Test Post: Thought-Turning
In all these cases we avoid certain bad habits by forming certain good ones. This in very early times we intentionally do, without any appeal to reason, or any call upon conscious will. Because at one-and-a-half or two, we cannot depend upon a person having material to reason with so as to make a right choice, and we know that he has not the power to turn his own thoughts from temptation. His thoughts, as we have said, are momentary, they flit from object to object without control.
He is busy looking out at life and taking in everything in succession. Life is one panorama from morning to night. When a young child, living life as it should live it, happily and without responsibility, looks you in the face and says he won’t do a thing, just try to realize that it is a passing whim to be wiped out by the next interest.
Don’t mark the occasion with talk and opposition, “That is naughty,” “You must not,” or appeal too cheaply to his strongest emotions by saying, “Do it to please mother,” don’t in short bring a sledge hammer to crack a hazel nut, but just try change of thought.
A baby of eighteen months had much better not know too much about what “naughty” means, and will very likely feel it fun to do what it must not, but it will be a great help to its thoroughly understanding these things in the future if it now does the thing it ought to do.
Believe me, the thing that really matters at this stage of life is that the child do the right thing in the right way, eat his supper, put on his clothes, go to bed, not lose his temper.
This steady laying down of habits through repeated right conduct is to later will control what the perpetual small restless movements of a young infant lying on its mother’s knee are to the purposeful movements of a later time. They pave the way and make the other easier as soon as the central nervous system is ready to guide.
See, without fuss, that a young child is tidy and it will soon delight in tidiness, see that it obeys and you will later find it obedient.