was at it.

He becomes filled with a spirit of vengeance instead of remorse. And the next chance he gets, he’ll let go. He hasn't learned to respect the law—just to resent the people who are pretending to lay down the law.

If you want him to learn that he may not hurt people, then you have to keep your own hands off him in anger. You may not punish physically. We cannot think of any situation which calls for physical punishment.

If your child does something you hoped he had learned not to do, the conclusion is plain: he hasn't learned yet and he shouldn't be allowed to operate free of your supervision until he has learned. It's been your mistake, not his.

B. Discipline and Possible Banger. Some well-informed parents and professional workers are in agreement with me on the general statement of no physical punishment, but they reserve one situation, namely, one in which the child will face physical pain if he disobeys.

Consequently, they believe, for example, that if a child runs into the street when he has been firmly cautioned against doing this, he should be spanked immediately in order to teach him that physical pain is connected with running into the street. 

We don't suppose such infrequent spankings would distort a child's personality. We simply prefer to think you are wise enough to be absolutely and completely certain that your child has no lingering desires to run into the street before you give him enough freedom so he can chance it, since the possibility of lasting injury is so great. 

We think if you put your faith in punishment after an infringement of the rules you may run more chance of having him hurt or having the rules broken than when you supervise and instruct carefully until you are certain that your child won't break the rules.

A young child isn't likely to do something on a dare from his friends or in order to show off to them; we'll talk about such situations with an older child in a later chapter.

RESPECT FOR PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Learning to get along with only his own possessions without purloining the possessions of others is easier if he has enough of these possessions. When he feels that he doesn't and you think he's got a justifiable point and you can afford it, you can mention to him, “You give Suzy back her ball now because that's her ball, and we'll get you one ‘cause a grown-up boy like you certainly needs a ball of his own to play with.”

If you don't think he has a justifiable point, you tell him so. You say, “No, you have a ball of your own, and you don't need Suzy’s ball.”

If you can't afford it, again I think the best thing to do is to mention this, to say, “I'm honestly sorry you haven't got a wagon of your own, but you can borrow Suzy’s when she lets you and grown-up boys like you don't need to have everything all the time, do they?”

If he doesn't respond to this kind of compliment, you can simply say, “We thought you'd like your pounding block more because you can use it inside, too, so that's what we bought you; and we just can't buy you every-thing because you don't need everything.”

These are all harsh lessons. But reality and society are harsh, too, and your child needs to recognize and respect reality and society.

A. Discipline and Learning about Property Rights and Honesty. The lessons are harsh, but the way to teach them should not be, because you want his conscience to serve as a guide, not a tyrant.

Sometimes your child wants something so much that he takes it and then tries to convince you that he's found it or that it was given to him. We don't like to use the words lying and stealing for this sort of expression of a wish; and we think it's wiser if you don't use the words in your dealings with him either.

If you think it's improbable that what he's saying is true, then tell him so and take steps to get the things back to their rightful owners. You don't need to harp, “How dare you lie to me; you're naughty for lying,” or, “You're a thief! You should be ashamed of yourself.”

All you have to do is say something like, “I don't believe that you found that. It looks like Suzy’s ball, so let's take it right back to her. You have no right to take her ball, no matter how much you want it.”

And be sure never to give him an opportunity to lie; don't ask him, “Did you take Suzy’s ball?” or “Did you just find this?”

For this tempts him to bluff his way through. We think the same general rule is true for lying as is true for stealing. Your child respects the truth just as he respects the rights of private property if his own limits aren't tried too sorely and his conscience is a reasonable one.

He learns this respect as you consistently, sternly, but reasonably remind him that he must obey the laws. We haven't made a separate point of discussing your property, as apart from the property of others, for the two go together.

He learned when he started to crawl that he couldn't touch your books, although he could play with his books. He learned that you wouldn't let him pick up things which could break. All of these kinds of limits are ways in which he learns that he needs to respect your property.

B. Destruction of His Own Property. Some parents are extremely concerned about the destructiveness of their children. They may have succeeded in having their children learn to respect the property of others; but they notice his immediate destruction of his own new toys.

There are several points to consider here: First of all, you need to be sure that he hasn't been faced with an impossible task of mastering frustrations of his own legitimate needs.

If he hasn't been getting his basic satisfactions, of course he'll bite everything he gets near, shred it, pommel it, and otherwise destroy it as he would like to destroy the people who aren't taking good care of him.

Another point is the question of the suitability of the toy. For example, a very young child has no use for books, even picture books, other than to wave and bend and rip the pages. So what might at times seem to be destructiveness may actually be misuse because the toy isn't something he can use the way it is generally meant to be used.

You also need to consider toys which just aren't made to stand up under the rigors of use by children. It's patently ridiculous to accuse a child of being destructive because he doesn't know how to handle fragile objects with the same care as you.

Just as it's expecting too much of him to expect him to be able to keep many small pieces together without losing important parts to a toy.

Often a child who is called destructive is merely unable to visualize the use of a toy because he really needs and wants some other toy, but his parents insist that the toy they've presented to him is the one he should need and want.

The combination of his frustration over not getting the toys he can use and his lack of motivation to appropriately use the toy he's gotten can easily lead to misusing it and destroying it in this process.

Certainly the question of destructiveness with his own play-things is an important question. The same considerations you have to take in regard to this question will come up again in relation to money and allowances when he's older.

Ultimately, two things are involved: learning to respect the value of money and being assured of privacy of his own. Ideally, your child's toys are his possessions and you have no more right to interfere with his use of them than he has to interfere with your use of your possessions.

Ideally, also, your child, being content and having things which he can use wisely, is not destructive. He wears his toys out or outgrows them, he doesn't break them up. So, the conclusion is that chronic destructiveness of play-things is a symptom of something else being wrong.

And that leads to the further acknowledgment that there's no point in trying to keep him from breaking up all his things until you've gotten to the bottom of what's troubling him and have corrected it. At that point, you probably won't need to stop him from destroying his things because he won't want to. All of this is ideal.

Certainly, the children who are generally described as destructive are, in all probability, children who are suffering too much frustration. A healthy and happy child given playthings wisely in accordance with his capacities and needs is not wantonly destructive.

But what are you going to do if you've given your child something which has been relatively expensive, which apparently he doesn't want to use wisely and is now in the process of destroying?

One school of thought has it that you'd probably comment that if he breaks it, he can't get another since you can't afford to buy another; you would sit by and not interfere with him and then later on you would simply console him for his loss if he begins to regret it.

Another school of thought—the one I belong to—believes that this is just a different guise for learning from bitter experience and through pain, and that your job as a parent is to  prevent your child's needing to learn in such a punitive fashion, just as you prevent him from breaking his neck in order to learn that he can't fly from the rooftop.

So, in trying to keep him from suffering too much later on because of his present-day foolishness but at the same time trying to respect his rights of privacy for his personal possessions, you are caught nicely between two important principles.

To resolve them you need to be a diplomat with him. You don't need to start double-crossing him. You can, instead, ex-plain what you're trying to do. You can say, “I'm sorry that I made a mistake in thinking you could use this toy now, so how about putting it away for a while and instead playing with your old toy until I can get you something else to take the place of the one you're going to store.”

If he objects, you can say, “I don't want you destroying this because we just don't destroy things; I'm sure that later on you'll want to play with it and not ruin it, so let's put it away right now.”

If you keep in mind that you're not trying to punish him for not using it properly, but instead are simply trying to help him preserve his private property, you'll find it easy to carry this out.

Also, you can wait until he's less involved emotionally and then pick the toy up and say, “How about putting this away for a while ‘cause you don't like it very much, do you?” 

We don't think you need to worry about his becoming argumentative and insisting that he likes it just because you've suggested that he doesn't—not if the two of you have been getting along well in other respects.

The only children who have to insist that it's white when you say its black are the kinds who are having a rough time with you and who don't feel that their souls are their own.

Even simpler is waiting until he's distracted and then quietly putting the toy out of the way. If he didn't like it much anyhow right then, he probably won't even notice that it's missing.

We are not suggesting that you start sneaking—you always have to keep your relationship honest with him. But if you honestly know he doesn't want it, you can, with a clear conscience of your own, put it out of sight. Remember, though, to bring such toys out again occasionally to see if they've become acceptable and useful, and remember to tell him you've put it away.

Another thing you can do to help avoid such tricky situations is to educate your child about a toy before you give it to him, if it's a toy which can't withstand too much experimentation.

This isn't likely to come up with a small child—his toys should always be ones which either can take a lot of battering or which are tacitly made to be played with once and then thrown away.

But an older child can be shown the insides of a watch, for example, in a store. Then, when you give him his first Mickey Mouse watch, he doesn't have so much need to open it up to find out what makes it run.

You can assure him that it has the same insides and tell him that you hope he doesn't open it because that might make it stop working and then he won't have a watch that's any good to him. Be careful, though, that you don't provoke curiosity where it doesn't exist and thus ask for trouble.

For example, most happy and healthy children aren't concerned about what's inside their dolls, so it would be bizarre for you to cut up a doll to show him.

Your own common sense will tell you which things are likely to provoke ordinary healthy curiosity—mechanical things like watches, toys that rely on magnets, music boxes and such things are the ones which usually provoke experiments in ”I was just trying to see how it worked.”

From this discussion, it should be clear that your child should never be permitted to be wantonly destructive. But you need to remember that he is, being a child, active and aggressive—so you have to make sure that his toys will take punishment.

We think if your child is having a good time in living with you and his toys are well made, you can easily enough relax and permit him to enjoy his privacy with his own personal possessions.

He may play with some things in ways that are creatively imaginative and unlike the way you might play with the same toys—but that's his business. You should never interfere and start showing him “how.”

When he's ready to use them in the way the saleslady described to you when you bought them, he will. Until then, so long as he's enjoying himself and not being destructive, you must respect his privacy.

LEARNING RESPECT FOR YOU, TOO.

You remember that we started off this section by saying that respect for laws aren’t something which is introduced to him after his first birthday but rather is something which has been developing all along.

It develops as he learns that you won't let him hurt himself when he first learns to crawl or to walk. It also develops when you take his hands out of your hair or off your nose and away from your eyeglasses when he sits on your lap.

It will be confusing for him to think that he can't pinch Suzy when he's angry with her if you've allowed him to pinch you—particularly if at the same time you're being pinched you exclaim in admiring tones, “Look at him, see how strong he is, look at him pinch!”

It's your duty to release his fingers and to say to him that he can make “nice Mommy” but “no pinching,” as you show him how to pat your face softly. He has the capacity within him to understand the difference between love-pats and random cruelty or blows struck in anger. It's your job to show him the difference, time after time.

If there are pets around, by the way, you have an easier time teaching him this difference, probably, for your pets demonstrate to him, concretely, what they will put up for and what they consider random cruelty. 

We don't mean that you should let your baby and your dog or cat fend for them. Stick around, close by, so you can remove him when they start showing signs of anger; but be sure to show him and remind him what kinds of petting they like and what kinds they will become angry about.

A. Practice in Courtesy and Obedience. You can see that what-ever discipline there is at this time of life generally consists of insisting that he do what he's supposed to do.

Sometimes this goes to the lengths of insisting that he do something by commanding him; but the emphasis is upon having him learn to follow a rule through following the rule.

Thus, for example, if he runs down the stairs instead of walking down them a step at a time, you ask him to return to the top of the stairs and walk down properly. Similarly, you ask him to come in again and go out holding the door instead of slamming it if he has previously forgotten to do this. You teach him to undo what he has done wrong.

Somewhat similar to this is the way in which he learns to say “please” and “thank you.” You mustn't make a great point of insisting upon his saying these courteous phrases, especially while he is just beginning to learn to talk, but you can easily add these words to his statement when he forgets. Most of the time, he happily repeats them as you remind him.

We don't believe this teaches him to have contempt for courtesy simply because these two courteous phrases have become automatic. Rather, this helps him learn something which is considered fairly automatic anyhow.

True courtesy, of course, doesn't consist of a few words; but he is learning true courtesy as he learns genuine respect for himself and for others.

B. Respect for Your Privacy. Your baby learns a lot about respect for others as he learns respect for your privacy. Perhaps we should, in fact, have discussed this aspect before taking off on how he learns to respect other people's rights.

Once the emergency period of infancy was over, once your child began to show that he could tolerate delay, in the ordinary course of events he began practicing this tolerance.

He may have started to become restless in the playpen, for example, although your dusting wasn't finished yet. And you said to him, “You'll have to wait just a little while, honey bun, while I finish up the dusting.”

Or he may have dropped something from his chair just as you were beginning to eat your supper, and you said, “I'm not going to pick that up right now, you'll have to wait until I'm finished eating.”

There are countless times when such delays have been required of him, simply because you've judged that your wants were greater than his or something had to be taken care of before you could get around to him.

He has learned from these instances that he isn't the only one being considered. He learns that there are needs of others which are equal to his. You've told him so and he's begun to remember.

One important way in which he learns to respect your privacy is when he wants to go on playing after his bedtime. Some parents, very unwisely, forget that their children need to learn how to amuse themselves in bed by themselves after their bedtime even though they aren't particularly sleepy.

So they permit their children to get out of bed for water and then to urinate and then to come say good-night once more and then to hear a story, etc., etc. It's wise, we believe, to place a limit to these activities and to have a steady pattern to bedtime. Stories are told before bedtime.

Water is by the bed. Urination—hardly a problem with the one-year-old since he's still wearing diapers but likely to be a problem with an older child—is a one-time thing. Toys are in the bed for him to play with.

If he cries, he's simply told from afar that you won't let anything hurt him and it's his bedtime now and so you won't come in to see him. If the crying continues for a long period of time, go in just once to make sure that nothing is actually wrong.

Then kiss him and tell him you're sorry he's unhappy but you want to have some time for yourself and take off.

He seldom cries for very long or for more than two or three nights, and you've helped him remember that he's safe by himself once you're around and you've also helped him remember that he needs to respect your privacy. The same steady pattern applies to daytime naps.

AMUSING HIMSELF.

This leads into a final area of respect for your privacy which he will be learning during this second year and which is a reasonable expectation for you to have of him. We have mentioned his being able to play by himself. 

We want to talk about it a little more and in particular to talk about the usual ways in which he is hampered in learning to inspect the world and play creatively and imaginatively on his own.

First, let me state that I firmly believe your healthy child is able to spend most of his waking hours playing contently without the need of too much stimulation from you or other adults.

When he isn't, when he becomes a child who just sits waiting for someone to come to play with him, something is wrong. Maybe the playthings aren't suitable. Maybe he's tied up in knots about some other emotional problems.

Or maybe he's had so much “help” and “instruction” and “supervision” in using his toys that he's finally decided he's not going to move a finger until you tell him which one to move.

You can avoid creating such a passive-aggressive attitude toward play if you remember that he probably doesn't need your help in playing with most of his toys and he doesn't truly want it.

The world is his—he wants to explore it and play with it and control it and know it. It's no fun for him if you're always around showing him the world through your eyes. You need to keep him from pain—but you have no right to keep him from experiencing the pleasure that comes from finally learning how to put the peg in the hole.

The wisest attitude you can take toward his playing is to regard it as something which he can manage well by himself. By expressing your faith and respect, you give him the extra bit of encouragement needed for him to go out and conquer his little dragons.

When you see him starting to become unhappy because he can't get something to go right, it generally is enough for you to say, “I'm sure you know how to work it out by yourself.” You can help untangle pull-strings.

You can put wheels back on. But try to avoid doing things for him that he can figure out for himself. In particular, avoid making him believe that a toy is only fun when you're playing with him with it and no fun by him.

Another common source of trouble comes from playing with your child in ways which are so exciting that they make his other play activities pallid by contrast. I don't mean that you shouldn't have treats with him. An occasional treat like seeing the monkeys isn't going to ruin his taste for pretending that his Teddy bear is a monkey in the zoo.

What I'm referring to are the games that are heavily loaded with relief from fear and with sexuality. This is another reason why we don't think it's wise to swing him around or throw him up in the air or play horsey by bumping him up and down astride your lap.

All of these have an added tingle which really amounts to a lot of stimulation of a kind that he can't replicate for himself with his own toys by himself. If you play like this with him, he won't be able to play by himself.

So if you want to make it easy for him to respect your privacy, the cardinal rule is to respect his and to refrain from introducing him to fears or thrills which depend upon you and which remind him that he's just a small plaything at your mercy anyhow.

His possible inner rage over being reminded of his vulnerability may make him strike back by becoming over-dependent upon you for these compensatory thrills, addicted to such stimulation and unable to enjoy acceptable pleasures.

By the time your baby is two years of age then, he's learned most of the important things he needs to know in order to practice the art of living comfortably and wisely. We don't mean that he is “fully formed.”

But he has accepted the pleasurable responsibilities of satisfying his immediate bodily needs, with you in the background to cook the meals and iron the clothes and pay for the hot water.

From his point of view, though, he's doing the eating and the bathing and the dressing. Soon he'll be completely at home with adult toilet habits. It won't be long before you'll be able to say, truthfully, that he can take care of himself, just like a grown-up.

He's also learning the rudiments of social living—not hurting others or their things. Simultaneously, he's learning to cherish his own things, to keep them in order.

Gradually, he'll begin to ease up on the routine of what's mine is mine and what's thane is thane, and he'll be able to share and so be able to play with others, not just next to them.

In the next chapter, we'll discuss some of the situations that come up with his beginning to spend more and more time playing with other children.

Since this chapter was primarily devoted to discussing his assumption of responsibility for his behaviour by himself, I've tried to keep separate the related topic of responsibility to others which now needs to be discussed.

Sharing and Playing with Others

WHEN YOUR CHILD

Has passed his second birthday, he becomes more involved with playing with other children than he has been previously. His first two years have been crowded with learning how to enjoy many bodily pleasures and with learning emotional attitudes toward himself and toward his immediate family members.

Once his physical skills enable him to move swiftly and to communicate fairly understandably through speech, he can make contact with people in the wider world outside his family.

And once his own skills in self-control and responsibility have been practiced in the comparative safety of his home, he is equipped to spend time in a mutually comfortable way with others.

So the time from now on naturally becomes increasingly occupied with learning about others, learning how to play with them, to share with them, to tolerate them, and ultimately, to love, respect, and take care of them.

I don't mean to suggest that your two-year-old is fully equipped with all the social skills he needs so as to be able to move in a broader society without discomforting himself or others. But he's on his way—he already knows a lot.

So one of your primary jobs as a parent is to help provide him with pleasant, instructive, meaningful experiences with children his own age.

If you live in a small community, this means visiting other mothers who have children of similar ages, sitting in the playground with them as your children play together, or maybe just dropping your child off at someone else's house.

If you live in a larger community, you have these choices as well as the additional choice of sending him to a nursery school for several hours of the day. In any case, you are the one who is primarily responsible for ensuring that he finds friends of similar age with whom he can learn to play.

Why Does He Need Friends of His Own Age?

Perhaps you feel it is too much trouble to transport your little one around so that he can play with children of a similar age. You may feel that you can supply the same toys, clays, paints, etc., that a nursery school supplies, at less cost to your-self. And you may believe that there's nothing more to be gained from taking your child outside of the home.

Or perhaps, finding that your child is willing to sit in front of a TV set for hours at a time, you may stoutly believe that your child is contented and doesn't need any companionship from real playmates.

Maybe you even reflect upon your own childhood and decide your child is just as happy as you yourself were, playing with the kids on the block that differs widely in age.

You may insist that it's good practice in learning “how to get along” for your child to try to keep up to the older children on the block. You may believe this is an even better learning experience in sociability than playing with similar-aged children.

We think that all these kinds of statements are, at best, useful rationalizations if there is no other course open. So, for example, if you live on an isolated farm, too far away from other families to do much visiting, obviously the employment of nursery school supplies at home is better than just letting your child fritter his time away.

In such a setting, even a limited amount of TV each day acquaints your child with a bigger world and helps lessen his isolation (more TV time than this is not advisable—we'll discuss this point later on more fully). Similarly, if you live in a very small town, your child may very well have to play with a group of youngsters who differ widely in age.

But—if you live m a community where there are several other youngsters of the same age, your responsibility as a parent is to help your child make contact with them. It is as vital for him now that he's two years old to have playmates his own age as it is for him to have two parents.

Just as you and your husband serve as ways in which your child can insure himself against over-dependence by being close to first one and then the other, so outside friends of his own age help him insure himself against being forever buried in his family.

He needs to know that he can operate independently of his parents. But being independent is something he's going to have to practice for the next 18 years or so before he's sure enough of himself actually to take off on his own completely.

And the first essay at being independent is much easier for him if he's trying out this new status with others who also are in the same boat, rather than with children whose differences in age present additional difficulties for him to cope with.

With children of the same general size and skill, he can discover himself all over again. The problems of competition are ones he can handle without hurt or loss of pride; if he plays only with children who are much older or much younger than he is, the vast differences in skills may make him feel unsure of himself and anxious.

So I don't think there's any question about the desirability of providing playmates of the same age for him. Particularly if you notice signs of real pining and yearning for playmates— signs like the development of an imaginary playmate—you need to make every effort to provide him with real, live companions.

The only question is whether this is to be in an informal way or whether it's to involve something formalized like a nursery school.

Nursery School

In general, if a good nursery school is available to you, you should most certainly take advantage of this excellent opportunity for maximizing the pleasure and minimizing the anxieties of early independence. As soon as your child is eligible, you should enrol him. There are several considerations involved in all this.

How can you tell when your child is ready and truly eligible for nursery school?

How can you tell it's a good nursery school? Why does a nursery school make it more pleasurable and less anxiety-provoking for him to be away from you?

ADVANTAGES OF FORMAL NURSERY SCHOOL PRO-GRAMS.

Let's take that last question first. At first glance, it might seem as though having to get along with 10 other children is going to be a lot more difficult than getting along with just one or two other children of your friends or neighbours.

As we inspect this situation more closely, however, we find that most of the time he's doing something with only one or two other children in the group or else is doing something in an anonymous way with the entire group under the direction of the teacher.

He has the chance to switch loyalties easily. If he can't get along with Tommy one day, he can build a block house with Jimmy instead—and it doesn't involve all the strife and diplomacy that it would if he tried to do the same thing in a smaller group.

In the nursery school, too, there isn't too much intimacy or self-responsibility. The whole group works together under leadership often enough so that there is outside stimulation, which relieves him of the responsibility of dreaming up his own games all the time or playing the same old game over and over.

There's another advantage which is bound up in the fact that the nursery school teacher is someone else who is just about as friendly and kind and fair as Mommy and Daddy. Your child can safely try out depositing a little love with her.

He finds that it won't take away from his feelings for you, and at the same time, he's learning that there are other enjoyable, safe people who aren't his relatives. Parents often remark on the adoration which nursery school teachers receive from their pupils.

This is a good sign that the children have learned sufficient faith and trust in themselves and in others to be able to become attached to someone they don't know very well. Its proof positive that they can be dependent or independent and still not suffer a loss of love.

This advantage, again, is one which is generally absent in informal play relationships. Your child doesn't get the same opportunity to become attached to his friends' parents as he does his teachers.

The other great advantage is that your child begins to understand the meaning of true fairness and justice in a group situation. He isn't held back from striking forth to recognition as an individual by the confused feelings of loyalty he might otherwise feel if he's playing with the child of one of your friends.

There aren’t any of them, “Now you behave yourself because I don't want Johnny's mother to think you're just a young roughneck.” There isn't much of the pull and tug on your own friendships that occur if your children squabble and each of you is there to witness and take sides.

Instead, there are rules which apply to everyone and which the teacher expects and helps everyone to live up to. In this kind of a setting, your child gets a feeling of freedom about following the rules. He doesn't feel personally hampered or persecuted because he can look around him and test the truth that everyone has to do just what he's having to do.

In those places where careful studies have been made of the effects of early socialization via a nursery school, it has been shown that there is a strikingly significant absence of the neurotic problems which involve feelings of persecution, unbearable desire to be hostile, extreme fearfulness, etc.

We don't want to emphasize the advantages of having at his disposal materials which might not otherwise come his way because this is about the least important feature of nursery school.

The same clay and finger paints and jungle gym—or inexpensive substitutes for them—can be made available at home. Food colouring and flour and water paste make the same delightful mess on the kitchen table that is made by finger paints in the nursery school room.

Ground up newspapers, suitably dampened and floured, make the same kinds of funny blobs that clay does. And the city parks and playgrounds have much of the same equipment that the nursery school does. You can sing songs and make rhythm-sticks out of dowels and make triangles out of coat hangers—all at home.

These materials at school are not as important to your child as the fact that it's much more fun to beat out the rhythm to Jingle Bells if 10 others are making a noise too, and its fun to see what the other guy has painted. So there is a definite ad-vantage and greater pleasure in doing all these arts and crafts in the school setting.

The major advantage thus remains that the nursery school provides a training ground with worthy companions in learning the art of playing and working with others.

To be able to accomplish this, your child will need to develop some additional skills besides the ones he so far has learned. But to signify that he is ready to develop these skills—all ones which can only be learned in a social setting—he must already have other skills at his command.

WHEN HE IS READY FOR NURSERY SCHOOL.

So we get back to the original question: How do you know your child is ready for nursery school?

Maybe you think that you have to wait until he starts to use the toilet before enrolling him in nursery school. (Many nursery schools, for their own convenience, demand that he be able to toilet himself before he can be considered eligible; but let us assume temporarily that the school you are considering make no such requirements.)

The toileting comes quickly, however, when he sees other children using the toilet at school—assuming that he has no emotional difficulties.

So this should be your own last consideration in deciding upon his readiness. Your child may lack this one skill and have others and so still be ready to adjust to nursery school easily.

What are the skills he needs for entering nursery school?

He does need to be able to talk well enough to make his needs known to a stranger. He does need to be responsible about putting on his own clothes—or most of them.

He does need to be able to respect personal possessions and to keep his fighting hands to himself, not to the extent of having an adult conscience, but at least to the extent of being able, in the ordinary course of events, to follow suggestions and directions fairly easily and to know and respect the difference between his things and the ones that belong to others.

So, you know that your child is ready for nursery school when he shows you that he is able to get along on his own without your immediate supervision all the time. As was mentioned before, if he's started to fantasy playmates for himself, he is in great need of real playmates.

WHAT IS A GOOD NURSERY SCHOOL?

Once you decide that your child is ready for nursery school you have to decide upon a good nursery school for him. How can you tell if a nursery school is a good one or not?

In the good nursery school are: ample play materials; a sympathetic and patient and informed teacher who does it have numerous obvious personality quirks of her own that will interfere with her understanding of small children; space; rest room; an organized program of activities; and a general air of relaxed cheeriness and industry.

You can easily tell whether these are all present by visiting. If the children seem to be herded and hounded, don't choose it. If the teacher seems to have a bug on cleanliness or No Running or No Giggling, don't choose it.

But if she seems the kind of person who is open-minded and acceptant of childishness, while still understanding the difference between being free and being wild, she probably runs a good nursery school.

So, make your selection on the basis of the teacher. Even if the rooms are smaller and the school is poorer than some other one, a good teacher makes a good school.

DOES NURSERY SCHOOL ATTENDANCE ALTER HIS OTHER SCHEDULE?

Ordinarily, your child is in school for only a few hours each day. This is as much as he can take of the work of playing with others. This is work for him, remember. It's a hard job to practice all his social skills.

So you need to be additionally careful to provide him with lots of privacy at home. He needs the opportunity to pull into himself and just dawdle around with some toy on his own speed after he's put in a hard morning of nursery school.

We want to emphasize this need for privacy because it is so easy for you as an interested mother to ask all sorts of questions about what happened during the morning, then bustle your child through his lunch, wait impatiently for his nap to be over, and then take him out for a few hours because he “hasn't had a chance to get any time outside with his other friends.”

After a few days of this killing pace, your child begins to resent the whole idea of nursery school, simply because he hasn't gotten any time for himself. So be wise and regulate your trips to the stores and visits to your friends so that your child gets some time to be all by himself.

POOR REASONS FOR DECIDING ON NURSERY SCHOOL ATTENDANCE.

When we mentioned the topic of nursery school first, we spoke of the pros and cons. So far, we have discussed only the good reasons for sending your child to nursery school and the poor reasons against sending him.

Let's talk about some poorer reasons for nursery school and then let's also pay attention to some of the arguments raised against nursery school. A poor reason for sending him is to gain several hours in which you are relatively freed of responsibility for him.

It is true that your child's absence does give you time to make a shopping tour without the added encumbrance of a stroller. But this is a somewhat poor reason because you shouldn't be in such a position as to have had to wait until you can bundle your child off to nursery school in order to have some few hours to yourself.

All along, if you've been doing a good job of raising your child and sharing parenthood with your husband, you must also have been making sure that you have sufficient time of your own so that you don't feel martyred and as if you've lost your own personal identity.

Also, of course, your child should have developed enough respect for your privacy so that he can leave you in peace to read a book or write a letter when you ask him to.

Another very poor reason which you might have for sending your child to nursery school is the hope that the teacher will manage to do some of the things that you've failed to do. Maybe you hope nursery school will teach your child to be courteous or less destructive or will teach him to drink fruit juice or wash his hands before he eats, etc.

I don't deny that children learn lots of things in school, some of which their parents haven't even thought of teaching them. But unhappy children who suffer in their relationship with their parents and thus are belligerent or shy or “backward” are not going to be helped by being placed in a situation of increased pressure.

And you need to remember that nursery school does increase the pressure upon your child. So, if he has some grave personality disturbances, the place to get them cleared up, the place where relations need to be altered so that his behaviour may alter is not in school but rather in his home.

It's futile to hope that a casual relationship with a nursery school teacher—no matter how fine and friendly she may be—is going to give your child the solid sense of acceptance that he needs in order to be happy and healthily developed.

In nursery school, he has lots of chance to practice the courtesies he's learned at home; he has lots of practice in sharing and in trying new things, including things like the tomato juice that maybe he's avoided at home up to now.

But school is still not the place where he should be learning the essentials of the art of living. It's a sad commentary on parents when children say that they've learned about politeness and kindness from their teachers and schoolmates, not from their home life.

WHICH CHILDREN SHOULD NOT ORDINARILY ATTEND NURSERY SCHOOL?

This discussion leads right into the major reasons why some parents should not send their children to nursery school even though the children may be 3 or 4years old.

If children are unduly disturbed emotionally, they need treatment from someone professionally trained in therapy with disturbed children—they should not be sent to nursery school. It places an additional burden upon their overstrained egos and it also places an illegitimate burden upon the teacher and the other members of the class.

We have seen some kind-hearted nursery school teachers whohave tried to help disturbed children by taking them into nursery school groups in hopes that the stimulation will help them stop having their emotional problems. 

We have never seen this succeed. I don't mean that these children have not changed their behaviour or have become more ill as a result of the nursery school experience.

But in almost all cases where children have made personality gains, it has been because they were simultaneously being helped by a change in the parents or because the nursery school teachers were able to convince the parents that they should seek psychotherapy for themselves or their children.

In most of these cases, the teachers have admitted that they were unduly burdened and their other pupils were also inconvenienced by the bizarre behaviour of the unhappy children.

It is unfair to permit someone else to assume these burdens; it's much better simply to forego nursery school until the difficulties have been cleared up, unless it's possible to arrange for admittance to one of the special nursery schools which are formally organized to handle emotionally disturbed children.

If nursery school seems to produce bad effects in your child, it's necessary to examine closely all the surrounding situation. It's most probable that this occurs only if he hasn't had sufficient time in his family to develop the traits of self-control and responsibility that he needs to have in order to take nursery school in stride.

In that case, withdrawal from nursery school for a month or so is advisable, to see if you can't help him gain greater self-control before again placing him in this demanding yet potentially rewarding situation.

You can see that the arguments against sending a child to nursery school have very little to do with nursery school— instead they are really concerned with the relative maturity of the child.

Nursery schools are “bad” then, only if your child has sufficient difficulties of his own so that he's not ready for this situation yet. In a later chapter about sibling rivalry and acceptance of a new baby, this question of nursery school will be discussed further.

Whatever the circumstances within the family may be, it can be said that a healthy love and respect between a child and his parents, with steady encouragement of development of responsibility, will enable a child to profit from the nursery school experience, particularly during his third and fourth years of life.

The only truly practical reason against sending your child to nursery school is the absence of sufficient money to pay the bills. But most nursery schools, supported as they are by some Church charity or some public institution can make provision for scholarships and part-payment of fees. Talk it over with the director before leaping to the conclusion that you can't afford it.

What Skills Are Developing Now?

It is easiest to put aside the question of nursery school or an informal play arrangement while we discuss the things which your child is now equipped to start learning.

Now that he is past the age of two and is able to control himself fairly well and is able to play next to others while respecting their rights, he needs to learn two more social skills: one is learning to defend himself against the tyranny of others—learning to claim respect for his own rights; the other is learning to share—learning to play with someone, not just next to him.

Up to this age, he really hasn't had too much responsibility for the behaviour of others; he hasn't affected them too much. Now, he is sufficiently self-controlled so that he is free to begin to experiment in dealing with others.

LEARNING TO BE RESPECTED.

Learning to demand respect and learning to share, it often seems to me, are just about the hardest lessons a child has to learn. Both of them involve a high degree of evaluation of the other person.

Your child needs to learn to size people up, wisely, so he can tell in advance what kind of people they will be if he behaves in a certain way towards them. He needs to learn to tell the difference between the kind of person who will really let him have his turn with the slide and the kind who will try to bully him out of his rights.

In addition to learning this kind of sizing up of people, he needs to learn to determine and insist that some “borderline” people, not complete bullies but not completely pleasant and controlled people either, will treat him the way he wants to be treated.

Now all of this is needed to be learned and practiced by your child in a social setting if he's going to get to where he can operate independently but cooperatively with others. He doesn't learn overnight. But he does start learning and does have plenty of opportunity to practice.

If he were living in an ideal world where everyone accorded everyone else instant respect and courtesy, he wouldn't need to learn how to claim respect from others. But chances are that among his playmates there will be children who are frightened of him and other children who try to frighten him.

With each, he needs to learn how to disregard the feelings they evoke in him, that is, deny his own inner feelings; and then behave in such a fashion as he believes will get them to treat him the way he wants to be treated.

This means he needs at times with the timid children to project an aura of good will toward them, deny his own tendency to take advantage of their fright and to bully them, and get them around to feeling at ease with him.

With the bullies, he needs to deny that he himself is scared that they'll hurt him, he needs to stand up to them firmly, but not provocatively, and get them to respect him and deny their own bullying tendencies.

How's he going to do this?

There are lots of ways of accomplishing the same ends, but some methods are very poor because they lead to lots of additional difficulties.

A. Poor Methods of Getting “Friendship”—Bullying and Submitting. For example, he can try giving presents to the shy children, giving them the toys he selects from the toy box, pretending to need their help, etc.

Some children at two are accomplished flatterers like this. But this is a poor method of winning affection because it really isn't a feeling of being liked which is being developed, but rather a form of false pride which makes shyness a virtue.

The child who can get your child to be sorry for him by being shy will never have to develop his own trust in people—he'll be getting a bounty for being frightened. And your child, meanwhile, is giving up his pleasures without receiving anything genuine in exchange.

With a bully, there are some methods which are particularly poor and consequently to be avoided. One is seen when your child, scared of a bully, simply manages to be someplace else every time the bully comes near.

The bully is in no way faced with the necessity of changing his bullying behaviour and your child's freedom is being seriously curtailed. Your child may pretend to himself that he isn't being bullied, but in reality this dodging isn't too much different from just plain letting the bully take over completely. Your child's activities are still being influenced unduly by the presence of the other child.

Another method which is poor is to become an even greater bully. This is the time-honoured tradition of beating up someone who's been bullying. But if you look at this objectively, you can understand that this has no over-all beneficial effects.

It's hardly likely that your child will easily relinquish the position of being biggest bully once he's broken his private code and started to bully.

A final poor way is to take foolish dares, provocatively made by a bully. Your child needs to know that at no time may he do anything foolish or dangerous in the vain hope of gaining friendship from someone he fears.

Taking a dare is no different from purchasing tolerance, only the price is not a bag of candy or a toy—it's his physical or emotional well-being. So prohibit this by telling him why he may not take dares.

B. Best Method of Claiming Respect-Denial and Projection. If these methods aren't wise methods, then what is? The only suitable way to handle such situations is to exert authority, and, if that fails, to appeal to a higher authority.

By this I mean that if some child comes over to yours and tries to take his toy away, your child needs to handle this directly by acknowledging the attempt and by withstanding it firmly and with dignity.

Perhaps you think it's somewhat foolish to talk about firmness and dignity in two-year-olds, but firm dignity is operating in the following not unfamiliar interaction:

JOHNNY: “That's my toy, I picked it from the toy box and you picked one for yourself, now you leave me alone.”

TOMMY:  “I want it now; give it to me.”

JOHNNY: “NO, if you're angry about something you go somewhere else, but you leave me alone.”

It is operating if Johnny replies in similar vein to Tommy's taunts that he bets Johnny doesn't dare fight him.

Now, that type of interaction isn't always magically effective. Often a blow is struck and your injured child demands help from the teacher or from you. Or he turns in anger and gives a punch in return.

In that case, either you or the teacher intercedes. The child who started the fight must be told sternly that he has no right to bully and the other child must be told that if he's attacked again, he should come tell about it before he starts hitting back.

Slowly and gradually, your child learns that he can keep a bully from getting away with things because the bully is afraid of higher authority or is afraid of being counterchallenged. And slowly and gradually, the bully is learning his important lesson and becomes more willing to share and be tolerant.

You can see that we truly don't think it's wise for children to start trading punches. I know that many people feel that it's necessary for children, boys especially, to learn to defend themselves by learning to fight. They believe that children who don't fight back are sissies or cowards. Or they believe that backing down on a challenge is cowardly.

But we don't think that the ability to hit, or the willingness to take a foolish dare, automatically makes a person brave or manly. Lots of cowards strike out in the efforts to prove to themselves that they're not really afraid.

Lots of boys who aren't too happy about being boys, who are anxious and afraid of the responsibilities of being young men in the making become overbearingly “virile” in the effort to establish their sense of sexual identity.

A person who is genuinely brave stands up to a bully, but doesn't necessarily fight back. It takes a great deal more courage to maintain his standards than it does to yield to the temptation to forget them.

We also have to add the element of wisdom here. If your child senses that he cannot control the bully, he is only wise if he requests the help of the teacher or a parent. He isn't being a tattle-tale, he isn't being a sissy. He's merely appealing to a higher authority that he's sure will work.

You do the same thing when you witness a crime—you call the police; and you don't feel ashamed of yourself for not being able to stop the crime single-handedly nor do you think that you are being a tattle-tale for telling.

Your child needs to learn these elements of self-control and control of the other if he's to feel self-confident in the world. The shy child and the bully never feel confidence in themselves. They are dependent on others for their sense of well-being.

And if your child doesn't have adequate early opportunity to learn how to manage him and others, he's in the position of not knowing that he can, so he may resort to bullying or shyness in the effort to prove or to avoid needing to prove that he can manage himself.

There is a lot of projection and denial involved in learning these lessons. Projection is assuming and feeling that the other guy is going to like or dislike something because you really do the same, unconsciously.

Projection is “bad” when you use it to keep your child from eating string beans, for example, be-cause you don't like them. But projection is useful and healthy when it's coupled with realistic evaluation of the immediate situation of the other person.

Used this way, it permits you to make assumptions about how he will behave because that's how you'd behave if you were in the same present situation. It means you don't always have to be wondering about and be amazed by other people.

It gives you a chance to figure out in advance what you have to do in order to have another person behave the way you want him to be.

FURTHER   ADVANTAGES   OF   LEARNING   WITH   PEER GROUP.

Your child, incidentally, can only learn this kind of management if the odds aren't too great against him. That's why I emphasized his being in a group with children of similar age.

With his peers, he has a good chance of learning this kind of give and take. With an older, bigger child, he has little chance, since he is likely to be too impressed by the size and wit of the older ones; he is almost forced to become a resentful slave.

And with a younger child, he faces too much temptation to exert his own capacities for bullying; there isn't any check from the other child on him.

This is why we see the neighbourhood groups where there's a wide age range as being much more demanding and much less instructive in wise and healthy ways of behaviour than a peer group—generally found only in a nursery school setting.

We have spoken to people who received their education in schools where organized hazing existed; they tell me that they think maybe it was good preparation for life because it was so unjust and after all, there's a lot of injustice in the world, so a child might as well get used to it early.

We are sure you'll agree that this is a very sad rationalization for feeling defeated and inwardly resentful. The world does have injustice in it, true enough, but rather than accepting it, your child should be learning to grow up to alter it—and he can only do this if he feels truly self-confident and truly respectful of the rights of others.

LEARNING TO SHARE.

Sharing is another important social skill that your child learns once he's learned to respect the rights of others. He can't, by the way, learn anything about true sharing until he's gotten this firm sense of respect for the rights of others.

But that isn't enough to make for sharing— it just permits him to let the other guy keep one toy while he has his own.

A whole new world is opened up for him, however, as soon as he learns to share and to trade. Trading is sort of an in between stage: “I'll let you use my toy if you let me use yours.”

It's giving and undoing the giving at the same time. This does involve tolerance for not being the sole possessor; it does mean that your child is finally giving up another area of thinking that he should be able to run the world his way.

But trading needs to develop into actual sharing if your child is going to be able to enjoy the pleasures of truly playing with others. Trading results only in isolation. Sharing means willingly giving up sole command over something at the time you are using it.

Your child can only learn sharing with a peer. With someone superior to him, he's being given a present if he's allowed to participate in play. He's being condescended to be.

So, while he might be enjoying the play, he isn't learning anything in addition about mutually agreed upon sharing. With someone inferior to him, he learns how to be generous, but it's generosity which borders on pity or charity.

With an equal, he can give as much as he takes and simultaneously be gaining pleasure in both giving and taking.

It takes a long time for your child to learn how to share. He is going to need to cooperate all through his life if he's going to enjoy being with others and have them enjoy his presence genuinely. And since cooperation is so important, it's necessary for you to ensure that his early experiences in cooperating are maximally pleasurable.

This, again, is why a nursery school is a good thing since there's enough equipment to go around but there's also some equipment which needs to be run by two or more in order to be pleasurable.

It's hard to get that much equipment together on an informal basis. And there must be enough, or sharing is hindered. If children only have one toy to be passed amongst them, they can learn something about trading turns.

But they can't willingly forego some isolated pleasure with one toy in order to merge with another person and enjoy the greater pleasure of cooperative play.

This is the most important aspect of sharing, as I see it. It is free and willing. It isn't forced by practical necessity or by parents bent on “instruction.” Sharing isn't coercion. It's a give and take, together and at once.

You easily recognize this difference in such things as marriage, for example. Some things you may trade with your husband—you let him decide about movies and he lets you decide about dinners.

But the times when you genuinely feel happy about being married, when you feel the thrill of being part of a union, are the times when you both are freely and willingly sharing some responsibility or pleasure.

And you can easily imagine for yourself how it would be if some pleasure, let us say, making love, were to stop being something you both join in freely and were instead to become something you do because you feel you must. It wouldn't be sharing anymore, would it?

It would become a routine that doesn't have as much fun in it as it could have. Your child doesn't need to be “trained” in sharing. If the emotional climate is right and he's mature enough, he will naturally try out what it feels like to share.

As he gets more and more fun out of sharing in his play, he feels more and more at ease and becomes better able to handle altercations by themselves when they arise.

By climate, we mean all the things we've been talking about: playmates of similar age and level of maturity, sufficient play equipment to permit both isolated and shared play, an absence of compulsion to “play together,” reasonable rules that are automatically asserted and followed—rules about not hurting others and about respecting their privacies, and finally, some authority figure who can be called upon when trouble looms.

In that kind of climate, your child learns to share. “Role Playing. By the way, as your child learns to share, he may frequently take opposite roles. For example, he may pretend to be the Mommy while Suzy pretends to be the Daddy. He may be more attracted to typically girl's toys than to boys' things.

This need not worry you—you should not interfere and try to get him to change. This has nothing to do with his future development of a firm sense of masculinity. It's just part of learning to share the “other guy's point of view.” Changing roles helps him develop an appreciation of others and their roles and makes him a person with better rounded interests.

So let him plays with dolls if he wants to and let your daughter play with the hammer and saw. Only if this is a part of a general renunciation of his gender is it a sign of trouble—we'll discuss that in a later chapter.

INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM-ISOLATION.

We want to discuss resorting to authority in more detail before closing this chapter. One of the phrases that are often heard is, “You've got to learn to stand on your own feet, and you’ve got to learn to fight your own battles.”

Of course, this is true. Independence is a cherished goal. The problem about this comes up when we start to analyze how to achieve this goal.

We have already mentioned that we don't think you need worry about your child becoming a tattle-tale or a sissy and failing to learn independence if he learns to resort to higher authority when he's threatened unreasonably.

Now we want particularly to call your attention to something else your child needs re-assurance about during this difficult time when he's first learning to play with people: He needs your help in reminding him that he can always play alone, that he can isolate himself from a situation which is too hot to handle.

If he's firmly convinced that higher authority will help him as best it can, but, if that fails, he can enjoy solitude; he is equipped to handle well most of his problems in playing with others and is learning independence.

As we have mentioned before, I don't think the problem of the bully is as great in a nursery school set-up as in a neighbourhood group. The teacher can always isolate the bully, thus permitting the other children to have their necessary freedom to play together.

But in a neighbourhood, there may very well be a child who causes a lot of trouble, about whom your child complains greatly. While you are trying to work things out with such a child's parent, or while you're hopefully watching the results of such a child’s were being ostracized from the play group by the children, you need to encourage and support your child in his belief that he can play alone.

A. How to Handle Problems of Independence   of   Playmates.

Let's set up an illustrative situation: Your child is playing enjoyably with Suzy when Tommy comes along. Tommy succeeds in luring Suzy away and then, with her, tells your child that they don't want to play with him. Your child is hurt and comes to complain to you about this.

This is the kind of situation where you need to remind him that if he can't play with Suzy and Tommy, he can always play by himself. You need to express sympathy for his hurt feelings but you also must point out to him that he doesn't need to depend upon his friends completely for enjoyment.

The net result of this kind of support from you is that your child remembers that he is actually independent of the other children. And human nature being what it is, as soon as Suzy and Tommy realize that your child is content, even without them, they generally make overtures for his companionship again.

B.  Poorer Choices. I don't think it's wise to try to console your child by statements like, “Oh, well, you don't really like Suzy that much anyhow, do you? How about playing with Mommy for a while.”

The reason this kind of response is poor is that it is a very subtle way of telling your child that he doesn't know enough to choose friends wisely, that he's only really safe with you, and that his friendships are fickle, childish, superficial things. None of that is true, so you mustn't confuse him this way.

Another poor type of response is to get angry with your child for feeling hurt because he's been rejected. Perhaps you say, “Well, don't come crying to me, for heaven's sake, Suzy’s your friend, not mine, and if you can't make her like you, it's your own fault: you've got to learn to fight your own battles.”

Not only is this unsympathetic, it is also an implicit demand that your child do something that realistically he cannot do, namely, control completely the other guy's emotions. It makes him feel frustrated and worthless.

He knows perfectly well that he can't fight Suzy into liking him. He doesn't like being rejected. In such confusion and pain, he can benefit only from two things—your sympathy and your reminder that he really isn't dependent upon Suzy for his joy in life.

C. Real Neighbourhood Problems. Let's take that example and make it a little more disastrous. This time, Tommy isn't just someone who occasionally charms Suzy into preferring him.

He really is a bully who makes Suzy play with him and forces your child to play by himself. What then? The bully hasn't been affected in the slightest by Suzy’s resentment or by your child's independence after being pushed away.

He's a real neighbourhood problem. Suzy’s mother recognizes her inability to help Suzy avoid or withstand him and you recognize your inability to help your own child.

We think when this sort of situation arises; it's an awkward but necessary thing for you and your husband to make a date with Tommy's parents to talk over the situation with them.

In many cases, Tommy isn't helped in his emotional difficulties too much—his parents may just punish him for having been naughty and may not do anything to get to the roots of why he's so big a bully. But even if this happens, at least two other children, yours and Suzy, are not being hurt by him.

Once again, this is a situation where the greater good of society is being taken care of before the individual's difficulties. You can help yourself feel a little less guilty by reminding yourself that Tommy isn't being helped out of his emotional difficulties by being allowed to run riot either.

In some cases, though, you may actually succeed in helping parents come face to face with the fact that they need professional help in guiding and disciplining their child. Or you may even get some insight into why Tommy is behaving the way he is, and it may be a situation where you can help.

Maybe Tommy is fed up because he's all alone in the morning when everyone else is in school, and he's taking out his resentment over not going to nursery school by being a bully in the afternoon.

Maybe you can help convince his parents that they should try to send him to school, or you may succeed in getting them to apply for financial assistance from the school if that's been why they haven't sent him.

There are lots of possible reasons why a child may be a bully, and sometimes a friendly, investigative, non-judgmental, non-condemning talk with parents will help single out some of these causes where neighbourhood action can help.

We don't want to suggest that I think you should be a busybody or a do-gooder. But you shouldn't just sit back and talk about Tommy's parents as if they were monsters without first trying to see what an offer of friendship and talking together will accomplish.

What if Tommy's parents simply say that they think it isn't their responsibility to control Tommy, that they're not interested in trying to help him become a fair person, that “the kids will just have to fight it out by themselves”?

This is a really tough situation. You may solve it by having your child play in areas where Tommy may not trespass. You keep watch and tell him to leave whenever he starts to bother your children.

Or you may threaten Tommy directly. You may even move away. You may, if Tommy is assaultive, petition the local police and get a peace bond sworn out.

You can see that all these various methods are really either ways of avoiding the trouble by keeping out of Tommy's way or are ways of instituting higher authority over Tommy.

Which to use, which is effective, which causes the least amount of disturbance in neighbourhood relations while limiting Tommy's bullying, is undeterminable. You must judge for yourself and try to decide for yourself what you can accomplish.

D. Letting Your Child Know You Want to Help. One thing you should do, however, is to make clear to your child what you are doing. He needs to learn from you that you've asked Tommy’s parents to limit Tommy, so he can be prepared for Tommy’s behaviour.

If it finally ends up that the only thing you can do is to have your child and Suzy play inside or else brave it out with Tommy on their own, you need to tell him this and back him up with sympathy and solid, sound advice and directions.

If it ends up with your recognition that you are powerless, short of calling the police, to do anything about the situation, your child still gets some essential emotional consolation out of having you tell him this, yourself, without distortion or alibi.

For example, one such situation involved the son of the landlady who lived on the premises. The child was able to continue to be a bully without limitation from his mother or father.

The tenants had spoken to their landlady about her child's bullying of their children and had been informed that if they didn't like it, they could move. A peace bond was sworn out after the bully had progressed to physical assault, but his verbal assault and provocation continued.

The tenants then informed their children that they could only play outside at certain times, when the bully was otherwise engaged. The parents apologized to their children for not being able to do any better until they were able to find another home to move to stay.

The children weren't very happy about the situation, of course, but at least they had learned something of importance from their parents: they had learned that their parents wanted to help them, even though they couldn't accomplish much.

We think the situation would have been much worse if the tenants had distorted their position and had told their children they'd have to fight it out by themselves or had told them to give in to the bullying because there wasn't any other alternative.

The parents and children continued to enjoy trust in each other and their eventual move to another area solved matters.

Most of the time, if a bully can't be controlled, he can be avoided—and your child needs to have you help him remember this. We are not suggesting that this is good—it's merely better than giving in completely and accepting slavery.

If your child is encouraged to recognize a problem too big for him or for you to handle, at least he doesn’t have to be afraid of his own fears. He is able to admit them to himself; and they are easier to handle that way. A far more serious distortion would occur if he had to deny his own fear.

Learning to share, learning to claim respect, and learning to keep from provoking trouble are the big lessons your child begins to learn when he starts to play with other children his own age.

Another area in which there's a lot of development at this time is the area of sex. In the next chapter, part of the task of helping your child develop healthy and happy attitudes regarding sexuality will be discussed.

Sexuality

IN ALL the preceding chapters, the topic of sex has only been mentioned occasionally because most of your child's attention during his first few years is devoted to learning how to trust and to respect others and to have self-confidence. He's been interested in sex, of course, but this interest has been subordinated to other concerns about the world and the people in it.

As your child becomes less anxious about moving around in a -world of people, less tied up in mechanical and physical chores of eating and talking and walking and using the toilet, he begins to have more energy at his disposal to devote to sexual concerns.

So, even though you might not have noticed any intense interest in sexual concerns while he was very young, by his third birthday he's probably going to be experimenting and questioning, in a very direct way, about what we generally call sex.

Freudian Meaning of Sexuality

We want to make a brief excursion away from your child for the moment, because we think we should clear up something that's often confusing about the word “sex.” The word “sexuality” as used by Freudian psychologists is not at all similar to the way that it's used in everyday talk.

Instead, infantile sexuality is regarded as covering all sorts of intense interest in various matters that concern the body. So we think of infantile sexuality when we think about your child's intense interest in sucking, or in biting and grasping and moving and seeing, in toilet matters, and in power and status contests like the ones involved in learning to respect privacy and property.

You can see, then, that actually all the preceding chapters have discussed aspects of infantile sexuality, even though it was not called this directly.

The concept of psychosexual development which is the concept behind Freudian thinking about infantile sexuality is probably the foundation stone of Freudian psychology.

But instead of being very complex and seeming to be very far-fetched, you can see that it's really a very forthright declaration of something that makes easy common sense to you as a parent observing the natural way your child matures: He goes through stages where certain body satisfactions are the most important ones to him.

As he matures, he very naturally progresses to being concerned with the next stage and he faces certain conflicts, solves them, takes another step in maturing as a result, and then progresses to the next step.

This is what the Freudians mean when they talk about psychosexual development. It's making sexuality into a word which is almost identical with joy or pleasure.

It's saying that there are certain drives, the satisfaction of which gives your child pleasure; that these drives are important in turn at different times in your child's life; that these drives conflict with each other, but that the conflicts can naturally be solved by him as he matures; and that certain feelings about himself and the world of people are developed as he solves the conflicts between these drives and satisfies them and progresses to trying to get other satisfactions.

So far, we've talked about five of the major psychosexual stages: We've talked about the autistic stage—when the child is brand new and is learning to derive the basic satisfaction that comes from being alive and alert and that also comes relaxing and drifting off to sleep.

Then we also talked about the oral sucking stage—the time when the child's big joy in life comes from eating and being cuddled. You can see that this conflicts to some extent with the satisfactions from the first, autistic stage.

He can't lose himself in the pleasure of eating and still be wide awake and alert to everything else going on around him. But that conflict isn't too great. He solves it by learning to take everything in turn (which, by the way, is essentially the healthy way of solving these psychological conflicts).

Then we've talked about the child's progress into another psychosexual stage, called the oral biting stage. That's the time when he's most intense about moving around, grasping the world, learning to see everything and get over to it, and learning to talk about it.

There's a lot of conflict between this drive and the other two drives, mostly with the drive to be dependent and oral sucking, though. He can't very well be passively nursing at the same time that he's crawling over to see what that funny red thing is on the floor.

But as he develops greater ability to retain lots of food and to bite it and swallow it in a hurry, he sacrifices some of the joy of sucking in exchange for the greater (to him at that time) joy of mobility and he's solved another important psychological conflict.

During this stage, too, he learns to identify with people constantly near him and so get an idea of himself as if he were exactly like them. He gets into conflict when he sees strangers.

That's why he's frightened and troubled by strangers at about 10 to 12 months—but he solves his conflict by deciding that he doesn't have to become a different person with each different person. He decides he's just himself and he can now progress to learning more about himself.

Then we talked about his entering another stage of psycho-sexual development, the anal expulsive stage. This is when the child faces the restrictions, internal and automatic and biological, that are placed by his need to eliminate waste products.

While he's struggling with the problem of how to move his bowels in a hurry, he has to face up to the recognition that it takes time and effort, concentrated effort. He can't be running around and playing—he has to stop and devote attention to himself again.

But once again, as he learns to eliminate efficiently, he also develops an important sense of inner strength which supports the feelings of worthiness and self-confidence and trust in himself he's been developing from his maturing through the previous stages.

And then we've also talked about the next psychosexual stage, the anal retentive stage. In this stage, too, there are conflicts—he can't see how much he can contain, how much he can withstand, if he also is going to have the pleasure of letting go, eliminating.

But once again, he eventually gets things under control within himself and this also enables him to handle other problems with other people—when he's sure of his ability to keep himself under control, he's also equipped to follow rules, to share, to be just and fair, and to control others.

Freudians regard all these oral and anal problems as “sexual” problems because they involve pleasure, bodily pleasure. The next stages that the Freudian regards as important however are also called sexual by other people. Thus there usually isn't so much confusion about them.

One of these stages is concerned with private sexual pleasure; it's called the phallic stage. And the last stage is called the genital sexual stage. This is reached only by fully mature adults.

In this chapter, we're going to be discussing your child's interest in his sexual organs and that means we're going to be considering aspects of phallic sexuality.

Development of Phallic Sexuality

If you remember, your child has been curious and interested in playing with his sexual organs from a very early age. As an infant, he was as curious about his sexual organs as he was about his toes and his hands. And you did nothing to interfere with this investigation because you recognized it as just plain curiosity.

Off and on, as he grew older, you may have noticed more deliberate exploration, that is, you may have noticed him masturbating. Again, you were wise and you didn't attempt to interfere with this activity.

In the healthy young child, masturbation isn't habitual. He's as likely to cuddle a fuzzy toy when he's going to sleep as he is to masturbate. This part of him isn't overwhelmingly fascinating. His mouth, his hands, and his rectum take first place in his attention.

But as he becomes more mature, as these erogenous zones (the Freudian term for places like the mouth and anus where intense feelings are aroused), develop and mature, they be-come less the places where his major pleasure is felt. They give way to the sexual organs themselves.

The phallic stage isn't as short a period of time as the oral and anal stages were. In about two years of life, your child has progressed through the two oral and two anal stages. But for the next few years and then once again in his adolescence, he's going to be at grips with the problems of phallic sexuality.

Throughout all his early years, if other relationships between him and you are satisfying, you don't need to do anything at all about cautioning him against masturbation.

You have a duty to inform him about the “facts of life” as he asks for information. And you have a duty to help him in his struggles with competition—struggles that spring from phallic sexuality.

You need to guide and direct him when his curiosity about his body becomes channel into curiosity about the bodies of other people. But you need never—or at least, only very seldom— make any comments about his own exploration of his own body.

Your Role in His Developing Sexuality

Rather than continue to make broad, general statements, let's discuss various aspects of sex which come up in the ordinary course of events and let's discuss your role in regard to these. At first, we'll be talking about things which apply mainly only to a young child.

SEPARATE SLEEPING ROOMS.

Just about the first problem that comes up involving sex is the problem of separate sleeping rooms. You remember that I talked about this in the beginning of this book. At that time, we talked mostly about the need for privacy; I wasn't paying too much attention to sex.

But sex does play an important part in the reasons that lead psychologists to advise parents to have their children sleep in separate rooms, away from the parents, definitely, and, if possible, away from other children, too.

Your child, very young and inexperienced, can't make sense of what's happening if he wakes up accidentally and watches you and your husband during sexual intercourse. The emotions that this stir up in him is strong and confusing—he can't make any order of them and he can't do anything to release his pent up tension.

Instead, he's left with a feeling of being over-stimulated, with an impression that people he loves are suddenly very strange, and he can only form a distorted conclusion about what's happening to them and to him.

Maybe he thinks it's all a big fight and he's frightened. Maybe he has even less clear impressions. Whatever he's left with—and to some extent this will depend upon his age and also upon the qualities of the sexual play that he's observing—it causes too much immediate tension for him to handle and may well cause a distortion in his later appreciation of what sex can and should mean.

So the wise things are to avoid presenting your child with this problem by simply ensuring his privacy and yours.

PLAYING WITH HIM.

Another aspect of sex that we have talked about briefly is the extent to which he is stimulated sexually by you when you clean him play with him, cuddle him, etc. You remember that we spoke about avoiding direct sexual stimulation as much as possible.

You may, without being aware of it, be stimulating your child sexually when you cuddle him or hold him; perhaps you automatically pick him up with one of your hands on his back and the other between his legs, and then start bouncing him on your hand.

Of course he becomes quiet immediately as he becomes entranced with the genital stimulation; but this can have lasting bad effects, so it should be avoided. You need to avoid having your child sit on your lap with his legs apart and you need to avoid carrying him with your hand between his legs.

It's a simple enough matter to hold him across the buttocks or under the knees; it's simple enough to have him sit sidewise on your lap rather than astride; it's simple enough to rock him rather than jiggle him up and down. And be sure not to prolong or concentrate attention on cleaning his genital organs.

HANDLING HIS GENITALS.

You might also be puzzled as to the wise course of action to take when your child starts to touch his genitals while you're diapering him. This is a fairly easy situation to deal with—obviously you can't diaper him without removing his hand, so you do, matter-of-factly, and you go on with the diapering. You don't need to say anything.

Most other situations involving his playing with his genitals won't puzzle you too much if you remember that an important thing about sex, whether phallic or genital, is that it's generally a private celebration.

So, when, for example, he starts to play with his genitals while you're bathing him, you can casually say that right now you want to finish washing him and he can play with his penis later on.

If he wants to know why not right then, you can simply say that it's keeping him from enjoying his bath while he's in the bath and he will probably enjoy more playing with his penis when he isn't distracted and is alone. This is one of the few occasions when you need to comment on his exploration of his own body.

This same sort of comment serves equally well if he starts to masturbate in other social situations, too. Most of the time, he won't. Masturbating publicly is generally a sign of anxiety and you should take it to mean that he's not awfully happy about what's going on around him.

The big thing to do is to help ease the situation for him. But if you believe that he's going to get himself into more social difficulties by his frantic desire to reassure himself that his genitals are still there, you can help him out by reassuring him that he's not going to be hurt and that he will be able to masturbate later on when he's by himself.

That aspect of masturbation is actually part of behaviour difficulties so there will be more about it in a later chapter. This chapter instead is concerned more with normal, ordinary, healthy manifestations of natural sexual desire and curiosity and also with common mistakes that can easily be avoided.

QUESTIONS ABOUT SEX.

For a long while, your child's sexual curiosity is only manifested by casual play with his own genitals. But as he grows older, he begins to wonder about the origin of things and the differences between things. Eventually he begins to wonder where he came from and he also begins to wonder about the differences between him and girls and you and his father.

As he asks questions about sex, your role in answering him is no different than it is in answering his questions about any differences. We often think it's a mistake to term these sorts of question “sexual.” Actually, they are just a part of his general wondering about the nature of things.

So your kinds of answers aren't any different when he asks why kitty has four legs and he only has two than when he asks why you have breasts and Daddy doesn't.

Your answers are just replies which tell him that things are different: “Kitty has four legs because he's a cat and you have two legs because you're a boy”; an answer which is exactly like, “I have breasts because I'm a woman, and Daddy doesn't have breasts because he's a man,”

When he gets around to questioning about the differences between boys and girls, you need to give him an additional amount of reassurance. By now, the question might not be quite so devoid of anxiety. Behind it there may be a little bit of concern about why girls don't have penises. 

We say a little bit because I don't think a healthy young child is awfully worried about being castrated (we'll discuss this, later on, more fully); the ordinary two-year old child is really still asking mostly about differences.

He isn't worried about losing his penis be-cause there hasn't been any reason for him to fear this happening. 

You, of course, have not been threatening him with punishment for masturbation; you haven't been sadistic when you've punished him for other kinds of naughtiness or kept him from getting hurt; and he hasn't yet gotten to where his fantasies and wishes about you and his daddy will make him worry about the same thing happening to him that he wants to have happen to Daddy.

So when he first asks about why he has a penis but Shirley doesn't, you need only respond that he's a boy and boys have penises and Shirley is a girl and girls have a vagina instead of a penis.

Sooner or later he may carry on his investigation and won-dement to where he wants to know what a vagina is. Then you need to tell him that it's a place which goes inside on a girl right where his penis goes outside on him.

You don't need to get all involved in pointing out the strict lack of anatomical similarity. For example, he's not terrifically concerned about the fact the vagina is totally separated from the urethra while his urethra is enclosed by his penis. Don't go beyond his meagre needs and his meagre ability to comprehend.

These questions and answers aren't too much different for a girl. When she asks about breasts, you can be adding on the reassuring information that when she grows up, her nipples will grow larger and she'll have breasts too.

When she asks what's inside the vagina or what it's for, you can tell her that it's a place where she will feel pleasant when she's grown up and where she can grow children when she's grown up and has a husband.

When your child asks about where he came from, you can, at first, answer only that he once grew inside of you just like a little bean grows inside a pod. If you think it may make him slightly happier, you can embellish this with all sorts of tales about how happy you were when he was in there. 

We think a child appreciates learning from his parents that long before he was ever even seen, they were already loving him and protecting him. By the way, to make it easier for purposes of discussion, I'm pretending that all these kinds of questions follow logically upon each other, and, of course, that isn't necessarily so.

You can see that there's a principle behind the way in which you answer your child's questions regarding sexual matters. The principle is that you tell him the truth in as simple a manner as possible, without becoming too involved in a lot of scientific phraseology, and certainly without becoming involved in something overtly sexually stimulating for him.

We mention this last point because I've heard some parents state that they think they should permit a child to explore their bodies so he won't have any confusions about what they mean, or that they should stimulate their children sexually and direct

Most certainly, you should never do either of these. Direct sexual stimulation is something you engage in only with your husband. If your child says he wants to see your vagina, for example, you can simply tell him that you don't like the idea and you can reassure him that when he's grown up, he can make love with his wife and see her vagina. The same thing applies to a girl's questions, of course.

She does not need to see an erect penis in order to understand your replies to her questions. This talk about direct sexual exploration leads into several related topics. First, there's the question of seeing his parents nude.

A. Nudity and Differences. If you pay attention to the likely sources of confusion for your child, you can sort out all the various arguments that have raged over this question.

There are two differences that your three-year-old child is probably concerned about: One is the difference in size between him and his parents. The other is the anatomical difference between the sexes. Before the age of two, these don't concern him much.

We think a child's difficulties are lessened if once he has learned to use the toilet the only parent he sees nude is the parent of the same sex. So your boy should never see you nude. Similarly, a daughter should only see her mother nude.

A whole host of questions about the differences in size may spring up because your son sees his father undressed; but he is easily reassured and satisfied by being told that when he grows up he'll be shaped like his daddy and he'll have hair on his body like his daddy does, too.

Replying to a daughter's questions by reassuring her that she too, will have breasts and have hair on her body also serves to satisfy her curiosity and reassure her. The other question, the difference between the sexes, springs up easily enough as your child begins to play with other children.

If not before, surely when he's in nursery school he has the opportunity to see other children at the toilet. He's con-fronted with something that puzzles him, but it's easier for him than if he is confronted simultaneously with both differences, the difference in size and the difference in physical structure.

You may ask, “OK, but what about once he's aware of the differences, why shouldn't he then be allowed to see both parents nude?

Why shouldn't everything be natural?

Why all this prudishness?

To this the answer lies in the true reality of how you live if you live in this culture. You do not walk around nude in your home when you have guests over, do you? Nudity in an adult is almost synonymous with sexual invitation.

You restrict your appearances in the nude for times when you are sexually intimate. And within you is the knowledge that this is so.

If you try to deny this inner knowledge, insisting idealistically that you “don't mean anything by it” when you walk around nude before your child, you are trying to do something that's emotionally impossible.

Then, not only does the overtone of sexual seductiveness get across to your child, but also your anxiety about the act you're putting on. This con-fusion of emotions arouses all sorts of confusions within him, and you are a long way away from having reassured him that sex is good and natural and so is nudity.

We don't think the same problem arises when you're nude before a child of the same sex. As a healthy adult, you are naturally not concerned with homosexual seduction.

This is something which has been dealt with deep within yourself as you yourself have matured. So you can appear nude before your daughter without feeling the undertone of sexualized anxiety that would be there if you were before your son.

What about the reverse of this question: if it isn't considered wise to appear nude before a child of the opposite sex, what about the child appearing nude in front of the parent of the opposite sex?

Here the answer involves an appreciation of what nudity means for the child. In a state of what has been traditionally called “innocence,” during his first or second year of life, your child doesn't feel anything particularly sexual about being without clothes.

During his first few years, if you are having a healthy re lationship with him, he regards sex on a purely sensational and purely intellectual basis. His sex play has the qualities of any other play for him. His questions are like his questions about the kitty.

   But when he gets to where he has begun to have fantasies about sex and to have fantasies involving his parents, his nudity now may have all the connotations that yours, as an adult, has.

If you believe he is being provocative in appearing nude before you, you can easily ask him to put on his robe, etc. The problem, then, is to distinguish between the time when your child is being forthright about sexual sensation and the time when he has begun to formulate fantasies about sexuality.

As he begins to become involved in real sharing with other children, sexual concerns with them arise. Then, no longer is using the toilet with them a simple, non-exhibitionist activity.

At this time, when he's begun nursery school and has learned the rudiments of sharing in his play, he also starts experimenting in games like “playing doctor.” Before discussing such games, let's continue to see how his changing feelings about sexuality and nudity affect the question of his appearing nude before you.

At this stage of “play doctor” games, your child still appears before you without any self-consciousness. He doesn't regard himself as someone who wants to tempt you sexually. Any feelings of this sort are relegated to his peers, not to adults.

So, during this time, he can still appear nude in his family circle without this meaning anything for him. However; once he's past this stage, once he's begun to tackle the problems of sexual identification with his parents, his nudity is no longer innocent of sexuality.

When he reaches this point, he should be encouraged to wear a bathrobe, zip up his fly, etc. You'll know he has reached this stage by watching his obvious self-consciousness when nude.

There's another, final, aspect to this question of nudity. Per-haps you are wondering why all these complications need to be considered. You may feel that it is much simpler, altogether, for everyone, children and parents alike, just never to be seen unclothed.

The objection to this is that such carefulness will make some learning situations very difficult and it will also lend an air of being sinful or clandestine to nudity—at best, an encumbrance in later life.

The learning situations which become impossible or difficult, particularly, are the ones in which your child is learning about using the toilet and also the ones providing a realistic image before him of what his body will be like as he matures.

If he has no opportunity to witness his parent of the same sex in the bath and using the toilet, he has to make up ideas for himself out of his own imagination and the hints he may pick up from casual conversation. His imagination may not serve him well; it may just give him a picture which is very far from ordinary reality.

He may develop all sorts of distorted feelings about himself and about others. All in all, it is much easier for him to have a sensible idea and a realistic picture if he has a real-life example before him.

The Victorian attitude toward both nudity and sexuality, of course, is not a helpful attitude. Constant nagging at a child to keep himself covered all the time, lack of opportunity to see any other bodies besides his own, and a forbidding attitude about sexual behaviour and questions only breeds a deep sense of shame about his body.

And this sense of shame seriously interferes in his ability to enjoy life and to be fully creative and productive and loving in his later life.

Previously, we discussed the question of taking a child into bed with you. You can see that many of the objections to this activity involve this same business of avoiding sexual stimulation.

B. Questions about Birth.

Let's get back to the questions your child asks about birth. Once he's fairly complacent about the differences between him and adults and the difference between the sexes, and he's begun to understand, in his own terms, what you mean about where he comes from, a very logical question for him to ask is the question of how did he get there.

Then you need to explain to him that you had a part of him in you and Daddy had another part of him inside of him, and when the two parts came together, they started to grow inside you and they became him.

The “standard” language used about this is to speak of a seed within you which is sprinkled by Daddy and then starts to grow. The doubt which we have about this kind of language is that it may lead to some confusion with urination.

We think it's actually just as easy to talk about the scientific truth in understandable terms: that a man and a woman each have different little parts inside of them which become the beginning of a baby when they come together.

You can tell him that right now he has the parts within him which, when he's grown to be a man, will develop his share of a baby.

If you think your child might be interested, you can also inform him that these little parts came together when Daddy made love to you by putting his penis inside your vagina. And you can assure him that when he's grown up and is married, he, too, will be able to start a baby growing in the same fashion.

We think this is one time when your volunteering information probably helps your child out. It's really helping him under-stand something that he might otherwise imagine about in a distorted fashion. Of course, such education doesn't really do away for once and for all with all his different ideas on the subject.

He's still going to re-interpret things for himself. For a while, he's going to be convinced that you really swallowed something. Later, he may imagine that conception takes place somehow through the anus. But it helps him eventually get these different ideas unravelled if you consistently give him the correct information.

Another reason why this particular bit of information may need to be volunteered is that your child may very naturally shy away from asking this particular question, particularly if he has had some casual hints about love-making or has picked up some definite information.

There seems to be a kind of natural repression of curiosity, much as if your child inwardly recognized that there's a lot of emotion tied up in this somehow. By bringing this out into the open, you are sparing him some anxiety.

C. General Attitude about Sex Questions. 

We want to caution about this, though, because I think it's a very serious mistake for you to anticipate the whole realm of questions about sex and think that you need to talk about sex all the time to your child.

In the final analysis, sexual intercourse is not quite the same as a hockey game. If you try to pretend that it is completely unemotional, if you become obsessed with the necessity of delivering “sex education,” or if you give your information tensely or snickering, then you are creating problems for your child, just as confusing problems as if you never answer your child's questions about sex.

After a while, the factual questions pertaining to sex and to procreation cease. Your child has some ideas about what his sexual organs can be used for now—private pleasure—and he also knows what they can be used for in adulthood—making love and creating children. He has fairly good ideas about how children come out into the world.

COMING TO GRIPS WITH PHALLIC SEXUALITY: THE OEDIPAL PERIOD.

Most of this information just lays a back-ground for the real coming to grips continually with sexuality which begins sometime about the age of 3 or 4 and continues, very intensely, until he's about 6, 7, or 8. This is called the oedipal period.

This real preoccupation with sexuality involves not only masturbation but also fantasies. And the fantasies are ones in which you and your husband play a big role. Your role in reality is to behave in such a way that his fantasies are not given support.

The outcome of all this concern is that your child develops a strong sense of pride about his sexuality—he is content and happy about being a boy or your daughter is content and happy about being a girl. This is called resolving the Oedipus conflict.

But in between, from the time your child first begins to realize that he has sexual feelings which are really his until the time that he's at ease about these, there is a long time of more or less open sexual competition.

Before describing the typical behaviour of your child during this time, it might be well briefly to review the inner events, the emotions which he is feeling. Then we must review your own emotional attitudes.

You need to remember that the emotional complications of earlier childhood are receding in importance. It is probably for this reason that sexuality seems to increase in importance in comparison as oral and anal problems become solved.

A. Immediate Emotions. Your son starts to develop fantasies of seducing you sexually. These fantasies at first provide a very pleasurable accompaniment to his masturbating. In these fantasies, he begins to elaborate how he will destroy his arch-competitor for you, his father.

Then, since he isn't too very far removed from the anal fears that his hostilities may show and may awaken counter hostilities, he begins to get anxious about what his father might do to him. This anxiety mounts into a well-defined fear of castration—his father will castrate him because he lusts after you.

The only way out of this dilemma is to repudiate his desire for you. So he represses his sexuality and his masturbatory fantasies and he becomes fewer exhibitionists. This marks the end of the oedipal period for him.

A daughter, however, develops different emotional ties during this time. Her sexuality also becomes increasingly import-ant, again probably as a result of the comparative lessening of intensity of other drives.

But when she begins to masturbate, having you as the focus of her tender desires just as her brother does, she becomes anxious about becoming dependent upon you again. Also, she recognizes that her clitoris is small and not a very impressive aggressive instrument with which to seduce.

She feels, in effect, castrated, and she believes that it is you who thus deprived her. She probably accuses you, because you have been the person who has punished her most of the time.

This leads to feelings of hatred for you and eases her fear of being once again caught up in dependency with you. Now begin feelings of a yearning to have a penis of her own. With one, she can seduce you without being dependent, she can be aggressive.

But she can obtain one only by attracting her father, so she promptly sets about trying to seduce him so that she may regain the fantasized penis she believes she once had. In so pursuing, she becomes competitive with you.

But she must become more and more like you in your femininity if she is to win her father, so her hostility and competition toward you disappear gradually as a result of her enforced identification with you.

The resolution of her Oedipus conflicts is much more diffuse than that of a boy. Because her hostilities toward you cause anxieties both about your counter-aggression and about her needing to repudiate her own feminine identification, she represses both the sexuality and the aggressiveness, and becomes feminine and passive and modest in the effort to avoid further anxiety.

She dreams of getting a baby instead of a penis and thus assumes a tender rile. This is the classical view of development during this time. There are many different interpretations of the prime causal factors.

However, it is agreed that this interpretation fits the facts of behaviour as it is seen to develop naturally. If you examine your own child’s behaviour you can see how it fits this sort of sequence.  

B. Behaviour During the Oedipal Time

At the beginning of theOedipal time, his desire for you is fairly plain to see. He attempts to behave toward you in a very courtly fashion, imitating his father. Most of his behaviour and talk is more concerned with you than with you than his father.

He talks about how he's going to marry you when he grows up, he attempts to help you across the street, and he’s very cuddly and affectionate. He may be very exhibitionist, trying to seduce you into looking at or touching his genitals, he may rub against you and try to catch you undressed,

Then, as he gets older and his sexuality becomes more complex, another element, this time of real rebellion and antagonism toward his father, appears. His affectionate behaviour toward you manifests itself only when his father is absent.

Toward his father, he is as competitive and argumentative as he can be. He may resort to subterfuge and say his genitals hurt, thus trying to get you to touch him even while his father is witness

Occasionally, there may be violent swings in the opposite direction, so that he becomes exceedingly “boyish,” acting al-most like woman-hater, and spending all his energies in trying to be with and to attract his father.

Then there is generally a period of complete indifference to both of you, a time when he seems to be saying, “I don't care one bit about either of you, I have my own life to lead.”

Eventually, things calm down, he once again becomes a real member of the family, once more he is willing to go along with the rules your family has lived by. He becomes affectionate toward both his parents, but in a more adult sense.

There is less cuddling or none at all, but he shows his affection by being helpful and he once more has a sense of humour about himself. He stops spending much time with you and concentrates on his school friends and his father.

Your daughter's activity during this time is even more complex. With her, rebellion and competition are much more closely intermingled, probably because most of her run-in with authority is with you and she's also competing with you.

Also, you may too easily mistake her competition as just plain identification. You may think that she's just happily trying to follow your example when she tries to cook or bake or clean, and you may forget that perhaps her major motivation is to show off to her Daddy how much better a wife she'd be for him than you are.

She changes from little girl to tomboy to competitor to friend, but far more subtly than a boy during this time. In many ways, a girl's inner conflict and anxiety during this time is much greater than a boy's. She really has no way of investigating, directly, what she really is, inside, as a woman. She needs to take, on faith, all your statements about her.

Whereas a boy can examine his sexual organs directly and so make sure they're all right, she cannot. Her clitoris is available for manipulation and inspection, but her primary sexual organs remain a complete mystery, inaccessible to her direct investigation, throughout her life.

Freudian psychologists believe this is why little girls are so much more concerned about things like dancing, new clothes, and other things connected with showing off. They feel that this is an attempt to make up for the fact that a girl can't show, even to herself, what are her sexual organs.

From time to time, your child may exaggerate episodes of ordinary discipline. A son may tell his mother how angry Daddy was; purposely trying to stir up an over-protective feeling in her so that she'll become angry with her husband.

A daughter may openly beg her father for concessions, so she can show off to her mother how much she can get away with and thereby also stir up an argument between the parents.

This is a time in many households when peace and quiet and a family feeling seem to have disappeared forever. Parents complain about how their children no longer seem to respect their wishes.

All sorts of arguments can be traced to this competitiveness. Seating arrangements in the automobile suddenly become something to be fussed about; all sorts of habits are challenged or broken.

During this oedipal period, your child is really forgetting that he's a child and that you don't feel sexually attracted to him. Instead, he directs his sexual feelings toward you and expects these to be reciprocated and challenged, in turn, by you and your husband, much as if he really were a true peer.

Combined in this is an assertion that he thinks he's quite grown-up; it's a stroke for independence. Also, at the same time, this looks like an indication of some resentment about needing to follow rules, a rebellion and a way of testing the validity of the rules he has up to now taken for granted.

C. Your Role. What should your role and your husband's role be during this time?

To answer that, it's necessary to distinguish clearly the goals you want to reach. You want your child to arrange this challenge because you know it's the means by which he arrives at a clearer understanding of himself.

But you don't want his struggles to be burdened by guilt’s and anxieties during this time or as a heritage from this time—guilt’s and anxieties that are inappropriate.

It is appropriate that he feel a measure of anxiety about his own body integrity; in the discussion on adolescence this necessity will be further explained.

And it is necessary that he feel a measure of guilt over his hostilities toward his competitor, for otherwise he would spend himself in a futile attempt to win you and might engender a great amount of counter-hostilities. But you don't want him to feel guilty about trying.

If you seek to keep this inappropriate guilt to a minimum, you need to distinguish closely between competition and rebellion. If you react to his competition as if it were, in fact, rebellion, you are being authoritarian at the wrong time.

The result is that he becomes anxious about asserting his new independence and aggressiveness; and he cannot come to grips with the sexual feelings within him and with the reality of his family set-up.

You need to remember that his competition springs from within him, from the newly rearranged sexual forces within him. It isn't a result of the pressures upon him. Your behaviour (and your husband's) isn't teasing and competitive, yet your child behaves as if it were.

If you remember that you are not the one provoking this behaviour, you will be better equipped to handle it intelligently, to turn him down gently.

For your major role at this time is to spurn his advances.

A great deal of difficulty is made for a child by the parents responding to his sexual competitiveness with a sort of welcome, rather than with a tender rejection.

It's very easy for a mother to feel both proud and flattered when her son starts acting as if she were the most attractive woman on earth. And it's just as easy for a father to feel that he isn't as old as he really is when his daughter starts making a great bid for his attention.

But if you do respond this way to his overtures, you are really telling him something which just isn't true. You're saying to him, in effect, “You aren't just a very lovely young boy whom I love dearly as my son. Rather, you're a man and I'm a woman and I think you're terrifically attractive.”

Sooner or later, this causes tremendous complications for him. His major difficulty is with his own inner feelings. Particularly, he feels extremely guilty about double-crossing his father, for that's what this amounts to in his own fantasy.

Also, he's frightened about what father might do to him. And he is certainly confused and over-stimulated by your response, then later enraged and further confused when you finally turn him down.

The problem is much simpler for him always if you react not by secretly or openly welcoming his advances but rather with the same type of tactful refusal you would demonstrate toward an older suitor.

Imagine to yourself that he isn't just a little boy but is some man who is trying to attract you, even though he knows you're happily and contentedly married. If you had this type of problem with a close neighbour, for example, you would try to show him that you did not welcome his advances.

You'd purposely talk about your husband when you were with him alone. You'd be particularly attentive to your husband when you were all together. You might laugh about some of the things he told you. You might express to him your annoyance over his failure to show proper respect for your marriage and your husband.

All these sorts of things you can do, too, with your child during this time. You aren't going to be the one to say anything direct to him, any more than you would to a grown-up suitor. Instead, you need to show that you really aren't interested in what he's trying to accomplish.

Your husband, though, plays a somewhat different role. Just as he might, with our pretended neighbour, after a while say something about it all and give a joking warning to stay off, he also may be called upon to say something direct to his son.

For the most part, though, father is simply alert and ready to guard his interests when they are being usurped. If he's always been the one who sits at the head of the table, for instance, he needs to turn down your child's demand to be allowed to do this, at the same time assuring him that he can do this when the two of you are alone.

Both roles, essentially, are reversed with a daughter.

Neither of you should make your child feel ridiculed or rejected flat out. But both of you have to get across to him or her notion that Mommy and Daddy are married and that the two of you are a pair.

The reason you mustn't make him feel ridiculous is because this is also his early training in courtliness and chivalry—you don't want him to start believing that these qualities are ones he can't eventually possess. You don't want him to hate himself for not being bigger and able to force you to notice him.

So you need to steer a course between the dangers of permitting him to get the idea that he's winning and the idea that he’s forever doomed to defeat. Either brings too much anxiety and guilt in its wake; only the middle path permits him to give up his longings for you without undue shame.

If constantly throughout this period you keep reminding your child that, while he may not do something now, he will be able to do it when he's grown up and married and has his own family, he is helped to emerge from these struggles with a new sense of his own unfolding future.

If you fail to give him this reassurance, he may instead get the idea that he's no good; he may hate himself, and develop many distorted notions about his own sexuality, trying to reject it.

D. Difficulties. A lot of disturbances that psychologists see in patients can be traced to this period of childhood. Some children are so severely rejected for these early attempts at forming a sense of sexual identification that they reject their own sexuality completely.

Others form too close an attachment to their parents, so that they are never free to love in later life. Frigidity, homosexuality, “incestuous” ties, excessive modesty, exhibitionism, promiscuity—these are just some of the difficulties that have their basis, in part, in a disturbed relationship between the child and his parents during this time.

The Oedipal conflict puts a strain upon you and your husband that probably isn't equalled at any other time in your child's development. It's an implicit challenge to you both to keep sorted out all your feelings about each other.

For example, if you get annoyed by some habit of your husband, and your son comments upon it, you need to distinguish his attempt to win you to his side from your own desire to express your annoyance.

You may never use your son as the medium of exchange of hostility or competition of your own with your husband. There is also a strong pull upon you as you defend yourself or as you permit your husband to defend himself.

All through the oedipal period, essentially your role toward your son is that of an innocent virtuous woman who doesn't feel any interest in what he's alluding to, while your husband's role is one of stoutly insisting that his rights not be infringed upon.

Conversely, with a daughter, you are the one to lay down the law, to insist that she cease her competitiveness, while your husband tries to sell her on the idea of being his little girl without encouraging her to think of herself as a big girl.

But if either you or your husband reverses these roles, you create problems. If your husband is accustomed to being the stern authority, he may very easily interfere and stop your daughter from trying to be like you or even from being competitive towards you.

The result is that she is confused and decides that she can't attract him. That much isn't too bad, but if this is repeated too often, or if he is too punitive, she may conclude that all men are mean and angry toward her.

Then the result is long-lasting damage to her sense of feminine identification and her trust in man. Or she may find that she can attract her father by being a tomboy or being ultra serious and intellectualized. In this way, too, she is kept from developing a natural sense of femininity.

The same is true in relation to your son. If you are the one who continues to control him, especially if this is done by anger, he concludes that women are even more dangerous than men—you might, in his eyes, be the one to castrate him, even as you are presently stripping him of all self-respect.

He may look at his father, sitting by passively as you rule the roost, and decide that men aren't supposed to be aggressive. And the result is long-lasting damage to him in his sense of masculine identification. Or he may find that you are attracted by his self-imposed passivity—again, this doesn't help his masculinity.

You can see that unless you and your husband are fairly mature people with a healthy and happy marriage, there is little likelihood that your child can pass through this period without extensive damage.

This is the time for solidification of sexual identifications. So if you want your son to be a man and your daughter to be a woman, with all the qualities of masculinity and femininity that are essential, you need to be sure that you are providing good and consistent examples. Your roles, as parents, thus consist of being happy and healthy adults.

Freud and Puritanism

Perhaps all these injunctions make you believe that Puritan-ism is not really put aside, but is still lingering here behind a lot of other ideas. In a sense, I think this objection is true.

Part of the Freudian belief is that the sexual tie between a child and his parents is extremely strong, even in the absence of overt stimulation. It is believed that the difficulties a child faces in trying to remove this tie from himself are very great and can lead to a great deal of anxiety and confusion.

So you need to avoid as much additional stimulation and provocation as possible. It's much easier for your child to free himself, eventually, from this con-fusing type of bond if you, yourself, have done nothing to stimulate him.

You can see that it's very difficult to keep sexuality a simple matter for discussion. Perhaps it will be easier to continue more about his sexual relatedness to you if we return to his sexual relatedness to his peers.

Sexuality and Playmates

Sharing play quite naturally leads to a desire to find out the ways in which he is like and the ways he is unlike his playmates. This is all part of the process of expression and communication.

And added to this very natural desire to talk about himself and show himself to the others in different facets is the stimulation that comes from chance occurrences like seeing other children using the toilet, etc.

The result is that your child begins to be curious about sexual differences, and, in his direct way, he tries to satisfy his curiosity by playing “doctor.” He becomes very manly in his pretending to be a doctor who's going to examine the sick little Suzy or Shirley.

And she, in turn, becomes very feminine in her coyness as she invites this examination and examines in turn. Most of the time, this kind of play loses its fascination shortly, no harm has come to either child, and curiosity about the opposite sex is fairly well satisfied.

You don't need to become frightened if you happen to find out that this kind of sexual exploration is going on. Nor do you need to become punitive or threatening.

All you need to do is to indicate that you suppose they were curious, now they know, and how about playing other games because men and women don't play with each other's genital organs until they're grown up and married.

DANGERS OF SEX PLAY.

The only likelihood of harm coming to a child from playing “doctor” is the possibility of infection from dirty sticks, etc., and the possibility that your child may be confused and thus unable to avoid sexual invitations from older, disturbed persons who seek sexual intercourse with children.

A. Hygiene. Because these two possibilities do exist, it's wise for you to inform your child that masturbation is a private thing and for you to call a gentle halt to sex games with peers when you become aware that they exist.

You may never find out. This entire episode may pass by without your child calling your attention to it or you’re noticing it. The level of excitation is almost too high for your child, so he quite naturally does not continue such exploration once his initial curiosity is satisfied.

If his relationships are healthy and happy, he won't become obsessed with sex play, so you need not fear that one episode of playing doctor will ultimately lead to promiscuity. 

We mention your calling a halt to it because I believe that if you do this without anger or condemnation, you are relieving your child of the necessity of feeling anxious or guilty. He isn't hiding knowledge from you. Instead, he knows that you have accepted his way of satisfying his curiosity and he can forget about it.

The danger of infection is slight—most of the time, the general routine of daily bathing prevents your child getting an infection. However, if his initial essays at sexual experimentation result in some infection (this is probably more likely to happen to a girl) remember that once again you don't want to add to his difficulties by blaming him.

Your doctor will help you talk matter-of-factly about general hygiene. You've already discussed a similar topic when you've instructed your child about using toilet paper. Particularly as you taught your daughter about wiping from front to back, you were indicating to her that she needs to be sure not to get germ-laden material near the vaginal opening.

Remember, though, in all such instruction—whether it be his learning to direct his stream of urine by holding his penis or her learning to wipe herself hygienically—that this is not done by you. Once your child is old enough to use the toilet he is old enough to follow your directions. Don't stir up possible later trouble by wiping or by holding.

B. Trusting Strangers. Probably another great concern of yours is the fear that your child may be tempted to accept an invitation from someone who will abuse him sexually. You have a difficult job here.

You don't want to warn your child about some danger in such a way as to make him afraid to be friendly with other adults. But you also don't want him to be so trusting that he might get himself into trouble.

When your child first is permitted to play outside by himself, you should already have made sure that along with under-standing that he may not play in the street, he may not go into a playmate's house without telling you first.

He also fully understands that he is not permitted to go anywhere with a stranger or take candy or money. When he questions you about this, you can simply inform him that you don't want him to get hurt, and you know that people both of you know won't hurt him, but you're not sure about strangers.

So you can reassure him that when some stranger comes by and starts to talk with him, he doesn't have to worry about it, but he is not to get too friendly with him unless you've met the stranger.

These are fairly straightforward precautions, they don't tend to alarm your child, but they do help him avoid some possible situations of danger. As he gets to school age, tell him, too, that he must not play with the genital organs of any one: friend, relative, or stranger.

A surprising number of attacks are made by people who were known well, in situations where the confused child didn't know enough to run away.

Actually, a warm, trusting, healthy relationship between your child and you is the biggest safeguard against such happenings. Many psychologists believe that there are usually elements of willingness and desire to be grown-up and some resentment about being a child in the child who becomes involved in a sexual attack.

A healthy and happy child is not eager to participate in such an adventure or be led into circumstances that permit an attack because he's quite content with his life as it is. So the best way in which you can prepare your child to avoid these unusual dangers is to help him be a healthy child.

The End of “Childhood”

Sooner or later, all this fuss and fury passes away. The end of this era marks the real passing of childhood. From now on your boy is a young gentleman; your girl is a young lady. You may not believe this when you see them behaving “like infants.” But most of their important character is formed.

The later years will change them, of course, but the changes will be more in the nature of modifications and additions to their character than in the nature of real changes. The basic human emotions and attitudes have developed during these first 6 or 7 years.

Trust, discrimination, self-confidence, respect, pride, deference, optimism, and a realistic sense of responsibility all develop if things have gone well. Fear, shame, hate, guilt, and a desire to escape into a dream world result if things have been too wrong.

In the following chapters, other points about child-rearing will be brought up. But, for the main part, these will be details that won't really matter too much. You’re most important job is helping your child live through the natural crises of his first six years.

Taking Stock During the Latency Period

ONCE your child has calmed down from the high tension of the oedipal period, he becomes very much the kind of person he's going to be, basically, after he has reached adulthood.

He still has the rigors of adolescence to pass through before we can say that his personality structure has stabilized, but his childhood has laid the foundations upon which the contemporaneous manners of his adolescent world will be placed.

As he develops through adolescence, he will take on the prevailing attitudes and goals, he will make his choice of a future occupation, and he will be experimenting and crystallizing socially and sexually. But these additions will be fitted into the kind of person he became when he settled his childhood problems by the close of the oedipal period.

Thus, if we look at a school child during the years between the oedipal period and the beginning of adolescence, we can gauge how well we have helped him mature. This is a quiet time when parents and children can get along easily because the intense needs that characterized early childhood are no longer so pressing.

It's a time for evaluation by parents, a time when they can relax and realize that they have almost completed the big job of being parents.

Because there is such a close similarity in the personalities of the school-age child and the adult, you can use this “latency period,” as it's called, as a time to judge what carry-overs from early childhood are causing difficulty for your child.

This is the time to inspect him for behaviour problems that signal something’s not having gone well in the years before. This, then, is the time to do something creative and therapeutic so that he won't have to grapple with these left-over’s throughout later life.

The period of adolescence is a very challenging one. And if your child is to pass through this period without lots of heartache, he must be clear of problems relating to more childish times.

Ideals

What can you expect of your child during the latency period? What are the personality characteristics that tell you that he's grown up through his childhood, instead of just getting older?

You undoubtedly know the ancient formula: A sane mind in a sound body. This is what you should find. The sound body is easily enough determined. Your doctor will tell you about the physical soundness of your child, and you can add to that your own knowledge that he sleeps soundly and adequately, enjoys play, is eating well, has no troubles with urination and defecation, doesn't pick up infections easily, and looks healthy and energetic.

You can add to that your knowledge of his school work and his friendships, so that if he is alert and productive in school and enjoys the company of others, shows curiosity and initiative and imagination, and is respectful and courteous and responsible, he is functioning well in these spheres. Often his teacher or the school psychologist can provide this information to you and can serve as a sounding board for your discussion of your child.

You can list for yourself the personality traits which all happy and healthy children should have developed and you can judge your child against these:

alertness

trustfulness

optimism

initiative

independence

honesty and truthfulness

endurance and patience

respect for lawful authority in people

or in rules

industry

pride and self confidence

modesty cooperativeness generosity realism

If your child has all these qualities, a psychologist can say of him that he has a strong ego, a well-structured super-ego, and that he has adequately integrated his libidinal impulses. In short, he is healthy.

These words in the list are big words; they cover a lot of territory. Perhaps they are best understood when you contrast them with their opposites:

withdrawal

fear and mistrust

pessimism

passivity

dependence

dishonesty

intolerance for delay

sassiness and disrespect

stagnation, boredom

shame or shyness or indecision

bragging

hatred and isolation

meanness and miserliness

fearfulness and wistfulness

But even those words don't explain too much. In reality, it's much easier to investigate and make sure that there are no gross behaviour problems and strong outer signs of neurotic conflict than it are to check on the character of your child.

In all probability, if he doesn't show any gross behaviour problems, his personality is sturdy and healthy and you can be sure that his character has the qualities we've listed as good.

Behaviour Problems

Let's make another list; this time of the most common child-hood behaviour problems, with the understanding that some of these occur occasionally in every child during the latency period—but they are always a sign that something's wrong.

If they only happen infrequently, something is wrong only every so often. If they are chronic, then you need to realize that they are a sign of some enduring, pervasive difficulty.

The problems which occur most often are:

thumb sucking

having unusual food idiosyncrasies

like being unwilling to eat a major food: milk products, vegetables, meats, sweets over-eating, especially having a strong need for sweets clinging

and being unwilling to play alone

or away from parents or certain people day dreaming

and spending much time “in a daze” doing nothing

being over-active and unable to “sit still a minute”

and to stop fiddling and fussing unproductively

whining and demanding too much

and becoming tearful easily when things aren't exactly as they ought to be 

nail biting

bedwetting or losing bowel

and bladder control when excited having nightmares

and sleeping restlessly and without refreshmen from sleep

being belligerent and bullying

being provocative and teasing and hateful

having temper tantrums

being destructive and hostile

being intolerant of members of other religions or races

stealing

lying

cheating

being reckless and a daredevil

being exceedingly afraid of such things as the dark, cripples, animals, dirt, etc.

being fearful and timid and suspicious

being inflexible and ritualistic about such things

as washing, sleeping, eating, or dressing

being excessively proud

and unable to accept correction or criticism

lacking in personal modesty, making a spectacle of himself,

being a show-off

being excessively intrusive into privacy of others

being seductive and sexually provocative

even promiscuous being extremely shy

and unable to express himself publicly

demonstrating homosexual

needs by such things as refusing to dress appropriately

or play usual games, etc.

HOW TO SOLVE BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS.

For all of these behaviour problems and any others which have not been included in this list because they are not so common, there is a three-part general rule for altering behaviour and solving the problems:

(1) You need to figure out the pressures which are causing these difficulties and change matters so that these pressures are removed;

(2) you need to indicate to your child what you have concluded has been causing difficulty, point out to him how you have changed the situation so that these pressures are removed, and show him and tell him you are sorry he was made unhappy; and

{3) You need to help him learn to control the problem behaviour and eliminate it as the need for it is reduced.

This admittedly glib formula involves a lot of thought and effort on your part, but it is the only way truly to change your child's behaviour. I'm not denying that you can stop the problem behaviour by punishment or bribes—you can.

If your child is severely reprimanded or punished each and every time he does something you don't like, let's say, sucking his thumb or wetting his bed, he will learn to be afraid to show his inner tensions and unhappiness in this way.

But, so long as his internal problems aren't solved, but are only changed or possibly increased by your punitive attitude, he will need to express this unhappiness in some way or other. Maybe it will only be by being quieter, day-dreaming more.

Maybe you don't feel so unhappy, yourself, about having a passive, withdrawn child as you do about having a child who sucks his thumb publicly or who runs up your laundry bills. But you need to admit to yourself that even more socially acceptable unhealthy behaviour really still isn't health or happiness.

You may need professional guidance in your efforts to undo the wrongs which have created your child's behaviour problem. Certainly you should not feel any foolish hesitations about consulting someone for help in regard to a problem of mental ill-health.

If your prime concern is for the over-all well-being of your child, you need to put aside all the unrealistic feelings about how awful it is to admit that you don't know how to raise your own child, you don't want a stranger to know about your private concerns, etc. 

We grant that it seems much harder to seek psychotherapeutic help than it is to seek medical help; but it is possible to regard this in the same sane way you regard consulting your physician for physical aches and pains.

If there's an illness which doesn't clear up easily within a few days or which presents alarming symptoms, whether the illness is physical or psychological, you need professional help in making a diagnosis, instituting therapeutic measures, and gauging the response to these measures.

So I hope that if you find yourself unable to cope with your child's problem behaviour and unable after a reasonable attempt and time to effect changes, you will seek professional help.

CLUES TO WHAT IS CAUSING TROUBLE.

However, many parents by their own introspection do gain sufficient insight into what has been happening to be able to make a pretty accurate diagnosis of the trouble, make changes in the daily routines which prevent further trouble, and support and en-courage the developing healthy responses of their children as life becomes less dissatisfying.

There are some generalities which make such insights easier for you. Most of the time—not always—there's a fairly close relationship between the development of certain types of problem behaviour and certain types of underlying causes. We want to stress the fact that this isn't always true.

You cannot always assume that if a child is a thumb sucker, for example, it is because he has unrequited oral dependency drives about which he feels conflict. Some thumb suckers have different motivations, just as, to leave childhood temporarily and go off into adult psychopathology, all alcoholics are not motivated by oral dependent drives—some people drink because it gives them an excuse to become belligerent, some because it's a way of showing how “grown up” they are, etc.

You need a lot of evidence before you can conclude that a given set of motivations is operating in your child and causing his particular behaviour.

But, while the relationship isn't always exact and direct, most of the time certain behaviour rests on certain motives. Thus, if you can define the behaviour for yourself, you can get a clue to what sort of an inner conflict is causing your child's behaviour.

And you can set about making it easier for your child to express his needs in a more satisfying fashion; you can remove the pressures which are causing him to feel he may not express his needs directly with any assurance of satisfaction and absence of punishment.

A. Dependency Problems. Have you gotten too rigid about eating, have you failed to encourage your child in trying new foods, have you stopped being demonstrative and affectionate, have you given your child the impression that he's all on his own and you can't or won't support him emotionally?

These are the sorts of things which generally lie behind thumb sucking, peculiar food likes and dislikes, and clinging. Your child is almost saying to you in his symbolic way: “The only good and safe oral dependency pleasures are the ones I can make for Myself; the things that Mommy wants to give to me aren't safe; but I'd better not go away from her completely because then I won't have anything.”

Whining and some clinging or being over-active or day-dreaming and being almost stupor us often come from another type of thing—from you’re trying to make your child dependent when he's equipped to be more independent and active.

Are you a perfectionist who never lets anything go; are you constantly exhorting your child to be more than he is; do you insist that he like or dislike something because you think that's how he should be, without giving him an opportunity to experience and evaluate for himself; do you harp on things like sinfulness?

If you set up impossibly rigid standards, oftentimes standards that are unrealistic, many different problems can result. Your child may decide that he can't do anything right—and he stops being active.

Maybe he thinks that if he just does enough, some of it is bound to be right—so he starts rushing around. He may take over your attitude with a vengeance and become even more over-critical—whining and tearfulness are generally a part of this.

Or maybe he turns his anger and frustration on himself and ends up by trying to punish himself for not being perfect—nail biting, recklessness and accident-proneness, and depression are the results.

B. Activity and Control Problems. Have you made such a point about toilet functions and orderliness that your child believes he has no real control over himself, but needs you to help him by giving him cathartics and enemas or remind him when to use the toilet?

Have you so impressed him with your superior strength that he feels totally weak in comparison? That type of situation often lies behind bedwetting or nightmares and also behind the anti-social kind of behaviour like bullying, destructiveness, and intolerance.

Partly he's expressing to you his inability to fight you back directly. He can lose control when he can't be blamed for it, as when he's asleep, but even then he's frightened.

Partly he tries to pretend that he's not the one who's angry; it's the others, and he's got to fight them before they fight him. Criminal acts of all sorts often stem from hating the law and authority because parents have been hostile and too punishing.

Have you made him keep such a tight control over his aggression that he feels tempted to burst?

Have you made him feel that the very worst thing he could do is to feel any animosity toward anyone?

Then he must become afraid to trust himself in situations where he might give way to temptation and he may develop fears and rituals like the phobias and compulsions and obsessions that convince him that he hasn't hurt anyone, even unwittingly. He may try to cover this timidity by taking foolish dares and courting danger.

C. Sexual Problems. Have you made him feel ashamed of his sexuality, have you ridiculed him and made him feel he will never be the equal of his parents?

Conflicts about sex most often lie behind things like boastfulness or promiscuity and behind excessive shyness and feelings of shame. The extremes of homosexuality and exhibitionism often are rooted in this kind of conflict.

CAUTIONS ABOUT LEAPING TO CONCLUSIONS.

Because none of us is strictly compartmentalized into an “oral-de-pendent self,” an “oral-aggressive self,” etc., there's a lot of overlap. So even though the biggest problem might lie in one area, the chances are that this problem-relationship will also have affected other areas.

Most mothers who are cold to a child when he's an infant also fail to respond to him healthily when he gets older. Similarly, a child, if he's suffered greatly early in life, is not able to present later demands directly and without distortion because part of him is still struggling with the old wounds, so there is a carry-over of old problems.

The tendency to continue specific behaviour habits is another reason why you can't always be sure that a given symptom is a sign of a specific inner trouble.

For example, your child may have started out to suck his thumb because he was lonely and distressed, then might have developed it into a way of tormenting you and fighting you back as he grew older and recognized that you disliked him for doing this. He's still thumb sucking, but for reasons that are different from the original ones.

Despite these complications, if you search honestly, without trying to blind yourself to your failings, you should be able to realize where some of the trouble lies and takes steps to alter the situation.

Often, a child will recognize that you are making sincere efforts to change things for the better, and will forego some of his behaviour simply out of gratitude. This won't last long unless you continue and manage to clear most things up, but it is an encouragement to both of you.

It's necessary for you to put two and two together for your child, helping him recognize what you've discovered and how things are changed now. This doesn't mean delivering emotion-laden lectures.

But you do need to announce to him how things will go, on your part, in the future, and carry through with some statement about what you hope for from him and how sorry you are he's been unhappy.

EXAMPLE OF PROBLEM SOLVING.

Let's take an example: A 6 year old girl developed a kidney-bladder complication after a long bout of tonsillitis. (There were lots of emotional difficulties for her at that time which probably lessened her resistance and led to the original illness. These weren't altered by her illness, but her illness kept her from needing to cope with them.)

As a result of her illness, she lost a good amount of weight and it was recommended that during her convalescence she be encouraged to eat so that she might regain her weight and vigour quickly. Her mother's anxiety over seeing how thin she was led the mother to be doubly insistent on her eating lots of food, drinking half-and-half instead of milk, etc.

Since she wasn't exercising much, her appetite wasn't up to these demands on her, so she naturally protested. Her mother countered with stronger statements to her about how she had to eat and ruled out all snacks between meals, including candy. Her appetite continued to diminish and soon every mealtime became a noisy struggle between parents and child.

Despite all this, she finally did begin to regain her strength sufficiently to start playing outside and begin making friends in her new neighbourhood (moving might have been part of the difficulty which contributed to her getting ill.)

But, while her appetite reached normal proportions, she was now taking twice as long to eat as she had previously, and mealtimes were still no more peaceful.

After quite some time, it dawned on her parents that they were still being as anxious about the amount of food which she was eating as they had been when she was ill and that she probably was very resentful about everything: being ill, being coerced into eating, no candy, etc.

They decided to go back to the good old ways of letting her eat as much as she wanted to, between meals, too, but expecting her to keep up to them in speed if she wanted to eat with them.

The table was cleared when most of the family had finished. If she wanted extra time to eat, she could eat before the rest of the family. The parents explained to her what they had decided.

They said, “Well, we've gotten all mixed up about how much you're eating and how long you're taking to eat, so from now on, things will be like they used to be—you eat as much as you like and have some candy when you want it, but if you think you need extra time to eat, you'll probably be more comfortable eating by yourself, so we all don't get angry about waiting for you to finish, because we're all sorry about how much fuss there's been over your eating lately.”

After a few more trials of their patience, including devouring a 5-pound box of chocolates in 7 days, she returned to normal in her eating habits.

This sort of talk lets a child know that you have thought through the cause of his problems and you are stopping some of the pressures. You are also making an apology, pointing out how you won't become emotionally reactive to the behaviour any longer, and indicating in a happier way what you want your child to do.

MAKING UP―“CQNVALESCING” FROM EMOTIONAL DIFFICULTIES.

An extra measure of cuddling and some especially good times help, too. For example, the parents in the above example provided the 5-pound box of chocolates to their daughter as a present “all her own.”

But you should never try to accommodate yourself to problem behaviour, thereby increasing the confusion your child feels. Some parents mistakenly think that if they don't react to a child's behaviour at all, sooner or later he will give it up.

Since his problem behaviour is a means of calling attention—unconsciously—to his legitimate needs which aren't being satisfied, all that this indifference or tolerance does is to increase his efforts to find a means of evoking a reaction in you. So things generally get worse, through neglect, than they have been.

Once some things are done, they're done, of course. So it's impossible, if you toilet trained your child too early, weaned him too abruptly, etc., to go back to his infancy days.

But the psychological attitudes can be revoked and you can start to give him the things which he needed then by way of emotional comforts, even if for a time he resists you. You can cuddle him and make special times to be with him quietly.

You can, for once and for all, permit him bodily privacy, refraining from all interference with his eating, toileting, and sexual exploration. This, particularly, you need to announce and to apologize for having failed to do previously.

*Substitutes. Until things have gotten re-arranged within him, your child will probably find it helpful to engage in socially-acceptable substitute activities which permit him to live out the same drives he had been expressing only through unacceptable problem behaviour.

Thus, for example, he may enjoy boxing or some similar highly strenuous activity if he's been a generally aggressive child. He may find caring for a pet of his own a way of living out the drives that made him feel additionally tender toward himself.

He may enjoy dramatics or dancing lessons if he's been a show-off. This isn't going to work very well unless it is accompanied and preceded by some concrete changes in his emotional relationships, but it will help him while he's struggling to control himself better.

The satisfactions which we've discussed in all the previous chapters are all satisfactions which every healthy individual needs. So, if your child is showing by his problem behaviour that something is wrong, you can guide yourself by making sure that you are giving him all the satisfactions which have been talked about up to now.

Don't, because of your guilt over having made some errors, start to make opposite errors. A special celebration once he's stopped sucking his thumb is in order, but treats every day afterward will cause trouble and confusion.

Also, don't become impatient. The process of therapy is a lengthy one, whether this is accomplished in a home entirely or with the help of professional consultations. If you believe you're making a little progress over the course of several months, you should not become unhappy because everything isn't fine.

Nor should you be discouraged if nothing seems to happen at all for several months. It takes a long time for anxiety-ridden needs to come forth directly again and a long time to eliminate the anxiety.

Often there's a tendency to swing far in the other direction, so that, for example, a timid child may become an over-riding bully for a while. Whatever the acting-out behaviour may be, your job calls for you to keep from reacting to it with lots of emotion at the same time that you are calling attention to the difference between feeling and acting.

You can remind a child that it's all right to say he's angry, but he still may not try to hurt someone, etc. You will probably feel better yourself and be more efficient in changing your life with your child if you seek psychotherapeutic counsel.

If your child has a severe personality disturbance, it probably will not be sufficient for you merely to consult professional help; it may also be necessary for him to be seen, too.

In some very extreme cases, the wisest method of helping the child is to separate him completely from his parents until he has regained emotional health, while his parents are meanwhile seeking help for their own personality problems.

Whatever the course of action may be that you take—your own efforts alone, your consulting help for your own problems so that you may be able to help your child best, your child's receiving therapy, or your child's being separated from you while he's in therapy—ultimately, these personality disturbances can be remedied.

There are still many members of the medical profession who insist that personality disturbances are inherited and the most that can be hoped for is that the person learns to express his troubles in socially acceptable ways—but this is not a judgment which people who have extensive training and experience in the field of mental health believe.

Rather, it seems probable that the pressures which cause personality disturbances come from the way a child is treated once he's born; and we are further convinced that it's possible to change his personality structure by understanding the pressures that have caused a disturbance, removing them, and encouraging healthier modes of behaviour which ensure adequate satisfactions.

So don't give way to the pessimistic thought that if your child is doing something unhealthy, he must forever remain like this. If you don't want to admit your errors, if you don't want to try to alter your errors, if you get neurotic joy out of suffering and having your child suffer, you had better realize these motives; but don't seek to rationalize by pretending that nothing can be done.

This is your margin-for-error time, this latency period. You have several years in which to measure your success as a parent. In the final stage of childhood, adolescence, the world will be able to measure your success, for adolescence is the time when your child finally separates himself from his family and becomes a social individual separate from you.

Other Common Concerns

FREUDIAN PSYCHOLOGISTS

Believe that the most important interactions which determine your child's character are the ones involved with eating, mobility, toileting, authority relationships, play, and sex. But everything you do affects your child in some way.

There is no way of avoiding the responsibility of being a parent—the responsibility of knowing that, in the greatest sense, your child's personality is something you have created and trained.

There are a whole host of inter-actions which may not be as important as those connected directly with biological needs but which still can play a part in helping or hindering your child's appreciation of his world.

But, before we start discussing some of these things like allowances, TV time, dancing lessons, music lessons, Scout meetings, homework, books, illnesses, etc. which psychologists call “desexualized” because they aren't too directly connected with body pleasures, I want to state my own views about these things:

We think that a child who is happy wants to participate in as many activities as he can without unbalancing his other pleasures. In other words, happiness tends to breed moderation.

There may be brief times when he tries to do too much or other times when he wants to limit him to just one thing. But over the course of time, he evens things out for himself, stopping the things he's not particularly good at, becoming less intense about something once the novelty has worn off.

I also believe that you need not fear the “evil influences” of TV, movies, comics, books, etc., if your child is happy and healthy. He uses these avenues of escape for vicarious outlets, but he doesn't need to overindulge because he doesn't have that much need for escape—his real life provides sufficient direct outlet and opportunity for sublimation.

Finally, I believe that a healthy and happy child meets his legitimate responsibilities fairly well on his own. He doesn't need a lot of supervision and direction. Only if he's pushed to continue something he feels he's no good at or which he feels is not necessary does he try to wangle out of a responsibility.

Perhaps this declaration of faith and belief makes it seem as though there shouldn't be any problem involving the desexualized areas of living. However, of course, there may be, so let's take a look at some of these things.

Money

The problem of allowances and of the spending of money crops up in many homes. You are probably concerned about teaching your child the value of money, you want your child to learn to spend money wisely, and you also want your child to learn how to save.

How can these eminently good goals be gained?

HOW BIG AN ALLOWANCE?

The first thing you need to do is to decide upon an amount of money which you can afford comfortably and which the amount that other children are getting is roughly. Here the only real problem is going to be having enough to meet neighbourhood standards; there isn't any problem if you can afford more.

You simply remember that you have no right to burden your child with the difficulty of being too “wealthy” and you keep his allowance down to what the other kids tend to have.

If you think the neighbourhood rate is too high, tells your child so, honestly, if you simply don't have enough money, again, tell him so. This is pretty much the same sort of situation as the one that was discussed in regard to buying toys.

There's no need for any feelings of guilt or resentment and there's no need for any deception with your child. Don't try to “avoid” the problem by saying, “You really don't need any money.” Just be forthright and sympathetic.

FREEDOM WITH HIS ALLOWANCE.

Once you've decided on an allowance, inform your child that this is his money and that he can do anything with it he wants to do. You can give him a jar or a real Piggybank to put his money in and you can explain about saving. But you should put no restrictions on the way he spends his money.

If he spends it all in one splurge, let him. If he seems indifferent to it, leaving it all over the house, deal with this as you would deal with his leaving toys around: tell him that this is his money and he's supposed to leave it with his own things. If he seems to want to save it, never spending a bit of it, permits this, too. If he wants to bury it, let him.

The big thing to keep in mind is that this is his money. If you are sincere in your desire to have him learn the value of money, then you have to let him learn on his own.

If you really want him to learn your values, of course, rather than finding out for himself, there's no point in trying to kid yourself or him; in that case, you'll be wiser just to go ahead and teach him your values directly.

He may, when he first receives an allowance, buy something which he steadfastly refuses to use. He may purchase a candy bar, only to keep it in his drawer for week after week.

This is his way of expressing the same feeling that you might have about buying something which you don't want to use up. So long as the candy bar is there, it's a tangible symbol of his power with money. So don't ridicule him, just let him use his purchases as he may want it to be.

You may be dismayed over his buying something he already has or buying something which isn't really a good bargain. Again, let him find out for himself. In his eyes, these are surrounded with all sorts of meanings that are valuable for him.

If he expresses dismay because something breaks too easily, you can help him decide what qualities he should look for next time he buys a similar article—but be sure not to sound superior.

Children often buy something which you suspect they really don't care for or need; you may think the major reason they are buying it is that other children seem to value it.

Since this isn't too different from the grown-up game of keeping up with the Joneses, you shouldn't try to dampen his assumed enthusiasm. Nothing can so easily help a child develop a sound sense of values as this sort of event.

He soon enough recognizes that it just isn't worth spending his money this way. The long and short of all this is to give him his allowance regularly and then keep hands off.

PAYMENT FOR CHORES.

An allowance should not be payment for chores. His ordinary responsibilities for himself he should fulfil without expecting payment. Additional chores for you which he volunteers for, again, should be acts of love and devotion—they should not be purchased by you.

His allowance should be considered an amount of money which is all his, just because he's part of the family and needs to learn about money so he can grow up to handle it wisely.

BUYING PRESENTS FOR OTHERS.

Also, you should not encourage him to think about saving his allowance so he can buy anniversary presents, birthday presents, etc. If he cares enough about special occasions, he’ll probably make something for them.

When he's much older and has really begun to appreciate the power which money can represent, he'll want to use it to buy things for other people. But he shouldn't be pushed into thinking about purchasing gratitude.

PLANNING AND EMERGENCIES.

As a just parent, you need to give him his allowance at regular intervals; and it's probably wise to remind him that this is his allowance until so-and-such time when another payment will be made.

When he does begin to realize that he can buy beautiful presents with his money, there often is a conflict. He remembers about your birthday a few days ahead, only to find that he hasn't the amount of money he needs to buy the present he has his heart set on.

This is the time to forget about being just and stern, and instead become a tactfully merciful parent. Find some “extraordinary” chore and pay him for it because it's so “unusual,” without mentioning that you know he needs the money.

This creates a happier feeling about earning power and saving than if you righteously remind him that it's his own fault if he has no money. His own developing sense of independence and self-responsibility keeps him from becoming a “panhandler” as soon as he can think far enough in advance.

By the way, if he does buy you a present, accept it and use it with joyful good grace. Don't ever hurt his feelings by criticizing. Be as tactful as if it were a present you've always dreamed of owning.

WHEN TO BEGIN GIVING AN ALLOWANCE.

One problem may be your indecision about when to begin an allowance. Probably one isn't necessary until he's in regular school and has learned about how to count money. From then on, he is able to count his change.

Before then, there probably is no real motivation on his part to have a regular allowance. His wants are being considered by you as you do your regular shopping. If he asks for money to buy something on his own, you’ll probably give it to him, without trying to put it on a formal basis.

Possessions—Lost or Broken

Somewhat allied to the question of allowances is the question of what you should do if he breaks something or loses something, his own or anybody else's. We think the important thing here is not to let the punishment fit the crime, but rather to let the punishment fit the criminal.

WHEN HE'S VERY YOUNG.

While he's very young, a pre-kindergarten age, there should be no thought whatsoever about letting him suffer the consequences of a loss of his own things. You scold him, remind him about putting his sweater on next time, bringing in his toy car, etc., and then you replace the needed articles when you can afford to.

If he breaks or loses something belonging to another you apologizes for him and replaces it as best you can. You shouldn't try to make him feel inordinately guilty. It's an unfortunate occurrence—that's that.

SCHOOL AGE.

As he enters the primary grades and begins to have a sounder appreciation of the value of money, you can start pointing out to him that you don't like having to spend money unnecessarily and that you expect him to be more careful.

You might as well try to be both crafty and philosophic about such things as mittens and pencils. They can be very ingeniously attached to him securely and somehow still, mysteriously, disappear. But you probably feel better if you scold him about them, mildly.

At about the age of 10, it's legitimate to start expecting him to contribute to the cost of items that he neglects to take care of. A token amount can be withdrawn from his allowance after you've explained to him that you think it's high time he starts to realize that your family money is partly his, too. 

We don't think it's ever wise or kind to keep a child without an allowance for an extended period of time. After all, if he really were fully conscious of the results of his folly, he'd be a much more adult individual than most grown-ups.

Nor is it a good idea to make him pay the total amount, even over a long period of time. As his parents, you still need to bear part of the responsibility. So make only token deductions from his allowance, and only over a month's period or so.

While we're talking about allowances and discipline, it might be a good idea to discuss the question of withholding allowances as a punishment for some bit of naughtiness that isn't really related to money and goods. This is very unwise.

It leads to a kind of confusion within your child's mind—he gets the idea that it's all right to be rude or disorderly or inconsiderate so long as he can hand over some money.

The only proper way to deal with such “crimes” is to tell him how angry you are about them and make quite certain that he doesn't repeat them. You may not think that it's effective to tell your child* “Now look here, I don't like your way of talking to me like that, so just stop it, you understand.”

However, there are good results following upon such talk—but only if, at the same time, you remember that the rudeness or other misbehaviour has some cause, too. So the other part of what you must do is to clear up the source of his discomfort that's being expressed through his misbehaviour—too much pressure, not enough satisfactions, or whatever the source may be.

You can see that taking away your pre-teen youngster's allowance is regarded as just as poor a method of discipline as sending him to bed without dinner, spanking him, making him stand in a corner, etc. His allowance is a necessary tool which you give him so that he may learn how to handle it.

As a social being, he needs it as much as he needs his regular meals for his biological being. Also, if you regard his allowance as a symbol of your displeasure or pleasure in him, you are further supporting his incorrect notion that money somehow is equivalent to love or to courtesy and respect.

HEALTHY OUTLETS

Perhaps the biggest difficulty about how he spends his allowance comes up when he's a school-child and wants to spend it on comic books or movies. You may feel that these aren't suitable sources of stimulation or healthy outlets for him.

Your objection probably isn't so much concerned with how he spends his money as with the kind of pleasure he seems to want to buy.

You can have less difficulty about this if you examine the factors that are involved in these things. Let's include TV programs in this discussion, too, since many of the same sorts of concerns apply to them, too.

We all have a need for some vehicles by which we can vicariously live out some of the tensions which accumulate within us. The most satisfying life generally does not so deplete our energies that we are left with no wants to day-dream satisfactions for, no tensions to fantasy away.

A healthy and happy person generally has relatively little need for vicarious outlets—but he still has some. And he appreciates the opportunity to have a vehicle for dreaming presented to him, without his needing to dream up his own drama.

That's why we all, child and adult, like to watch passively while some drama unfolds before us on the TV, stage, movie screen, or in books. The complexity of our real-life satisfactions and their intensity plays a part in determining what sorts of vicarious pleasures we search out and enjoy.

Your child, when his everyday life is fairly filled with healthy satisfactions, probably wants to be more active and creative about playing out his left-over wants and tensions than he would if his life convinces him that there's not much joy in real life, but only in passive fantasy.

So one of the major forces that act to make him want to escape into fantasy is the quality of his real satisfactions. If they are genuine and sufficient, he may still enjoy a good book or a good TV program or movie.

But he doesn't need to immerse himself in dreams concerned with naked displays of sadism or with sexual aggressions. He selects the ready-made fantasies which talk about the world he knows and enjoys, a world where the law-abider wins, even sometimes the little law-abider.

You don't need to be worried about his being seduced into “evil” ways or thoughts by the media of TV, the movies, or written material. If he has no need to live out vicious dreams, he doesn't care too much for the things he watches or reads experimentally which cater to viciousness—he soon decides he likes something else more.

TASTE OR TROUBLE?

If he does seem to show an inordinate interest in these outlets, the problem is not how to keep him from using them, but rather to help him get to where he doesn't need to or want to.

While you're working on trying to make his life more satisfying, you may want to try weaning him away from these things a bit, but you shouldn't get too involved in that part of it—your major care should be given to getting rid of the pressures. In any case, you should not prohibit his spending his allowance on comic books and movies.

If you're upset about the quality of the movies and TV pro-grams he selects, put this in the back of your mind and concentrate instead on examining his everyday life.

You can use the way he plays and the vicarious outlets he selects as guides to judging how happy he is about life. But this is information for your own use—it's not something to confront him with.

If his tastes don't develop as you concentrate on making sure that his every-day life is genuinely gratifying, perhaps he needs some help from you in discerning the goodness of other outlets. Maybe he's reading comic books because he doesn't read plain words too well, and he uses the pictures to give him an idea of what the story's about.

You can help him to learn to read more easily, you can discuss this with his teacher who wants to help him too. Maybe he can't hear the melody or feel the rhythm in music. Helping him learn to polka and waltz helps him “see” and enjoy music more.

Maybe he doesn't understand the big words or the humour in some children’s TV programs, and instead only can follow the galloping on the cowboy films.

You can help him by sitting with him and explaining the point of some of what Kukla and Ollie are saying, or by bringing in home incidents as examples of what Jiminy Cricket is talking about.

But remember that a child simply doesn't have the same tastes that an adult has. You remember how entranced he was when you first read Little Red-Riding-Hood to him. The plot was enthralling.

As an adult, you like your tales of mankind's folly a little more complicated and subtle. But don't expect him to share your tastes. It's as dangerous to expect a child to appreciate adult tastes in literature and music and drama as it is to expect him to have an adult's understanding and wisdom.

If you pressure him this way, the confusion in his mind be-comes great, and lots of resentments are bred. If you continually surround him with good adult influences while permitting him to exercise his child’s taste, eventually he'll follow your standards of taste if they fit in with the times he grows up in, have lasting value, and coincide with his natural talents.

That point about natural talents is necessary to keep in mind particularly if you are concerned about him because he's tone-deaf or more interested in action than in reflection or awkward and inartistic with his hands.

You have to remember that musicality and an artistic bent and a tendency to reflection or action seem to be inherited characteristics. But this doesn't mean your child automatically comes equipped with the same genetic structure that you have.

A grandfather or great-grandmother may crop up too. Your child may not have the sam predominant genetic structure that you have at all. So don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Give him reasonable freedom to develop his own tastes and tendencies.

You may have to learn something about baseball and hunting although you may yearn to have a child to take to afternoon concerts—but such contrast is part of the spice and surprise of living.

Energy level, intelligence level, musicality, skill with symbols—these are the sorts of things that seem to be built into us. We can alter their manifestations somewhat, but we can't develop them if they aren't there.

These are what are called “constitutional factors.” Keeping them separated from personality factors helps you avoid some frustration and difficulty. “Personality” factors are the things like respect, trust, responsibility, etc.

These are the things that your child and all children can develop—but only with the help of parents. So don't try to blame a hostile attitude toward life on your grandfather's genes. You're the one who's created this sort of thing.

OUTSIDE INFLUENCES AND MANNERISMS

Another reason that you may have for objecting to certain kinds of entertainment is that you fear your child may pick up small mannerisms. Perhaps you think your child may start swearing or spitting or wearing his pants slung low on his hips.

Some of these mannerisms he probably does pick up because they have the allure of the stage for him. You choose your hairstyle this way, too, sometimes, don't you? But if he understands the reasonable basis behind your objections, he isn't so likely to copy.

SWEARING.

Don't let your home become upset because you fear that if your husband swears, your child will swear, too. Your child doesn't drive a car because you do, doesn't turn on the stove because you do, and doesn’t wear make-up because you do.

So there's really no reason why he needs to start swearing if he hears his father do it occasionally or even habitually.

Your main objection to swearing should be on the realistic grounds that we need to learn how to express ourselves fully before we start taking short-cuts. You can explain this objection to your child and tell him that that's why first we need to learn how to say, fully, how unhappy we are when something wrong happens or how joyous we are when something wonderful happens.

Later on, when we're grown-up, we can use short cuts and say, “Damn!” when we lose an earring or say, “Wow!” when we see something beautiful. Also, another realistic objection to swearing is that it requires a fully developed social sensitivity.

As adults, ordinarily we don't curse when we want to make a good impression. But your child doesn't know enough to recognize that some people feel mortally offended when they hear, “Darn,” while other people just grin and take no particular note of it.

Until he's old enough and wise enough to gauge his social impression to the people he's with, he shouldn't swear—and that fairly generally means that he shouldn't swear until he's off on his own life, no longer intimately representing you and your home, too, whenever he goes anywhere. Indicate these limits to him; he can understand and respect them.

GRAMMAR.

Other mannerisms probably don't mean too much. Most people smile when they hear a child say, copying his favourite cowboy, “Ah isn’t a-gonna take no more nonsense like that.” They realize that children need to practice different roles. You don't need to blush and become furious over such slips in manners and grammar.

Talking about grammar—should you or shouldn't you correct your child's? I think you should, gently and consistently. You should never force him to re-say something. You should never punish him for a lapse. Just keep on at quiet reminders until he copies your example and requests sooner or later. The same applies to table manners.

MANNERISMS OR SIGNS OF UNHAPPINESS?

The only time you need to worry about these things is when you think your child is deliberately doing the unpreserved or “wrong” thing in order to get your goat, show his disdain for you, rebel, or compete.

When you think that's the case, handle it like a breach in courtesy and consideration. Tell him you know he'd like to show you he's bigger than you are, but remind him that he isn't, he doesn't need to be, and you want him to stop trying to do something that's impossible and unnecessary.

You can say to him that if he's angry over something, he can tell you so, he doesn't need to start chewing with his mouth open in order to show you he's angry.

Talk like this gets differences out into the open where they can be discussed and reconciled. The round-about ways, the hidden displays of defiance and resentment don't help any-thing at all and you need to point this out to him.

For a similar reason, it isn't wise simply to notice what your child is doing and yet not speak about it with him. This has the same maddening effect that your husband's refusal to talk about something has on you when you're angry.

It drives everyone to fury to be ignored; and the only result is that we behave more and more horribly in order to get some attention.

If you suspect that your child is saying something or doing something man eristic just to get you annoyed, mention to him that you think that's what he's doing and tell him you're sorry he's so annoyed, but that you want him to stop.

You don't need to get angry, nor do you need to make fun of him or to get into a wrangle about whether or not what you suspect is really true. It's enough just to say what you think and what you feel about it.

Self Discipline and Scheduling

If he's to have a chance to watch his favourite TV programs, do any homework he might have from school, and also have an opportunity to play outside, read, work on hobbies, etc., he's going to have to schedule himself. You need to talk this over with him. But this does not mean that you should be the one who sets a limit.

Once you have all decided upon a reasonable amount of time for TV and movies, he probably needs a watch so he can tell when it's time to come in from playing. We don't think you should be the one to call him from his play. These are his satisfactions and he has to learn to take the responsibility for seizing them.

But, the matter of discipline really is crucial to the situation of extracurricular studies like music and dancing lessons. By discipline, now, we mean the plain hard chore of regularly practicing something even though it might not be particularly re-warding immediately.

This is the kind of inner discipline that your child needs to develop in order for him to truly profit from his lessons. A lot of anguish can be spared if you are careful to distinguish between helping your child develop this kind of discipline and punishing him for not having this discipline.

PURPOSE OF OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES.

Let's approach this whole matter by asking: what is the purpose of taking music or dancing lessons? Perhaps you look upon these lessons as ways in which your child may learn to “appreciate” music and dance. Or you hope that lessons will teach your child stick-to-it'iveness or grace or poise. You might regard lessons as socially necessary, like an entrance badge.

Actually, most of these goals can be more easily pursued through some other means. Your child doesn't need to struggle through a few years of piano lessons in order to learn to listen to music.

His time is just as well spent, perhaps better spent, in listening to music with an intelligent guide to his listening. Then his feelings about music aren't corrupted by his feelings about needing to practice.

So far as persistence goes—he needs this before he can take lessons. Things can get awfully complicated if you hope that driving him to practice is going to teach him anything about feeling the inner motivation to practice. Instead, more probably, he only becomes impatient with you, himself, and his instrument.

There really isn't any argument about using these kinds of lessons to prove that you know how to keep up cultural standards. But remember, before pushing your child into classes for this reason that you need to consider his tastes and aptitudes.

If you choose to disregard a “tin-ear” or a lumbering body, keep in mind how much your child and you must pay for this in embarrassment and resentment.

The same thing is true when hoping lessons will teach poise. If he's too tall or too heavy for his age, he undoubtedly feels additionally clumsy decked out in a leotard.

A girl who thinks she isn't pretty feels additionally ugly sitting before a piano with everyone watching her. You are better off waiting until such self-consciousness disappears before putting your child in the limelight—waiting until body grace develops through natural growth and exercise.

These same objections apply to his joining groups—his or your major reason should not be “to get in with the crowd,” etc.

We're left with the conclusion that the major reason for taking lessons on an instrument or in dancing, skating, fencing, etc., is to learn the skill which is developed through these means.

To obtain a modicum of delight and success, your child needs to have an active desire to take such lessons as well as moderate drive in the face of obstacles. He succeeds more quickly if he has some talent, as well; but many teachers tell me that this is the least ingredient.

The biggest things are that he wants to take lessons and that he's willing to stick to it when he finds out its difficult—just as with group activities.

WHEN TO START LESSONS.

So be wise and wait until your child asks to take some lessons or to join a group before suggesting this. If he has decided talent and drive, under a good teacher, things go fairly smoothly.

There generally isn't too much difficulty about getting in the required amount of daily practice. You don't need to be concerned about helping him develop inner discipline.

WHEN TROUBLES ARISE.

But he may find, after the initial charge that the daily practice is dull drudgery and he may “forget.” Then comes the problem of what to do. Throw out the idea of lessons completely?

Get a different teacher? Insist upon the practicing? Punish?

Threaten?

Bribe?

Some of these alternatives are poor under any conditions, but I think it's wisest to try to find out what the difficulty is before trying some of the others. First you need to make certain that he wants to take lessons, still, even after finding out what they're like.

He may have soon decided that he made a wrong choice. He may have found out that he doesn't just skate off like Sonia Henie or play the violin like Heifetz. He may have recognized that he doesn't have enough drive to carry through the years of labour and practice. Given a chance to say so, he gladly tells you that he wants to stop.

It probably is a disappointment to you, but it's much wiser to stop right then and there. Though his ordinary school work is something required of him and his ordinary household chores are also something required of him, extra skills really aren't.

So you should only say you're sorry he is disappointed, and call it quits. Don't be angry about the money spent on the first few lessons or on renting an instrument or equipment.

(You'll notice I mention renting. For the really expensive equipment like a piano or other musical instrument, this is probably a wise I thing to do until you're fairly certain that he'll continue with his lessons.)

If you think that it's just a temporary set-back, you can suggest stopping for a little while and then taking it up later or else seeing how it goes for a few more weeks before stopping.

Often, such understanding encouragement and reassurance of freedom and absence of compulsion gives a child the needed energy to get over a hump and begin to “click.”

Another thing you need to consider is whether or not the teacher is someone who is genuinely interested in teaching and so is flexible enough to suit some aspects of the lessons to your child's aptitudes and personality. Ideally, of course, you try to be sure of this before starting lessons.

But it often is difficult to tell until several lessons have been held. I'm not suggesting that a good teacher is radically different with each child, but I think that a good teacher responds to the needs of a student as they change from time to time.

Some teachers are somewhat more concerned about schedules than about students. Others concentrate on turning out a fine recital performance, without paying too much attention to good foundations. If you find that the teacher you've selected has some obvious drawbacks, you are wise to discuss these things with her frankly and remove your child if they aren't remedied.

Sometimes it's just a matter of personality clashes. I think this is one of those situations where you should help your child learn that he doesn't have to put up with everyone.

He doesn't get much chance to learn this otherwise; he has to stay in the same class with his classmates and tolerate his regular teachers. But this is not necessary in extracurricular activities, including group activities.

If he doesn't like his violin teacher or the Boy Scout leader, he needs to know that he can choose the activity and the teacher or reject them. It is fortunate if he has a truly free choice with another violin teacher available, another Boy Scout troop, etc.

But if not, he should be helped by you to recognize that he can always give up such activities if the personalities are too displeasing to him.

These are the general big reasons why your child may begin to resent the need for steady practice or steady participation: recognition that he just doesn't like the activity as much as he thought he would, or a poor authority-child relationship.

But there are other reasons, too, harder to find but much more likely to cause lapses in practice. You may find that your child tells you he really likes taking violin lessons and he truly enjoys his teacher.

But you may still find that he seldom remembers to practice without a reminder from you and that he then is prompt to stop at the minute his time is up. Or he says he likes Scout meetings, but he misses them frequently because he wants to do something else.

In such a situation, I think it helps for both you and his teacher or leader to tell him plainly that if he wants to take lessons or participate he needs to practice regularly, or attend regularly.

Set aside a definite time for his practice and remind him of that time. Make sure he's ready for meetings on time. So long as he seems to be making some progress, probably the only thing that's causing the difficulty is his reluctance to give up other pleasures and put in the steady work.

He needs lots of encouragement and direction from you until he's developed enough skill as a result of his lessons so that he can get some real enjoyment from his own performance.

If you find that practicing has become a source of irritation for everyone—just one long nagging session after another—I think you would be wise to stop the lessons, explaining to him that you don't think he's old enough yet to have enough sense of responsibility for his practicing but that he can start taking lessons again after several months if he thinks he is ready for them then.

If you find you have to drag him to his Scout meetings, put a stop to such activity.

This may seem harsh, but again I'm guided by the fact that these activities are really not necessary for the healthy development of your child. If you pursue them to the detriment of your other relationships with him, the price is too high.

No possible skill in playing a Bach fugue is worth steady disruption in the household and its consequent toll on personality. Nor will lighting a fire without matches ever compensate him for feeling persecuted by you.

TRYING AGAIN.

It's sensible to try such activities several times, giving him a chance to make a better job of it after he's had some time to grow up a little and has asked to try again. But after three “false starts,” you probably do well to put the subject out of the way for several years.

Many children seem to get very involved in this sort of thing, starting and stopping lessons for two or three years, only to become seriously responsible about them when they are in their middle teens.

So if your child is given a fair opportunity when he's 8 to 10 years old, you may still find this experience helping motivate him, with greater success, after a few more years have passed and he's better able to evaluate the pleasures and responsibilities involved.

A vital fact about all these sort of lessons is that they demand a lot of hard drudgery, steady exercising, before any kind of “effortless” and enjoyable performance is attained.

The piano is a more immediately rewarding instrument than any others so your child might make greater initial progress on it; but all the musical instruments ask a great deal of the performer before much pleasant music can be made. The same is true for tennis lessons, dancing, languages, etc.

With so much demanded of your child, you need to be ready to pour out a lot of genuine appreciation and support. Try to avoid seeming like an examiner who's requesting some proof that learning is occurring, but do try to inquire about how things are going and heap praise for every improvement.

The teacher can be most helpful in telling you how things are going and in giving you help in learning to help your child so don't be afraid to call him and talk things over with him from time to time.

ACTIVITIES AND FAMILY STRAIN.

The last kind of extra-curricular activity that occupies most children's time is the formalized social group and the athletic group to which we have already referred.

With things like the Scouts and the Little League, probably your biggest problem in addition to not participating steadily or not liking the leader is the problem of making sure that enough time has been allowed for all other activities.

It's very easy for your child to arrive at the situation where there is something scheduled for every week-day afternoon and for Saturday and Sunday mornings, as well.

While this may not necessarily be harmful or bad, it does require some careful planning and thought. Some children seem to welcome so many demands—a teen-ager, particularly, seems to enjoy feeling important and outstanding because he has so much to do.

But a pre-teen child may become petulant and irritated over being “over-scheduled,” having no time to be just lazy in. If you see this happening to your school child, you need to help him arrive at a decision about which activities can be eliminated temporarily.

You may easily become tense about the realization that you have too much escorting and chauffeuring to do or that you never see your child except at mealtimes.

These feelings may not be truly appropriate—you need to remember that your growing child spends less and less of his creative leisure time with you as he grows older; you need to remember to relax the apron-strings. But part of such feelings may be a realistic result of too much pressure.

Especially in a large city where travel by public transportation is risky for a young child alone, you may begin to find yourself without any free time because you are escorting your child around too much.

*Easing the Pressures. If you can arrange to take turns with some other parents, your burden can be reduced. But if not, you have only two alternatives which are sensible once every-one's needs are considered—and you must take all the individual members of the family into consideration if you are to maintain family harmony.

One alternative is to help your child learn to travel on his own, safely and wisely. The other alternative is simply to cut down on the activities until you feel he is mature enough to travel on his own.

This problem isn't such a great one if you live in a small or moderately sized city. But if you live in a large city, neither of these two alternatives is extremely satisfactory.

However, before leaping to the conclusion that travelling by him is too hazardous for your youngster; you should consider his general sense of responsibility and his willingness and ability to follow directions.

It may very well be that he is capable of going to some things by himself if he's given careful instruction and knows how to reach you by phone if anything goes wrong or if he always phones after arriving and before leaving.

This same type of concern about possible injury may lead you to deny your child the opportunity to engage in certain activities. Once again, you need to consider how your child responds to the pressure, how he's supervised, and the reality of your fears.

For example, if you fear swimming, you may be unrealistically convinced that your child will drown in a school pool with the teacher always nearby. You may transmit these fears to your child or may actually forbid him the right to learn to swim.

Plainly, this is uncalled for, since the likelihood of injury is so small in this sort of setting. So keep your neurotic fears to yourself and permit him to learn to enjoy this activity.

More realistic, though, is the fear that football, diving, tree climbing, etc., may lead to injury. However, the best solution is not to forbid your child to engage in such activities but rather to make sure that he engages in them only after he's learned how best to guard himself.

You cannot keep your child from engaging in the sports that most children enjoy without creating lots of difficulties for him. If your child is healthy and happy, he wants to avoid injury, and he gladly learns and follows directions about how to take care of himself as best as possible. This can't eliminate every genuine accident, but it's the best insurance we have.

Keeping a Sense of Balance With Special Talents

If your child has some special talent, either in the arts or in sports, you may be concerned about what to do in order to train these talents while still maintaining a semblance of ordinary, childish interests.

You may have heard that children who are artistically talented are emotionally unstable or that children who spend a great deal of time engaging in athletic activities aren't too interested or skilled in intellectual pursuits.

These notions axe quite incorrect. Many studies have shown that children with high intelligence do well both in athletics and in artistic pursuits, and there is no absolute relationship between artistic ability and emotional instability or between bodily skills and intelligence.

So you need not be worried that if you help your child develop his potentialities to the fullest, you will also be encouraging some other bad side result, if you ensure that your child is having a healthy emotional relationship to you, providing him with special training in his special talents isn't detrimental to his over-all development.

You need to be careful to permit him to be the boss of how much effort and time he wants to put into his special pursuits while, at the same time, you are making sure that you don't indulge him and permit him to avoid his usual responsibilities.

So you should be careful to avoid placing so much emphasis upon his special talent that he ends up being forced to practice his ice-skating or his violin, or so he ends up becoming overly-dependent in some other area because he feels so much is being asked of him otherwise.

The best way to judge whether or not the amount of pressure is too great is to take a good straight look at your child's overall behaviour.

If you find him beginning to be rebellious about rules he's taken for granted previously, if you find him developing some unusual mannerisms, if his eating, sleeping, playing, and cleanliness habits begin to be disturbed, then it's probably wise to re-evaluate the pressures being placed upon him and reduce them.

The healthy, gifted child can withstand a great deal of stimulation of his talents while at the same time developing normally in all other spheres.

So if you see this healthy development suffering, it's a clue to you that perhaps he is being overstimulated or perhaps his talents are not so great as you have fondly hoped.

You should never conclude that emotional and intellectual development needs to be the price paid for special development. Nor should you conclude that special rewards can compensate for a disturbed personality.

While it is true that a few great geniuses have been able to overcome the pain of their neurotic developments and still create great works, a quick review of the several hundred out-standing creators of our civilization shows that most of these were people who were healthy and normal.

For every “mad’* genius, there are many more who were geniuses but were also sane and happy. Study of the lives of those “mad” geniuses shows that the sad thing which happened to them in their early childhood was the same as for all who are mentally ill: a general lack of a healthy, loving relationship with their parents and an over emphasis upon their being not like children in most areas.

Where we have their reports, we find them all resentful that they were not permitted to develop healthily.

You need always to remember that even though your child may be able to do some particular thing very well, he is still a child and needs to be permitted to be a child, especially in those things relating to eating, sleeping, playing, cleanliness habits, and sexuality—unless you prefer to rear a mad genius.

Handicaps

Related to this topic of special abilities is the topic of handicaps. Perhaps, through the effect of heredity, accident, or illness, your child is unable to develop normal motor or sensory functions, that is, he may not be able to move about in the way we generally call normal or he may not be able to perceive through his senses in the way most others do.

If this unfortunate state has occurred, you need a great deal of help from your doctor so that you may help your child physically to make up for his handicap.

Your doctor can help you make the important decisions about special schools, operations, physical therapy, etc., and can also refer you to books about your special problem that you will find extremely useful.

Because the topic of handicaps is so great and requires special attention for each type of handicap, the only comment made here is that you need to remember, above all, to help your child develop as many of the normal, healthy attitudes and responsibilities as possible.

The qualities of livableness and loving are not limited only to those people who have all their limbs and senses functioning perfectly. It is not necessary for the physical cripple or the intellectual cripple to be an emotional cripple as well.

By your loving care and your attention to his needs, you can help your handicapped child develop to the fullest limit of his potentialities and be trusting, loving, and respecting of others.

You should never feel that because he is handicapped, he need not develop the qualities of a happy and healthy personality. He becomes resentful, demanding, over-dependent only if you have confused the physical with the emotional factors of life or if he is in great pain for extended period of time.

Most of the warping of the personality which often accompanies some physical or intellectual handicap is a result of parental guilt’s and angers. If your child is not normal in physical structure and intelligence, it's quite natural for you to have a deep sense of guilt, a feeling of personal inadequacy.

Anger or shame over these feelings of guilt can easily lead you to project confused feelings upon your child.

You may feel that you need to make up for the handicap and your unhappiness by being additionally indulgent; you forget that by this very indulgence you are causing additional difficulties for your child.

Of course, the opposite is also sometimes true—possessed by your guilt and anger; you may make no allowance for the handicap and become over-demanding, expecting your child to perform in the area of his handicap just as if he were normal.

If he has a physical handicap, this kind of unrelenting demanding generally results in the sad spectacle of a child trying to do something beyond him. Personality disturbances caused by such over-striving are generally rather subtle and not too obvious.

This kind of over-expectation is particularly disastrous if his handicap is one of borderline intelligence. Expected to make sense of things which are too complex for him, he becomes belligerent and feels worthless.

The end result of such treatment is often the corruption of the personality: many feebleminded children are pushed into major personality breakdowns because their parents insist that low intelligence “should” not interfere in any way with memory for rules, ability to play games, etc.

If your child suffers a handicap, you will need expert guidance in learning what you may reasonably expect from your child, in helping him learn to compensate healthily for his handicap, and in thinking through the host of concomitant problems involving other family members, neighbourhood playmates, etc.

If you find yourself unduly depressed or unable to prevent undesirable behaviour, you are wise to consult a psychotherapist who can help you think through your feelings and become truly able to help your child.

Illness

If your child is just temporarily ill you may sometimes find it extremely difficult to think through how to cope with his illness. If his family relationships are satisfying and good he probably isn't exceedingly emotionally disturbed by an illness.

He needs some special attention from you to make up for the temporary inability to run around and play, and for the pain and anxiety which comes with illness. But you need have little fear that by being nice to him you are encouraging him to remain ill or get ill often.

He enjoys more satisfactions when he's healthy than when he's ill, so he doesn't need to seek out illness just because you buy him special toys, spend more time with him, etc.

The only danger comes if you unwittingly permit him to do something which isn't “legitimate,” that is, if you provide pleasures to him which he really has no right to have.

This is true if you permit a sick child to be destructive or to do any-thing that can confuse him continually. For example, if you take your sick child into your bed, you are provoking and encouraging the development of a problem, thus permitting him to gain the illegitimate pleasure of intruding into your marital privacy and you are also tacitly supporting his erroneous belief that when he's ill he isn't safe in bed by himself.

Don't let him become a child who finds out that illness lets him become illegitimate ruler of the roost, for he may find this heady wine of power very much to his liking and may provoke illness or simulate illness in the effort to regain such a pleasure, even though this secondary gain, as it is called, also evokes additional anxiety in him.

So you need to be careful to keep things straight while nursing your child through his illness. There are several questions you can keep in mind when deciding about a course of action: does it prevent his getting well as quickly as possible? does it help him get well? is it an equal and legitimate substitute for something he's being deprived of because of his illness?

If, for example, he wants to eat only candy, instead of the foods your doctor recommends, or if he refuses to take his medicine, then you have no choice but to deny him this right of decision. In the interests of getting him well as soon as possible, he must suffer some disappointment and chagrin.

If something doesn't directly help him get well, you need to examine it closely, for while it may just be an appropriate compensation for being ill, it might also be something illegitimate.

You need to reason that anyone who is ill wants more dependency gratifications and also appreciates an opportunity to be creatively active during the convalescence. If you keep this in mind, you can pick out safe pleasures to provide to him.

Reading to him, making special foods, playing phonograph records, telling him favourite stories—these are all ways in which you increase the normal amount of dependency gratifications.

Hobby crafts of all sorts provide him with an opportunity to release some of his tensions in creative play. But avoid all the dangers that have been talked about when we've been discussing normal development.

Make sure you provide some relief for yourself, give your child time by him in addition to his sleeping and rest periods, etc. That way, his illness will not be further complicated by over-stimulation and spoiling.

Remember that we all regress—go back to easier satisfactions—when we're ill, but these must be legitimate satisfactions even though they may be somewhat infantile.

Probably the motives which lie behind a parent's over-indulgence or rejection of her sick child are the same feelings of guilt and anger we've talked about in regard to permanent handicaps.

If you find yourself rather short-tempered and impatient when your child is sick or if you find yourself going to the other extreme and indulging all sorts of demands you would never dream of indulging were he well, it's probably a good idea for you to sit down and think through why you're so disturbed by his illness.

You may think it's heartless for me to say that your child's light illness should not affect your emotions greatly. However, it seems to be true that the wise mother does not react to her child's ordinary illnesses by feeling upset and anxious.

The common childhood diseases like chicken pox and measles as well as the ordinary colds and sore throats are not likely to cause your child lasting injury. Your own extreme emotional reactions may.

So keep control of your emotions, nurse him wisely, and it all soon is cleared up. If you lose emotional control, his suffering may well continue long after his illness is cured. Your doctor can instruct you on matters of diet, rest, medicine; but helping your child learn to suffer inconvenience and illness without undue anxiety is the job which you must do.

DEVELOPING TOLERANCE FOR PAIN.

All through your child's life with you, this is a major responsibility. You have your first duty of trying to keep him from any unnecessary suffering. Inoculations, proper hygiene, safety precautions, safety instruction, are all ways in which you seek to prevent his being hurt physically.

But you cannot prevent all pain and suffering. So you also need to help him learn to bear pain without becoming anxious, for it is the anxiety which he suffers that often prevents him from mustering all his forces to fight the cause of the pain. He develops the attitude toward illness or pain which you demonstrate to him. If you regard it as something to be avoided but something to accept and fight when it occurs, he, too, can be wise, then valiant.

If you regard it superstitiously as some punishment for some failure within you and react with guilt and anger, you create an atmosphere of anxiety for him and he becomes frightened by illness or pain and hates himself when he becomes ill.

GETTING TO KNOW AND LIKE DOCTORS AND DENTISTS.

By being matter-of-fact yet sympathetic and efficient about childhood illnesses and bumps and bruises and by letting him know that you regard your doctor and your dentist as friends and helpers, you are preparing him to accept these things in his stride.

You need to be careful to remind him that the pain he may suffer from inoculations or having cavities filled is something which serves to prevent greater pain. You need to help him learn to regard your doctor and dentist not as people to be afraid of because they may hurt him but rather as people who are working very hard to help keep him from being hurt.

If you find that your child has developed a resentment or fear of your doctor or dentist, you need to enlist their help in your efforts to alter this attitude. Be sure to take him for regular checkups— these examinations, which often don't involve any procedures that are at all painful, help to reassure your child that pain is not always an immediate accompaniment to a visit to the doctor or dentist.

Even though your dentist and doctor are busy people, they are happy to cooperate with you if you ask them to allow some extra time for getting acquainted. They don't like having their patients hate or fear them any more than you would in their place.

You don't need to be extremely concerned if your child develops this kind of fear about his first and second birthday-it's a fairly normal reaction as a consequence of adding together two and two in his own little mind.

He can't see far enough ahead to understand your reassurance that the shots don't hurt as much as the illnesses might; instead he reacts simply and directly. Doctors equal shots, and shots equal pain, so he hates and fears doctors.

But this reaction should not extend beyond the age of two. Having a healthy trust in people and being mature enough to understand your reasoning, he should begin to alter his attitudes and regard these professional people as friends as he approaches his 3rd birthday.

If he doesn't, you need to think through how you may be contributing to his uneasiness. Have you ever warned him against some course of action by saying?

“You'll catch a cold and then the doctor will have to come out and give you a shot, and you don't want that, do you?” Have you refused to leave him alone with the doctor or dentist and thereby implicitly let him know that you are afraid they will hurt him?

If, in general, his relationship to you is warm and loving and he is trusting of most other people but he dislikes the doctor and the dentist, then it's probable that somehow you have contributed to his apprehension and you need to do something constructive about this.

Of course, this means thinking through your own attitude toward illness and the people who seek to prevent and cure it.

*The Tooth-Fairy. One incident of childhood which may cause some consternation in your child is the shedding of the first set of teeth. Psychologists believe that this loss of a part of the body symbolizes some of the fears your child has lived through regarding his own bodily integrity.

So the first loose teeth may awaken in him some memories of vague fears and cause him to be anxious. For that reason, the custom of rewarding him for the loss of his teeth seems to be psychologically advisable.

You can, for example, make a ritual of replacing the tooth, hidden under the pillow, by some present or by money. If you embellish this with stories about how the Tooth-fairy has taken the tooth, your child receives a very deep kind of satisfaction and reassurance.

He believes that there's someone benevolent watching over him; he regards this loss of a part of himself as a means of obtaining something else, plus the new tooth which will replace the inferior, “baby” tooth. So the possible traumatic occurrence is avoided and turned instead into something good.

We think parents should not be the ones to pull the loosened tooth. Your child can easily become convinced that you really want to take away a part of him if you suggest that you pull the tooth out.

It's best to avoid giving him any realistic basis for his fantasies by letting him keep his loosened tooth as long as he wants, having him or the dentist pull it only if it inconveniences him greatly and he's constantly complaining about it.

ACUTE ILLNESS OR HOSPITALIZATION.

If he has a severe, acute illness, your calm may often be the one reassurance he can find in the midst of overwhelming pain and anxiety. So, hard as it may seem, keep control of you.

In these days of good preventative medicine and antibiotics which clear up many infections in the early stages, many children are able to reach adulthood without having had to suffer long illness or severe pain. However, if your child requires surgery, for example, a tonsillectomy, you need to be careful to make his experience as good as possible.

Fortunately, many fine hospitals have “tonsil rooms” where children who are having a tonsillectomy can stay and receive expert care. Perhaps you can be instrumental in organizing such a room during the tonsillectomy season if your hospital doesn't have this arrangement.

Your doctor, to some extent, may be guided by your reactions to chronic throat infections in your child; so remember that the older your child is before he has surgery, the easier it will be for him psychologically.

Don't become an agitated mother who barrages her doctor with so many pleas for a tonsillectomy that he finally yields earlier than he might have if left free to form his professional opinion on the strictly medical aspects of the case.

Whatever your child's age, you owe it to him to inform him that he can be shielded from as much pain as possible by the anaesthetic that puts him to sleep, but that he probably is going to hurt when he wakes up.

If your child is lied to now, told that he won't hurt at all, he is apt to develop a very intense animosity toward you—and rightly so. I'm not suggesting that you paint a picture of horrors and scare him. But be honest and tell him that you think he probably is going to hurt a lot and that you're sorry and you'll try to give him medicines that will make the pain less.

Many child experts suggest practicing the operation scene with your child at home, using sheets and the kitchen table to simulate the operating room. If you think this will help your child, by all means play this game before he goes to the hospital.

However, this may only confuse him because it makes the familiar home strange. If he becomes obviously frightened, stop the game.

He shows you himself how much anxiety he has in regard to the coming event; quiet cuddling and loving reassurance that he'll be able to “take it” probably help as much, if not more, than full-scale dress rehearsals at home that may end up by confusing him in another way because the actual operating-room procedure may be so different.

If you have the tradition of the Tooth-fairy, it's easy to introduce a Tonsil-fairy or an Appendix-fairy with a present under his pillow. This sort of exchange can serve to console your child for his feeling of having been violated—a feeling which often causes as much complication as the actual physical pain itself.

In all the ways in which you approach the physical and emotional areas of living, you are affecting your child. Some-times this is direct and easily seen, at other times it is a more subtle chain of reactions.

Two of the somewhat more subtle reactions are seen in your child's humour and in his reaction to vacations. You can use your knowledge of what he laughs at as an index of his own inner makeup, for children, like adults, seem to find those things funny which involve an expression of an impulse which they feel cannot, in ordinary life, be expressed so easily.

This generally means that it is something somewhat beyond his control which he finds funny. Thus, take a hint from exaggerated laughter over aggression or sex, and see if you can't help relax tensions in these areas somewhat. This doesn't end up by killing all sense of humour in your child—it means instead a developing of a genuine sense of humour.

Vacations, like excursions, should be enjoyable. So if you find your child reacting with naughtiness or despair, you need to realize that somehow you are failing to provide him with the gratifications he needs.

Even if you feel under extreme pressure during a long train ride, remember that his needs for entertainment, as well as for the other more basic gratifications, continue and need to be met. So make provisions for taking along games and books, favourite foods, etc.

Help him regard a vacation as a time when he can have fun, rather than as a time when he has to do without the old pleasures. The sight of the Grand Canyon can't compensate him for boring hours of driving and too little sleep, so provide games and activities while driving, frequent stops, and make allowance for the extra time he needs to accommodate himself to new situations like a bed in a strange room.

Don't keep rushing him, relax some of the usual demands, and your time together away from home can be as pleasant and enjoyable a celebration as it should be.

There's one last major epoch in your child's life: adolescence. After the next chapter which deals with some family situations that demand special attention, adolescence will be discussed.

But in the widest sense, adolescence is a type of dress rehearsal of real life. If you've done your job well throughout his first six to eight years, your child's basic personality is fairly well formed; adolescence, even with its. Special requirements, then constitutes mostly a rearrangement of the forces within him.