p. 108 | FRIGHTENING CHILDREN by Kit Clover

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 18, 1889

FromThe Signs of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 7

FRIGHTENING CHILDREN.

By Kit Clover

THE first rule that the Clover family made regarding the government of children, was that a child should never be frightened unnecessarily, and once adopted, it has been easily kept. Birdie, the eldest baby, amused us when at about three years of age she would spread the fingers of one chubby hand before her closed eyes whenever she wished to go into a dark room. “Why do you do that, Birdie?” I asked her one night, and looking up shyly, she said: “So I can not see ’e’ dark.” But, although she did not like to “see” it, yet she had no fear of darkness.

If the little ones were restless and wide-awake, they were never told to “cover up and keep still, else the rats would catch them.”

We even speak gently of rats at our house, lest the smaller ones learn to fear them. Not that they do not hear the marauders roundly denounced for digging holes in the squashes or nibbling the apples, but lest the little ones may feel timid about going down cellar, they are never spoken of as a thing to fear.

Frightening children as a means to secure obedience is not the only evil ruled out of our code. Frightening them regarding anything, unless absolutely necessary, was prohibited. I was an agile, venturesome child myself, once on a time, and I remember vividly the pleasure it was to me to walk a narrow joist, “shin” a tall tree, or run along a high ridge-pole, and I always allowed my children all the liberty possible without endangering life or limb. It certainly gives a child confidence, makes him self-helping and self-entertaining; besides, in my own mind, I always pity the child who is “nagged” about with “Here, you must not climb up there, you’ll fall;” or “No, I will not allow you to skate, you might fall and get hurt;” or “You shall not have a sled; I read of a boy who had his leg broken while coasting.” It is these very children who after an unhappy, discontented childhood, grow up into the clumsy men, who fill the daily papers with accounts of accidents; and awkward, timid women. I may have been helped to my decision

that no child under my care should ever be frightened, by my own experience. An older sister, wishing to guard against any future possibility of my falling down the cellar stairs, took me part way down, and pointing to two small chinks in the wall, in a dark corner, cried: “See the big bear’s eyes glaring at you. Run, quick, before he eats you.” Well, I did run, and from that day to this I cannot walk out of a dark room, or come up out of a cellar if it is dark, without a feeling of senseless fright that is almost unbearable.

Of all the mistakes made in the care of children, there is to my mind nothing quite as bad as frightening them.—Kit Clover, in Home Journal.