VIII.

       HONORING A CHILD’S INDIVIDUALITY.

       Table of Contents

      A child is liable to be looked upon as if he were simply one child among many children, a specimen representative of childhood generally; but every child stands all by himself in the world as an individual, with his own personality and character, with his own thoughts and feelings, his own hopes and fears and possibilities, his own relations to his fellow-beings and to God. This truth is often realized by a child before his parents realize it; and if it be unperceived and unrecognized by his parents, they are thereby shut off from the opportunity of doing for him much that can be done by them only as they give due honor to their child’s individuality as a child.

      A little babe is not a mere bit of child-material, to be worked up by outside efforts and influences into a child-reality; but he is already a living organism, with all the possibilities of his highest manhood working within him toward their independent development. Here is the difference, on a lower plane, between a mass of clay being molded by the sculptor’s hands into a statue of grace and beauty, and a seed of herb or tree containing within itself the germ of a new and peculiar individual specimen of its own unchanging species. An acorn is more than the fruit of the oak that bore it; it is the germ of another oak, like, and yet unlike, all the oaks that the world has known before the growth of this one. So, also, a child is more than the mere child of his earthly parents; he is, in embryo, a man with characteristics and qualities such as his parents could never attain to, and which, it may be, the world has never before seen equaled.

      The possibilities of Moses, who was to put his impress upon the world’s character, were in the Hebrew babe, as his loving mother laid him tenderly in the pitch-daubed basket of papyrus, to hide him away among the flags of the Nile-border, as they were not in any native babe of the household of Pharaoh; and if his mother had any intuitive womanly sense of his grand future in the providence of God, her zeal and faith in his behalf were quickened and inspired accordingly. And so it has been all along the ages; the germs of power and achievement were already in the babe, who was afterward known as Plato, or Cæsar, or Muhammad, or Charlemagne, or Columbus, or Shakespeare, or Washington. And who will doubt that many a germ of such possibility in a young child has been quickened or repressed, according as that child’s parents have perceived and honored, or have failed to realize and to foster, the best that was involved in the child’s individuality?

      It was to the credit of the high-priest Eli, that he perceived that the child Samuel was capable of receiving communications from the Lord, such as were denied to the possessor of Urim and Thummim; and that he honored the child’s individuality so far as to encourage him to declare the message that God had sent by him; instead of treating the child as one who could receive nothing from God, save as it came to him through the medium of his guardians and seniors. This spirit it was that prompted Trebonius to bare his head as he entered the school-room where he was looked up to as the teacher; because, as he suggested, he recognized in every child before him there the possibility of lofty attainment in his developed individuality. And it can hardly be doubted that this attitude of the teacher Trebonius had its measure of influence in bringing to its fruition the germinal power in his pupil Martin Luther. Trebonius and Eli are—so far, at least—a pattern to the parents of to-day.

      It is not merely that the child is to be the possessor of a marked and distinctive individuality, and that therefore he is to be honored for his possibilities in that direction; but it is that he already is the possessor of such an individuality, and that he is worthy of honor for that which he has and is at the present time. Many a child, while a child, is the superior of his parents in the basis and scope of character, in the attributes of genius, and in the instincts of high spiritual perception. This is the true order of things in the progress of God’s plans for the race; the better is in the coming generations, not in the past. But even where the child is not the superior, he is always the peer in individuality of those to whom he looks up with honoring reverence as his parents, and he is entitled to recognition by them in that peership.

      Every one who recalls clearly his child-time thoughts and feelings, remembers that even in his earliest days he had his own standpoint of observation and reflection; that he was conscious of his individual relations to others and to God; and that, in a sense, his independent outlook and his independent uplook as an individual were the same then as now, in kind, although not in degree. He also remembers that, as a child, he was often made to feel that his individuality was not fully recognized by others, but that it was frequently ignored or trenched upon by those who took it for granted that, because he was still a child, he had as yet no truly individual position, attitude, and rights in the world. Yet it is not an easy thing for a parent of to-day to bear always in mind that every child of his is as truly an individual as he was when he was a child.

      In little things, as in larger, a child’s individuality is liable to be overlooked, or to be disregarded. A little boy was taken alarmingly ill one day. For several hours his loving mother watched him anxiously. The next day he was in his accustomed health again. His mother, with the evident thought that a child could have no comprehension like a parent’s of such a state of things as that, said to him, tenderly: “My dear boy, you don’t know how sick you were yesterday.” “Oh, yes! I do, dear mamma,” he answered; “I know a great deal better than you do; for I was the one that was sick.” And many a child has the thought that was in that child’s mind, when he is spoken to as though he must get all his ideas of his own feelings and conditions and needs from some one who is supposed to represent him better than he can represent himself—while he is still in childhood.

      It is much the same in the matter of personal rights, as in the matter of personal feelings. A child finds that his individuality is constantly lost sight of, because he is a child; as it ought not to be. A little fellow who had been given a real watch, was conscious of an advance in his relative position by that possession. His uncle, having taken his own watch to the watchmaker’s, asked the loan of the little fellow’s watch for the time being, saying that he could not get along without one. “Can’t you get along without a watch?” asked the nephew. “No, I cannot,” replied the uncle. “If I had mine at the watchmaker’s, would you lend me yours till mine came back?” was the little fellow’s searching inquiry. “Why, no; I don’t suppose I would,” replied the other. “But then, you know, I’m a man, and you are a boy.” “Well, then,” said the individual boy to the individual man; “if you can’t get along without a watch, and you wouldn’t lend me yours if I needed it, I can’t get along without a watch, and I can’t let you have mine.”

      Now, the trouble in that case was that the boy’s individuality was not sufficiently recognized and honored by the manner of that request for his watch. It seemed to be taken for granted that, because he was a child, he had no such rights in his own possessions as a man has in his, and that he put no such value on that which he had, as a man would be sure to put on his belongings. Against that assumption the child quite naturally, and with a good show of logic, resolutely asserted himself. If, on the other hand, the boy had been appealed to as an equal, to render a favor to the other because of a special and a clearly explained need, there is no reason to doubt that he would have been prompt to respond to it, with a feeling