|
The Four-year-old is a funny little fellow, and if you can accept him as such, you will appreciate and enjoy him for what he is. If, on the other hand, you take a sterner stance and feel that his boasting, his swearing, his general expansiveness, and his often out-of-bounds behavior is wrong both you and he may have an unneccessarily hard time of it. For the most part, we have found the boy or girl of this age to be yoyous, exuberant, energetic, ridiculous, un-trammeled-ready for anything. What a change he offers as compared to his more difficult, demanding, Three-and-a-half-year-old, just-earlier self! If at times he seems some-what voluble, boastful, and bossy, it is because it is so exciting for him to enter the fresh fields of self-expression that open up at this wonderful age. The child at Three-and-a-half characteristically ex-pressed a strong resistance to many things the adult required, possibly because in his own mind the adult was still all-powerful. Four has taken a giant step forward. All of a sudden he discovers that the adult, though still quite powerful, is not all-powerful. he now finds much power point of view, and the roof does not fall in. More than this, following its seemingly built-in plan of interweaving, nature sees to it that whereas the Three-and-a-half-year-old was tather withdrawn and insecure much of the time, Four operates on the expansive and highly sure-of-himself side of life. Four, as Figure i shows, is an age when the child is characteristically in a nice state of equilibrium. Emotion exuberance has its positive as well as its negative side. The typical Four-year-old loves adventure, loves excursions, loves excitement, loves anything new. |
