But it is evident that simply keeping our hands off is not enough. To begin with the process of dressing himself, the first in order of the day’s routine, a child of three, with no training, turned loose with the usual outfit of clothes, could never dress himself in the longest day of the year. And here, with a serious problem to be solved, we are back beside the buttoning boy of the Children’s Home. The child must _learn how_ to be independent, as he must learn how to be anything else that is worth being, and the only excuse for existence of a parent is the possibility of his furnishing the means for the child to acquire this information with all speed. Let us take a long look at the buttoning boy over there in Rome and return to our own three-year-old for a more systematic survey of his problem, which is none other than the beginning of his emancipation from the prison of babyishness. Let him learn the different ways of fastening garments together on the Montessori frames if you have them, or in any other way your ingenuity can devise. Old garments of your own, put on a cheap dress form, are not a bad substitute for that part of the Montessori apparatus, or the large doll suggested on page 115 may serve.
Then apply your mind, difficult as that process is for all of us, to the simplification of the child’s costumes, even if you are led into such an unheard-of innovation as fastening the little waists and dresses up the front. Let me wonder, parenthetically, why children’s clothes should all be fastened at the back? Men manage to protect themselves from the weather on the opposite principle.
Then, finally, give him time to learn and to practise the new process; and time is one of the necessary elements of life most often denied to little children, who always take vastly longer than we do to complete a given process. I am myself a devoted adherent of the clock, and cannot endure the formless irregularity of a daily life without fixed hours, so that I do not speak without a keen realization of the fact that time cannot be granted to little children to live their own lives, without our undergoing considerable inconvenience, no matter how ingeniously we arrange the matter. We must feel a whole-hearted willingness to forego a superfluity in life for the sake of safeguarding an essential of life. When I feel the temptation, into which my impatient temperament is constantly leading me, to perform some action for a child which he would better do for himself, because his slowness interferes with my household schedule, I bring rigorously to mind the Montessori teacher who did not tuck in the child’s napkin. And I severely scrutinize the household process, the regularity of which is being upset, to see if that regularity is really worth a check to the child’s growth in self-dependence.