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chapter one
CHARACTERISTICS OF AGE FIVE
 
What can you as a parent expect of your Five-year-old boy or girl? It is a pleasure to tell you that with most Five-year-olds, some very good times are ahead. Five wants to be good, means to be good, and more often than not succeeds in being good.
 
Perhaps most delightful of all his characteristics is that he enjoys life so much and looks so consistently on its sunny side. “Today is my lucky day,” he will tell you as he jumps out of bed in the morning. Or, enthusiastically, “Today I’m going to do all the good things and none of the bad things.” Or even more comprehensively, “I want to be good all the time and not do any of the bad things. I’ll do whatever you say and I won’t make a fuss.”
 
In his determination to do everything just right, he may ask permission for even the simplest thing and will then beam with pleasure when his mother smiles and says, “Yes, you may have an apple, dear.”
 
Even his language is on the positive side: “Sure!”
 
“All right!” “Fine!” “Lovely,” “Wonderful” are among his favorite words, and “I just love——” is a constant refrain.
 
In fact, there are those mothers who worry that perhaps their Five-year-old is “almost too good,” as they put it. Our reassurance to such mothers is that they need not worry. Such goodness cannot last forever. If it did the child would be too compliant to stand up for his rights in what, for any growing child, will be an increasingly challenging world.
 
The key to all this goodness may be that for a few months at least, Mother is the center of the child’s world. He not only wants to please her, he wants to be near her. Wants to talk with her, play with her, help her with her housework, follow her around the house. Many Fives would actually rather stay in the house with Mother than go out to play with their friends.
 
Such adoration and acceptance, after the somewhat stormy days of Four, are certainly restful and welcomed by any mother, especially if she has more than one child. Five’s adoration of his parents is unquestionably heartwarming.
 
But Five’s positiveness and acceptance of the world extends even beyond his parents. As one little girl expressed it, “I love everybody in the whole wide world. Even God.” Another, when she heard the song “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” explained, “It would have to be God. Nobody else could do that.”
 
Five as a rule lives very closely in the here and now, and he cares very much about his own room, his own home, his street, neighborhood, and kindergarten room. He is not particularly interested in the new and strange and usually does not seek adventure for its own sake. The typical Four-year-old has been described by us as “wild and wonderful.” Wonderful he may be at times, but his wildness can get him into trouble.
 
Not so with Five. He is by nature quieter, more pulled in, closer to home. He not only prefers to stay within prescribed boundaries but feels most comfortable with the tried and true. The time that interests him is now; the place he likes best, here.
 
One of the important keys in understanding the remarkable smoothness of a Five-year-old is that he has an almost uncanny ability to judge what he can and cannot do. That is, he is self-limiting. With tremendous accuracy he judges what things are and what are not within his ability, and he tries only what he is sure of. His success then builds self-confidence. He isn’t smug, but he is secure. This means that he uses much less energy than earlier in resisting others in order to prove to himself that he is his own boss.
 
Unlike the child of some other ages, Five often shows a remarkable ability to protect himself from overstimulation. As one little girl said while visiting friends of her parents.’, “I can’t go to see your friends every night or I might get dizzy.” Another, while a visitor at nursery school not her own, told her mother on the second day, “I’m a little shy in this new school and it makes me feel a little funny in my stomach. But I think if you’ll stay for just a few minutes I’ll feel all right.”
 
Five is usually not a worrier. Six will worry that Mother may not be there when he comes home from school. Five assumes that she will be there, not only now but forever. The average child of this age seems to take for granted that he and his parents are eternal. He does not delve too far into the past (even though with his good memory he can remember things that happened to him when he was younger); and gives relatively little thought to the future. He likes life the way it is, is satisfied with himself, and adores his parents. Though not given to excess, he can sometimes be caught boasting about both mother and father and quoting them as the ultimate authorities.
 
There is also now a strong feeling for family. A child may tell the family cat, “This belonged to the whole family even before you were born.”
 
To the adult, a Five-year-old is tremendously appealing with his serious air. He is impressed with his own increasing ability to take little responsibilities and to imitate grown-up behavior. He is very proud when parent or teacher compliments him on something he has done. “Just like a grown-up,” he may exclaim proudly after some mature activity. Or it may be just his own age that impresses him: “I can do that because Five-year-olds can tie.”
 
Though the typical Five-year-old is not particularly expansive in most ways, he is expansive intellectually. He loves to be read to, loves to be talked to, loves to learn new facts. He likes to practice his own intellectual abilities—to show his mother how he can print his name, or write the numbers up to five, or spell out some of the words in his favorite books.
 
All things considered, the age of Five, for most children, can truthfully be called a golden age!
 
FIVE-AND-A-HALF TO SIX
 
So here you are, sailing along, happy as a lark. Your little son or daughter for almost six unbelievable months may have been good as gold. He or she not only plans to be good and wants to be good but actually is good. This age can be a parent’s dream come true.
 
Thus it can be more than a little disconcerting when all of a sudden things aren’t so rosy any more. That little angel who responded, oh, so easily, with “Yes, I will,” now is quite likely to say “No, I won’t.”
 
That child for whom mother was indeed the center of the world begins to show every evidence that he is now reserving that spot for himself. What’s gotten into him?
 
Quite possibly, no more than the beginnings of Six-year-oldness, a time that often brings trouble into the calmest households. Not yet a full-fledged Six, nevertheless the child of Five-and-a-half shows an all-too-great readiness to disobey, to go against what is asked or expected of him. And he doesn’t always do this gently. “Brash” and “combative” are adjectives that mothers use in describing this child, and all with good reason.
 
Five-and-a-half is characteristically hesitant, dawdling, indecisive, or, at the opposite extreme, overdemanding and explosive. Behavior is all too often characterized by the opposite extreme, which we saw earlier at Two-and-a-half years of age. That is, the child may be extremely shy one minute and then extremely bold the next; very affectionate, and then almost without warning very antagonistic.
 
And when he doesn’t have the courage to defy you outright, he dawdles—which amounts to almost the same thing. That is, whatever you want him to do, very often does not get done.
 
Emotionally the child of this age may seem to be in an almost constant state of tension, though fortunately most are calmer at school than at home. The child finds it hard to conclude an explosion or sulk or burst of tears once it has begun. This may be the beginning, once again, of a tantrum age.
 
Physically, too, we see signs of a breakup. The almost predictably healthy Five-year-old now suddenly has many colds, headaches, earaches, stomachaches. Or his feet hurt, his face hurts. He may even revert to toileting accidents when he is overexcited. And physically rather placid Five now has come to a place where there is an increase of tensional outlets—many hand-to-mouth gestures; chewing on loose clothing, biting or tapping a pencil.
 
Motorwise there is more restlessness, less composure than we saw at Five. Pencil grasp may be awkward and there may be frequent change of grasp. Though he may not, as at Six, “trip over a piece of string,” his total body seems less under his control than just formerly. And it becomes increasingly difficult for him to sit still for long periods.
 
Visually boys and girls are much more experimental than six months earlier. The simple, sure reality of Five is breaking up. Thus the child frequently loses his visual orientation and may often reverse his numbers or letters. (This is one of the several reasons why we feel this is not a good age to teach reading or writing. It is just too confusing for the child to work with words and letters when he is already having trouble figuring out the order of things.)
 
Eyes and hands now function with less speed and sureness than they did at Five, though behavior is gathering content and flow. The child at this age may know when he doesn’t have the right answer; he just doesn’t know how to get it. But he does recognize inconsistencies. His organization is breaking up, his reality often shattered. And in a way he enjoys this. Thus the child of this age may voluntarily and experimentally cross his eyes when he doesn’t understand something, when he is surprised, or when he wants to be silly.
 
Even the child’s teeth are breaking up, so to speak. One by one those pearly, even baby teeth are starting to go, beginning with the lower central incisors, which may merely loosen or may actually fall out.
 
As most parents know, few stages of perfection last forever. So though it may be disappointing, it should in no way be surprising that the golden age of Five gives way in time to the complexity and confusion of Five-and-a-half to Six.
 
Even in infancy, rather predictable stages of equilibrium alternate with stages of disequilibrium; stages of inwardizing alternate with ages of expansion. Five, as you will see clearly, is on the side of equilibrium, an equilibrium that in some children does not break up until Six. But in others, disequilibrium and difficulty may start as early as Five-and-a-half. Don’t be discouraged when it does; don’t feel that something is wrong with either your child or your handling of him or her.
 
Breakup of any early smooth stage must come before the child can attain a higher and more mature stage of equilibrium. But that higher stage will come, you can be almost certain.