¶ Child As Laboratory (1)
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Index Entry
Child As Laboratory:
"People of the older world are so apprehensive for the young. They see the young are going to encounter the pains that they have encountered. They are continually cautioning. As the new life reaches out, they say ‘Darling, you’ll get burnt. You better not do that.’ And so we find the valves getting shut off in all our love. Then when the parents don’t say to the child, ‘You better not do that,’ and the child is exploring, trying to understand tension and pulling on a cable and suddenly the lamp comes off the table on to their head. And they say, 'Why didn’t somebody say ‘Don’t’? Or ‘Why is that there?’ So that they get discouraged, either by the grownups or the kind of environment the grownups have organized about themselves with loose lamps… and so forth.
“I’m quite confident it could all be avoided. But we have to realize that every little child is a superb laboratory. Watch the child tearing paper. It tears all kinds of paper. And having torn some fairly common newspaper and wrapping paper, it’s then liable to get into your best books in the library and wanting to tear them. Because your child has to find out what it is when he holds on to it-- and what’s not going to tear when he really needs it.”
