Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant - Softcover

Louise Bates Ames (1908–1996) was a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and assistant professor emeritus at Yale University. She was co-founder of the Gesell Institute of Child Development and collaborator or co-author of three dozen books, including The First Five Years of Life, Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, Child Rorschach Responses, and Your One-Year-Old through Your Ten- to Fourteen-Year-Old series.

Frances L. Ilg wrote numerous books, including The Child from Five to Ten, Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen, and Child Behavior, before her death in 1981. She was also a cofounder of the Gesell Institute of Child Development at Yale.

chapter one
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE
 
 
Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game. Whatever he does, he does the opposite just as readily. In fact, sometimes just the choice of some certain object or course of action immediately triggers an overpowering need for its opposite.
 
The Six-year-old is wonderfully complex and intriguing, but life can be complicated for him at times, and what he needs most in the world is parents who understand him. For Six is not just bigger and better than Five. He is almost entirely different. He is different because he is changing, and changing rapidly. Though many of the changes are for the good—he is, obviously, growing more mature, more independent, more daring, more adventurous—this is not necessarily an easy time for the child.
 
“Six is a hard age to be,” confided one little boy to his mother.
 
One of the many things that makes life difficult for him is that, as earlier at Two-and-a-half, he seems to live at opposite extremes. The typical Six-year-old is extremely ambivalent. He wants both of any two opposites and sometimes finds it almost impossible to choose.
 
“I want to and I don’t want to,” said one little girl when asked at a party why she didn’t go to the table and get herself a cookie.
 
Or, we have a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay which beautifully characterizes the Six-year-old’s difficulty in making a choice:
 
“Come along in then, little girl,
Or else stay out!”
But in the open door she stands
And bites her lips and twists her hands
And stares upon me trouble-eyed:
“Mother,” she says, “I can’t decide!
I can’t decide!”
 
One specific example of Six’s oppositeness is his frequent reversal of letters and numbers as he reads or prints. This tendency toward reversal is one of the many reasons why we prefer to delay the formal teaching of reading, both at home and at school. Six’s reversals are truly something to be reckoned with.
 
Six is also stubborn. It is hard for him to make his mind up about big things, but once made up, it is hard to change. About small things, however, he does change rapidly. A choice of vanilla ice cream may immediately lead to a sudden realization that it was really chocolate he wanted all along, and if you change your order to chocolate he may swing back to vanilla.
 
One of the Six-year-old’s biggest problems is his relationship with his mother. It gives him the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain. Most adore their mother, think the world of her, need to be assured and reassured that she loves them. At the same time, whenever things go wrong, they take things out on her.
 
An example of this is that of the little girl who sat at the dinner table, arms folded, refusing to eat. When her mother urged her to eat, she replied coldly, “How can I? I have no spoon.”
 
At Five, Mother was the center of the child’s universe. At Six, things have changed drastically. The child is now the center of his own universe. He wants to be first and best. He wants to win. He wants to have the most of everything.
 
Six is beginning to separate from his mother. In fact, it is this quite natural move toward more independence and less of the closeness experienced at Five that makes him so aggressive toward her at times. On the other hand, his effort to be free and independent apparently causes him much anxiety. He worries that his mother might be sick or might even die, that she won’t be there when he gets home from school. And in his typically opposite-extreme way, one minute he says he loves his mother and the next minute he may say he hates her.
 
It is not hard to understand why this strong emotional warmth toward and love for his mother, which occurs at the same time he is trying to learn to stand on his own feet, causes him much confusion and unhappiness. It is fair to say that Six is typically embroiled with his mother. He depends on her so much, and yet part of him wishes he didn’t.
 
But Mother is by no means his only problem. The consensus is that somewhere around Five-and-a-half to Six years of age many children’s behavior takes a marked turn for the worse in many directions. A list of just a few of the ways in which one very nice little girl changed at this time includes the following:
 
To begin with, and quite uncharacteristically for her, she started crying about almost everything. She cried because she didn’t want to go to school (she who had gone with the greatest enthusiasm at Four and Five). She cried about getting dressed. She cried because she couldn’t get through breakfast in time to get to school. She cried because school was too hard.
 
For the first time in her life she refused to stay put once she had been put to bed, and often got up and came downstairs—against orders—half a dozen times or more in an evening. Even when she did finally decide to stay in bed, she remained awake, talking endlessly and loudly.
 
Previously a good eater, she would dawdle and fuss throughout each meal, spoiling the whole meal situation for everybody else at the table.
 
For the first time since she was Two-and-a-half years of age, she would, if left alone in her parents’ bedroom, raise havoc among her mother’s belongings—especially with dresses and shoes.
 
For the first time ever, she consistently refused to “mind” her mother.
 
Quite unlike herself, she fought and fussed with her playmates, and seemed quite incapable of playing peaceably.
 
To make things even worse, her customary excellent health gave way to an almost continuous series of earaches and sore throats.
 
(And every single one of these difficulties cleared up by the time she was Seven.)
 
Things often get so bad around the house that, as one mother put it, “Each morning I get up with the solemn promise to myself to try to make my daughter feel loved. And I may succeed for an hour or so. But then she’ll do something so impossible that I lose my temper and have to reprimand her. Then she accuses me of not loving her. She can do anything she wants, but my behavior toward her has to be perfection or she complains.”
 
One of the things that bothers parents most is the child’s “freshness.” “Why do you want to know?” he or she asks pertly. “Why should I?” “Try and make me.” And when things go really wrong, “I love you” changes all too quickly to “I hate you.”
 
But, rather sadly and touchingly, often when the child has been at his worst, once his temper calms down he will ask, “Even though I’ve been bad, you like me, don’t you?” Or, somewhat inappropriately, at the end of a very bad day a child will ask his mother, “Have I been good today?” It is an interesting fact about child behavior that the less praise and credit a child deserves, the more he wants and needs. The very difficult child needs a great deal of assurance that he has been good.
 
We must remember that a Six-year-old isn’t violent, loud, demanding, and often naughty just to be bad. There are so many things he wants to do and be that his choices are not always fortunate. He is so extremely anxious to do well, to be the best, to be first, to be loved and praised, that any failure is very hard for him.
 
He is, part of the time, demanding and difficult because he is still, even at this relatively mature age, extremely insecure, and his emotional needs are great. If, with tremendous patience and effort, you can meet these needs, nobody can be a better, warmer, more enthusiastic companion than your Six-year-old girl or boy.
 
Six’s way is, in his opinion, right; he cannot bear to lose or to accept criticism. On the other hand, he loves to be flattered and praised. Certainly he is not as secure as he might be. In fact, we believe that much of his stubborn, arrogant, and sometimes bratty behavior is his effort to build himself up and to make himself feel secure. Certainly when he boasts that some certain task imposed on him is “easy,” one can suspect that he is trying to cover up the fact that it is actually too difficult.
 
The typical Six-year-old tends to be highly undifferentiated—everything is everywhere. He seems to have little feeling for scale or hierarchy. He may be displeased because his mother or father has more possessions than he does. (In fact, this attitude may be one thing that leads to his occasional pilfering.)
 
The child of this age is really a very vulnerable little person, very sensitive emotionally, especially when he is being good. Very small failures, comments, or criticisms hurt his feelings. But if he is being naughty, once he gets started on a bad tack, he may seem almost impervious to punishment. That is why he needs so very much protection and understanding from his parents.
 
Six, for all he may be so bold and brash at times, tends to be very babyish about physical hurts. He may cry his head off just about having a very small splinter removed from his finger or about having to use nose drops.
 
However, for all we have said, Six can at times be a delightful addition to the household. One of his most endearing qualities is his extreme enthusiasm. He is enthusiastic for adventure, for new games, for new ideas. He loves to practice and show off his increasing academic abilities. He loves to ask questions. He loves to be read to. He loves to learn about things.
 
Another of his attractive characteristics is his emotional warmth. When things are right between him and his parents, as of course they often are, nobody could love a grown-up with more warmth and openly expressed affection. And sometimes he can be a wonderfully warm, loyal, and admiring friend.
 
He is at his most lovable when he dramatizes something he is telling you: “The biggest one you ever saw!” “The most wonderful time I ever had.”
 
When happy, he not only smiles and laughs, he fairly dances with joy. Even when asleep he seems to pitch his whole body into his dreams—which may explain why his nightmares, when he has them, bother him so much.
 
His enthusiasm is contagious. Things mean so much to him that it is a pleasure to provide for him opportunities to feed his very real need for the new and the exciting.
 
Life is seldom dull for the parents of a Six-year-old.