30
FIRST STEPS IN MENTAL GROWTH
only those which had to be learned, and which required, in most cases, a period of practice. Some of them, it will be seen, were for play, for the child's delight, while others had definite utilitarian values; the child needed them to help him get along in the world.[1]
Learning to use a spoon and fork to carry food to the mouth.[2]—The baby's first attempts to feed himself with a spoon or fork, from the artistic view-point, end in flat failure. The performance usually yields results which are far from satisfying to the æsthetic sense; in fact, the baby makes a mess of it. But the baby's sense of the beautiful is not easily offended and he enters into the learning with eagerness.
My notes do not contain an answer to the question, When will a child, unaided, begin to feed himself with spoon or fork? for the reason that neither of the two children whom I observed, as they learned to feed themselves, had an opportunity to make a beginning of his own motion. It was found that as soon as the child held a spoon or fork in his hands and poked around, in rough imitation of his attendants, in the cups, bowls or saucers which contained his food, he was ready to try to feed himself if given a little help. This little help necessary to set in motion the self-feeding process R. received in the fifteenth month (446th day). The child was rubbing and punching with the bowl of a spoon in the saucer from which he was being fed.
- ↑ The particular hand-movements which a child learns will depend somewhat upon the conditions surrounding him, the kinds of things he sees others doing, the nature of his toys, the latitude or climatic conditions, his freedom, whether he belongs to a civilized or barbarous race, etc.
- ↑ The use of spoons and forks to carry food to the mouth is a modification of the carrying-to-the-mouth motion which is so conspicuous a feature of the hand-movements of the latter part of the first year.
