Education and the good life · Bertrand Russell
FEAR
Apart from special fears, children are liable to a diffused anxiety. This is generally due to too much repression by their elders, and is therefore much less common than it used to be. Perpetual nagging, prohibition of noise, constant instruction in manners, used to make childhood a period of misery. I can remember, at the age of five, being told that childhood was the happiest period of life (a blank lie, in those days). I wept inconsolably, wished I were dead, and wondered how I should endure the boredom of the years to come. It is almost inconceivable, nowadays, that any one should say such a thing to a child. The child’s life is instinctively prospective: it is always directed towards the things that will become possible later on. This is part of the stimulus to the child’s efforts. To make the child retrospective, to represent the future as worse than the past, is to sap the life of the child at its source. Yet that is what heartless sentimentalists used to do by talking to the child about the joys of childhood. Fortunately the impression of their words did not last long. At most times, I believed the grown-ups must be perfectly happy, because they had no lessons and they could eat what they liked. This belief was healthy and stimulating.
Shyness is a distressing form of timidity, which is common in England and China, and parts of America, but rare elsewhere. It arises partly from having little to do with strangers, partly from insistence upon company manners. As far as is convenient, children should, after the first year, become accustomed to seeing strangers and being handled by them. As regards manners, they should, at first, be taught the bare minimum required for not being an intolerable nuisance. It is better to let them see strangers for a few minutes without restraint and then be taken away, than to expect them to stay in the room and be quiet. But after the first two years it is a good plan to teach them to amuse themselves quietly part of the day, with pictures or clay or Montessori apparatus or something of the kind. There should always be a reason for quiet that they can understand. Manners should not be taught in the abstract, except when it can be done as an amusing game. But as soon as the child can understand he should realize that parents also have their rights; he must accord freedom to others, and have freedom for himself to the utmost possible extent. Children easily appreciate justice, and will readily accord to others what others accord to them. This is the core of good manners.
Above all, if you wish to dispel fear in your children, be fearless yourself. If you are afraid of thunderstorms, the child will catch your fear the first time he hears thunder in your presence. If you express a dread of social revolution, the child will feel a fright all the greater for not knowing what you are talking about. If you are apprehensive about illness, so will your child be. Life is full of perils, but the wise man ignores those that are inevitable, and acts prudently but without emotion as regards those that can be avoided. You cannot avoid dying, but you can avoid dying intestate; therefore make your will, and forget that you are mortal. Rational provision against misfortune is a totally different thing from fear; it is a part of wisdom, whereas all fear is slavish. If you cannot avoid feeling fears, try to prevent your child from suspecting them. Above all, give him that wide outlook and that multiplicity of vivid interests that will prevent him, in later life, from brooding upon possibilities of personal misfortune. Only so can you make him a free citizen of the universe.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.