“Curing,” a Mischievous Boy
By Mariam Finn Scott
“Joe is impossible to have around the house, he is so incorrigibly mischievous,” a mother complained to me. “He simply takes the house apart. He meddles with every clock, lock, or screw, and we never know what is going to happen next.” To illustrate, she told me of an unpleasant experience the family had had on account of Joe’s mischievousness in the early fall, when the steam had first been turned on. It seemed to them for a while as if the whole house was going to be blown up, for steam was escaping everywhere. Joe calmly came forward and announced that he knew what was the matter, that he had unscrewed certain valves to see what would happen, and that he knew how to fix those valves. This, to the mother’s great surprise, he did. “And,” concluded the mother, “I fixed Joe, to help him remember not to meddle again with the valves.17It was very plain that what Joe needed was not punishment or suppression of his mechanical inclinations, but a chance to make use of them. I advised the mother to have him join a mechanical class in the neighborhood, where the boys also had gymnastic instruction under a competent leader. This proved to be exactly what Joe needed. He found great pleasure in his new classroom; he learned the use of certain mechanical devices there; and before very long, instead of being an annoyance to everybody, he became a very genuine source of pride to the household. He had a corner in the house which he called his shop, whence emanated all kinds of original and ingenious mechanical toys.—Mariam Finn Scott, in Good Housekeeping.