What extent do interests motivate the child's behavior?

What is meant by interest? To what extent do interests motivate the child's behavior? Of what importance are they in his development? How closely are interests related to aptitude and maturity? What fundamental directions do the child's interests take? What are his recreational, social, intellectual, aesthetic, and vocational interests during the first dozen years of his life? What is the significance of his interests in motion pictures? What are the practical guides and effective laws and principles for developing wholesome interests? These are important questions for all who would understand the forces motivating children's behavior.

The Meaning of Interest. Interest has two diverse meanings in psychological usage. It means a condition or cause of attention; it also refers to the feeling of pleasure resulting from giving attention to something or from experiencing something. Webster defines interest as "excitement of feeling accompanying special attention to some object; concern; as, an interest in Botany." Thus, this term has been used to refer both to the cause and to the result of giving attention or of experiencing. Using the word in the first sense, we say the boy gets out his blocks because he is interested in building a house, or the little girl makes a doll dress because she is interested in having lots of clothes for her doll. Using it in the second sense, that of a resultant feeling of pleasure, we say the child is interested in playing at building a house or making doll dresses. These two meanings, while diverse, are closely related in the experiences and behavior of the child. Interest which is a result of the feeling of pleasure attendant upon some event or experience tends to condition the child in such a way that he later on does attend to that experience, object, or event because of the pleasure which resulted from previously experiencing or attending to it. This is merely saying that the result of a previous response may be, and frequently is, a present cause of repeating that response. Similarly, a present result may be a future cause. At any rate, interests are motives and often have very strong activating influence on the child's behavior.

Genuine interest is the accompaniment of the identification, through action, of the self with some object or idea, because of the necessity of that object or idea for the maintenance of a self-initiated activity. Effort, in the sense in which it may be opposed to interest, implies a separation between the self and the fact to be mastered or task to be performed, and sets up an habitual division of activities. Externally, we have mechanical habits with no mental end or value. Internally, we have random energy or mind-wandering, a sequence of ideas with no end at all, because they are not brought to a focus in action. Interest, in the sense in which it is opposed to effort, means simply an excitation of the sense organ to give pleasure, resulting in strain on one side and listlessness on the other.

Genuine interest is active, projective, or propulsive, is objective in that it does not end simply in itself, as some feelings may, but involves some object of regard, and is personal, signifying direct concern. The emotional side of interest is quite as significant as its active and objective sides.