Plan for the Curing: George MacDonald and Modern Child-Training Methods

by Kathryn Lindskoog

"If the wise woman had but pinched her, she would have shown herself an abject little coward.... Nothing such, however, was the wise woman's plan for the curing of her." --"The Wise Woman,"

The Gifts of the Child Christ, Volume I, p. 235.

George MacDonald's story "The Wise Woman" which he also called "The Lost Princess - A Double Story," was one of C. S. Lewis's favorites. In this story MacDonald, successful father of thirteen (two of them adopted), clearly anticipated the child-training rules that would be developed and taught by behavioral scientists a century later.

"Each year thousands of parents seek professional advice on how to handle problems with their children." So began the book Living with Children: New Methods for Parents and Teachers (by Gerald Patterson and M. Elizabeth Gullion, 1972). The authors of this book and others like them seek to show parents how to encourage desirable behavior in their children and gradually eliminate undesirable behavior. Their method is based on the "social learning" approach. The rules are simple, but few people follow them.

In MacDonald's story a distraught king and queen sought professional advice about their terrible daughter. Not from a behavioral scientist in an air-conditioned office, but from a famous witch who lived in the heart of a forest. She was not an evil witch, but a strange, good, wild, and wise woman.

The princess was lost indeed when the wise woman came to the rescue. In fact, this woman came to two families whose girls had both become unbearable, and in both cases she soon perceived that the parents would not cooperate in the cure she envisioned. In both cases she snatched the girl up in her large black cloak and carried her off before anyone suspected what had happened. In today's terms, it was clearly a case of illegal deprogramming.

Both girls were only children born to doting parents - one in a palace and the other in a distant shepherd's hut. Both were taught from infancy by everyone they met that they were "Somebodies." They were awash in parental affection, but they were both totally selfish and unloving. Their parents wanted them to be happy, but for some reason they were both rather miserable; and so was everyone who had to be around them. As the wise woman put it to the frustrated parents, "You are sufficiently punished by the work of your own hands. Instead of making your daughter obey you, you left her to be a slave to herself; you coaxed when you ought to have compelled; you praised when you ought to have been silent; you fondled when you ought to hove punished; you threatened when you ought to have inflicted - and there she stands, the full-grown result of your foolishness. She is your crime and your punishment."

According to today's behavior modification experts, futile coaxing, inappropriate praise and fondling, and empty threats actually reinforce undesirable behaviors. As Gerald Patterson says in Families: Applications of Learning to Family Life (1971), "It isn't too much love that spoils a child; it is being reinforced for the wrong behaviors." Permissive parents like to let a child's natural impulses unfold freely. But according to John Krumboltz in Changing Chlldren's Behavior (1972), there is a deceptive appeal in the idea that children should be allowed to do whatever they want whenever they want. If the adult withdraws from the child's environment, the child is not then automatically "free." When parents decrease their influence, other forces increase theirs. The wise woman knew the only thing that could save the princess from her hatefulness was that she should be made to mind somebody else than her own miserable Somebody.

Krumboltz meets head-on the question "Isn't it harmful to a child's happiness to frustrate her by not letting her do as she wishes?" He claims that the goal of keeping a child happy will keep her from being happy. In contrast, he quotes the current folk-authority Dear Abby: "If you raise your children to be dependable, industrious, honest and considerate of others, they will make themselves happy."

We are taught now that the first five or six years of a child's life are the most formative. Some parents feel that if they fail during those years, all is lost; but behavior modification experts disagree. Learning continues throughout life, they say, and their principles apply throughout life. Past events predict present behavior, but present behavior changes for better or for worse. Krumboltz says "What shall we do now? What kind of environment can we arrange for the child now that will encourage desirable behavior and diminish undesireable behavior? We can take action that will make a difference."

The two girls the wise woman undertook to help were well past five or six. Significantly, she never scolded or spanked either one. Instead, she provided an effective new learning environment immediately. The princess was grasped under a cloak and borne away against her will. Later in the journey when Princess Rosamond rammed her head into the woman to hurt her, the woman did not raise her hand or her voice; the cloak could be hard as brass at such times, and Rosamond bruised her head on it. Natural consequences like that punished her repeatedly during her curing.

When Rosamond became so angry that she refused to travel on, the woman never said a word or looked around. Instead, she left Rosamond behind four different times on that journey. After the fourth time Rosamond made her first weak effort to follow the kind womon's advice. What happened after that is far too much to describe here; MacDonald's ideas for new learning environments were literally fantastic.

There are four alternative prlnciples that Krumboltz offers for stopping inappropriate behavior, and the wise woman used all four during her course of treatment.

1. Satiation principle: Allow the child to continue (or insist that she continue) performing the undesired act until she tires of It.

2. Extinction principle: Arrange conditions so that the child receives no rewards following the undesired act.

3. Incompatible alternative principle: Reward an alternative action that cannot be performed at the same time as the undesired act.

4. Negative reinforcement principle: Arrange an unpleasant situation which the child can terminate Immediately by improving her behavior. According to Patterson, the most powerful reinforcers for a child or an adult are social reinforcers: the close attention of another person, a touch, words of approval, a smile, a glance, or a kiss. In some cases the yelling of "Shut up" serves as an unintentional reinforcer. When all social reinforcers and other reinforcers are removed for a time, that is called Time Out.

Time Out is an ingenious replacement for spankings, a most effective means of producing rapid decreases in the occurrence of problem behaviors; if a parent uses Time Out consistently, the effect is usually noticeable in three or four days. Time Out means removing the child from the situation where all of the reinforcers for inappropriate behavior are located; "she is placed In a new situation where there are few, if any." Patterson reports that five minutes alone in the bathroom is the best form of Time Out for a child in most families. (He tells why and discusses both medicine cabinets and fiooding.)

The wise woman apparently had no bathroom in her home in the forest, but she used several kinds of Time Out. By far the most severe was placing the shepherdess girl Agnes into a spherical blue isolation chamber, magic and invisible, where she was left alone with her obnoxious self for five days. (At night, while Agnes was asleep, she lay in the loving woman's arms all night long and drank her wonderful milk without knowing it.) The treatment worked, but it was only the beginning of retraining for Agnes. As the wise woman told her kindly after rewarding her for her first good behavior, "Agnes, you must not imagine that you are cured...." Other key ideas of Patterson that the wise woman exemplified a century earlier are:

Begin where the child is.

Reinforce desired behavior immediately and often.

To be consistent, set up a program including a specific goal, specific steps, small steps.

Be sure the child is reinforced from the very beginning.

Be specific.

Make use of natural consequences that occur every day.

Do not nag or scold. Wait for the prosoclal behavior to come and then reinforce it.

The wise woman, being perfect, could do all of this without lapsing into outbursts, forgetting her goals, or having to fight her own bad habits. Krumboltz assures ordinary mortals that they are to be congratulated if they are putting behavior modification principles to use at all, that children are resilient enough to tolerate some parental failings, and that there are practical ways to gain selfcontrol and improve skill in this art.

Behavior modification principles are so effective that they even help to train autistic children. Like any other art, this one con be used for good or evil ends. If the wlse woman had been an evil witch she could have used the same methods to turn the two girls into evil witches. Behavioral scientists tell adults how they can change children's behavior, not what behavior they ought to change.

Fortunately, few adults would purposely teach their children wicked or sick behavior; but great are the numbers who do it accidentally. When George MacDonald was writing the story of the lost princess he may hove been thinking of his monarch, Queen Victoria, and the heartache that her own beloved young son was turning out to be. Her childrearing techniques were extremely defective, and his character turned out to be defective. It was the inner person, not outer pleasantness, that MacDonald was really concerned about. He said of the conceited shepherdess, "if she were not made humble, her growing would be a mass of distorted shapes all huddled together; so that, although the body she now showed might grow up straight and wellshaped and comely to behold, the new body that was growing inside of it, and would come out of It when she died, would be ugly, and crooked...."

The wise woman summed up her rules of behavior for Rosamond by saying, "It just comes to this, that you must not do what is wrong, however much you are inclined to do it, and you must do what is right, however much you are disinclined to do it." The purpose was to get rid of her weary shadowy self and to find her strong, true self.

When Rosamond's behavior had been well modified, she asked the wise woman if she could forgive her for all the trouble she had caused. "If I had not forgiven you, I would never have taken the trouble to punish you. If I had not loved you, do you think I would have carried you away in my cloak?"

"How could you love such an ugly, illtempered, rude, hateful little wretch?"

"I saw, through it all, what you were going to be," said the wise woman, kissing her. "But remember you have yet only begun to be what I saw." Rosamond is sent home and given the job of serving her blind parents (now doubly blind) as the wise woman has served her, and bringing them to the wise woman eventually. As Patterson says, "Children change their parents, just as the parents contribute to the changes in their children."

George MacDonald never intended this 79-page fantasy to be a tract on childtralning, and a prophetic one at that. But he knew very well that it was a mysterious, powerful story with at least two meanings. Although it is usually called "The Wise Woman," he also called it "The Lost Princess-A Double Story." Here is the way he ended it:

"And that is all my double story. How double it is, if you are to know, you must find out. If you think it is not finished - I never knew a story that was. I could tell you a great deal more concerning them all, but I have already told more than is good for those who read but with their foreheads, and enough for those whom it has made look a little solemn, and sigh as they close the book."

One can read the story with one's forehead to glean MacDonald's insights about child training, and that is good. But he has been known to use a great feminine figure as his symbol for God, and he has been known to state that every child on earth is both the child of a king and the child of a shepherd.

MacDonald's double story is about everyone, because he believed that everyone is part of God's ultimate plan for the curing.

This essay is one of twenty scheduled for Spring 2001 release by Mercer University Press in Kathryn Lindskoog's collection Surprised by C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and Dante and is reproduced with permission.

© 2000-2001 Kathryn Lindskoog