The Waterbury Democrat., 1934-03-08
RpY0UR CHILDREN
By Olwe Roberts Bsrtoa .
ns5 57 NTz stsV1cS. Me

The importance of child
 training before the age of
 six Is described by Olive Rob-.
 crts Barton below. It is an-
 other article i'm her series on
 modern child training.
 Probably the most formative period of a child's life are the years just preceding his entrance into school at six years of age.
 How the age of six happened to be chosen as the standard age of entrance to school life must be at- tributed more or less to accident because little was known in the early days of educational history about the different cycles and stages of child development.
 As it happens, however, better age probably could not have been selected.
 Kindergarten" play, now 50 perfected, is calculated to- develop the child between four and six and is based upon his growing capa- bilities and enlarging character.
 The Nursery School goes still further back into infancy and takes into consideration the physi-
 
 with habit at the time. r.
 Early Training
 Now two things are noticeable. One is that most children do not go to kindergarten, and therefore, unless the parents realize the i'm portance of the pre-school era and ment, they are likely to be misun- I af fo public school systems have until quite recently utterly ignored the fact that a child was anything but Q machine, therefore after six he still had little opportunity for needed guidance.
 The wonder is that the world has done so well. This is the ar- gument of the conservatives and a good one. But it does not go far enough. If 1t is possible to sta biliZe mental content in the child and thereby avoid unnecessary un- happiness in later years, the the ory loses ground. To try to make adults less nervous, healthier. saner, it is necessary to look at the young child first.
 This is a point of view the con- servatives would do well to con- slider. Child training does not have "the child" exclusively as its object, but the man to be, or the woman. No country can success fully go on with many millions of neurasthenics, and prisons with millions more, not to mention the mental discomfort of the rest of us. Who indeed is quite normal?
 It does not follow that a child has to go to kindergarten by any means to have fair chance to be- come his own best, but 1t does fol- low that other schools must recog- nize, and are recognizing the fact that young children need more than facts and discipline, that their judgment is immature and their different. If this be true it is quite as necessary that the home too should take cognizance of the importance of the develop ing child.
 Part Discipline Plays Discipline must always play a part in life. We never escape it until we die. Therefore the child must have it, most likely, but we have over-emphasized it largely in the past and under emphasized natural self-discipline. To shape g. child's values so that he will come to know instinctively right from wrong, needs attention. He won't always, of course, and here we must come in and operate as the law he must meet later.
 The little child is full of im- pulses. During his pre- school and early school years, we should know something about directing rather than frustrating them.
 The natural place for training is the home. The teacher cannot be expected to take the place of the parent, and does not do so, but in this eulogy of the kinder garten I wish to show that it was