Children can learn that the game of life has its rules and that the breach of these rules spoils the game and prevents our own happiness.  They can learn, too, that these are not arbitrary rules; they are like the laws of nature; they are the conditions under which alone it is possible for people to live together and to make life worth while.  Gambling is wrong because it is unsocial; it is the attempt to gain without an equivalent giving.  Cheating is wrong, no matter how many practice it, just as surely as cheating is wrong in the game on the playground.

Children are really peculiarly sensitive to the social consciousness.  In school under no circumstances will they do that which the school custom forbids or the older boys condemn.  In the home, despite contrary appearances, the opinion of elders, brothers, sisters, and parents is the recognized law.  Every small boy wants to be like his big brother.  Children’s conduct may be guided by an understanding of the social will outside the school and home.  Help them to know that all people everywhere in organized society condemn cheating and dishonesty.[49]

Sentiment and emotional feeling must back up all teaching of conduct.  Your stories and readings should be selected with this in mind.  The approbation of parents and of the great Father of all enters as an effectual motive.

But parents seldom understand these problems; they attempt to deal with each one as it arises until they are weary of the seemingly endless procession and abandon the task.  Their endeavors are based on faint memories of such problems in their own youth or on rule-of-thumb proverbial philosophy about morals and children.  Does not the development of moral ability and culture deserve at least as much attention as any other phase of the child’s life?  After all, what do we most of all desire for all our children—­position, fame, ease? or is it not rather simply this, that, no matter what else they do, they may be good and useful men and women?  Then what are we doing to make them good and useful?

A clear view of the need for moral training, a belief that is possible, will surely lead to serious attempts to learn the art of moral training.  In this they need not be without guidance.  There is a number of good books on character development in the child.[50] The foundation for all such training of parents ought to be laid in an understanding of what the moral nature is, and then of the laws of its development.  Later the specific problems may be separately considered.

Sec. 3.  TEASING AND BULLYING

Teasing is the child’s crude method of experimentation in psychological reactions; the teaser desires to discover just how the teased will respond.  It degenerates, by easy steps, into a thoughtless infliction of pain in sheer enjoyment of another’s misery, and then into brutal bullying.  When only two children are together mere teasing will not last long; either the teaser will tire of his task or his teasing will turn to that lowest of all brutalities, delight in inflicting pain on weaker ones.