VII.

       DENYING A CHILD WISELY.

       Table of Contents

      One of the hardest and one of the most important things in the training of a loved child is to deny him that which he longs for, and which we could give to him, but which he would better not have. It is very pleasant to gratify a child. There is real enjoyment in giving to him what he asks for, when we can do it prudently. But wise withholding is quite as important as generous giving in the proper care of a child.

      Next to denying a child necessary food and raiment, for the sustenance of very life, the unkindest treatment of a child is to give him everything that he asks for. Every parent recognizes this truth within certain limits, and therefore refuses an unsheathed knife, or a percussion cartridge, or a cup of poison, to a child who cries for it. But the breadth and the full significance of the principle involved are not so generally accepted as they should be.

      A child ought to be denied, by his parents, many things which in themselves are harmless. It is an injury to any child to have always at the table the dishes which he likes best; to have uniformly the cut or the portion which he prefers; to have every plaything which his parents can afford to give him; to dress—even within their means—just as he wants to; and to go, with them, where and when he pleases. That child who has never a legitimate desire ungratified is poorly fitted for the duties and the trials of every-day life in the world. He does not, indeed, enjoy himself now as he might hope to through a different training. It is sadly to a parent’s discredit when a child can truly say, “My father, or my mother, never denied me any pleasure which it was fairly in his, or her, power to bestow.”

      It is because of the evil results of not wisely denying the little ones, that an only child is in so many instances spoken of as a spoiled child. There is but one to give to in that household. He can have just so much more, than if there were half a dozen children to share it; and, as a rule, he gets it all. Parents give to him freely; so do grandparents, and so do uncles and aunts. He hardly knows what self-denial or want is. His very fullness palls upon him. It is not easy to surprise him with an unexpected pleasure. He not only is liable to grow selfish and exacting, but at the best he lacks all the enjoyment which comes of the occasional gratification of a desire which has been long felt without the expectation of its being speedily met.

      But it is by no means necessary that an only child should be spoiled in training. Some of the best trained children in the world have been only children. Many a parent is more faithful and discreet in securing to his or her only child the benefits of self-denial than is many another with half a dozen children to care for. But whether there be one child or more in the family, the lesson of wise denial is alike important to the young, and the responsibility of its teaching should be recognized by the parent.

      Few grown persons can have everything they want, everything that love can give, everything that money can buy. Most of them have many reasonable wishes ungratified, many moderate desires unfilled. They have to get along without a great many things which others have, and which they would like. It is probable that their children will be called to similar experiences when they must finally shift for themselves. Their children ought, therefore, to be in training for this experience now. It is largely the early education which gives one proper control over himself and his desires. If in childhood one is taught to deny himself, to yield gracefully much that he longs for, to enjoy the little that he can have in spite of the lack of a great deal which he would like to have, his lot will be an easier and a happier one, when he comes to the realities of maturer life, than would be possible to him if, as a child, he had only to express a reasonable wish, to have it promptly gratified.

      For this reason it is that men who were the children of the rich are so often at a disadvantage, in the battle of life, in comparison with those who have risen from comparative poverty. Their parents’ wealth, so freely at their disposal, increased the number of wants which they now think must be gratified; and their pampering in childhood so enervated them for the struggles and endurances which are, at the best, a necessity in ordinary business pursuits, that they are easily distanced by those who were in youth disciplined through enforced self-denial, and made strong by enduring hardness, and by finding contentment with a little. It is a great pity that the full and free gifts of a loving parent should prove a hindrance to a child’s happiness, a barrier to his success in life; that the very abundance of the parent’s giving should tend to the child’s poverty and unhappiness! Yet this state of things is in too many instances an undeniable fact.

      Children of the present day—especially children of parents in comfortable worldly circumstances—are far more likely than were their fathers and mothers to lack lessons of self-denial. The standard of living is very different now from a generation since. There were few parents in any community in this country fifty years ago who could buy whatever they wanted for their children; or, indeed, for themselves. There was no such freeness of purchases for children, for the table, for the house or the household, as is now common on every side. Children then did not expect a new suit of clothes every few months. Often they had old ones made over for them, from those of their parents or of their elder brothers and sisters. A present from the toy-shop or bookstore was a rarity in those days. There was not much choosing by children what they would eat as they sat down at the family table. There was still less of planning by them for a summer journey with their parents to a mountain or seaside resort. Self-denial, or more or less of personal privation, came as a necessity to almost every child in the younger days of many who are now on the stage of active life. But how different now!

      The average child of the present generation receives more presents and more indulgences from his parents in any one year of his life than the average child of a generation ago received in all the years of his childhood. Because of this new standard, the child of to-day expects new things, as a matter of course; he asks for them, in the belief that he will receive them. In consequence of their abundance, he sets a smaller value upon them severally. It is not possible that he should think as highly of any one new thing, out of a hundred coming to him in rapid succession, as he would of the only gift of an entire year.

      A boy of nowadays can hardly prize his new bicycle, or his “double-ripper” sled, after all the other presents he has received, as his father prized a little wagon made of a raisin-box, with wheels of ribbon-blocks, which was his only treasure in the line of locomotion. A little girl cannot have as profound enjoyment in her third wax doll of the year, with eyes which open and shut, as her mother had with her one clumsy doll of stuffed rags or of painted wood. A new child’s book was a wonder a generation since; it is now hardly more to one of our children than the evening paper is to the father of the family. It is now hard work to give a new sensation—or, at all events, to make a permanent impression—by the bestowal of a gift of any sort on a child. It would be far easier to surprise and to impress many a child by refusing to give to him what he asked for and expected; and that treatment would in some cases be greatly to a child’s advantage.

      A distinctive feature of the child-training of the ancient Spartans was the rigid discipline of constant self-denial, to which the child was subjected from infancy onward. And this feature of child-training among that people had much to do with giving to the Spartans their distinguishing characteristics of simplicity of manners, of powers of endurance, and of dauntless bravery. The best primitive peoples everywhere have recognized the pre-eminent importance of this feature of child-training. Its neglect has come only with the growth in luxury among peoples of the highest material civilization. The question is an important one, whether