Teaching Children Self-Dependence

Kathleen / / No Comments / Posted in Mother's Corner

So many begin wrong with children. They teach them that everything must be done for them. They are not expected even to amuse themselves, and so, by-and-by, when the nurse maid is dismissed because the baby has grown older, and the mother thinks she will manage alone, she finds she has made a rough path for her own feet.

I have in mind a child about three and a half years old. This child has never had a nurse maid. When little, its mother had her housework to do, and was not strong, so baby was left to himself a great deal, the mother always near, but not taking him oftener than was absolutely necessary. When she sewed or wrote, the little one was in a chair near, and was smiled upon or spoken to occasionally, and encouraged to play and amuse itself. So it has been through the three short years of his life. The child has been taught self-dependence. He expects to slip his own clothes on, and even buttons some of them himself, when he can reach the buttons.

Instead of the mother running to wait upon the child, the child is being taught to wait upon mother. He will bring spools of thread, and knows the colors, because he has been taught to get the thing sent for. He will run upstairs for his own hat and coat for going out, and he has a place in reach to put his everyday wraps and cap, and these are hung up when he takes them off.

It was not an easy task teaching him to pick up his playthings, but he expects to do it now. His blocks go onto the floor and he knows that he will have them to put back in the box. He delights in the button bag, even if the buttons are to be picked up when he is through with them.

A model child? No, not by any means; just a very commonplace little atom of humanity, but one that must be taught many things to make him fit for the battle of life that apparently lies before him.

Mothers are certainly to blame for the inefficient, dependent human beings in the world. I recall now a girl who was never expected to do things for herself. She would come in from her play and sit down to the table, when a girl of twelve or fourteen years of age, and ask for a drink, and the mother, who had been working in the farmhouse kitchen, would obediently respond. This same girl never was taught to comb her hair, and was dressed until, well – I can not say how old. I doubt if she ever waited on herself until she was sent from home to the Normal School.

It is wronging the child to teach it such dependence; it is wronging the mother, but, “as we sow so shall we reap,” and this does not mean if we have sowed self-abnegation we shall reap the same fruits in our offspring. On the contrary, we shall be obliged to reap self-abnegation by the hundred fold as the years go by, and the human being we brought forth reaches the acme of selfishness in the school of self-love and dependence, where the tuition has been constant from babyhood up to the present time.

Rose Seelye-Miller (1895, November). Teaching children self-dependence. The Household, Vol. XXVIII(11), 15. Retrieved from http://victoriantimes.us/mothers-corner/teaching-children-self-dependence.