FALSE SYMPATHY
We are aware that many good people in perusing this chapter will think that some of the advice here given is both cruel and hard hearted; but we can safely venture the opinion that those who have reared many children, at least if they have had some nervous little ones, will be able to discern the meaning and significance of most of our suggestions. Sympathy is a beautiful and human trait and we want nothing in this chapter in any way to interfere with that characteristic sympathy of a parent for its offspring—the proverbial "as a father pitieth his children"—nevertheless, there is a great deal of sympathy that is utterly false, that is of the nature of a disastrous compromise, for the time being making it easy for both parent and child, but making things unutterably more difficult later on in life when both (or perhaps the child alone) must face the calamitous consequences of this failure early to inculcate the principles of self-control and self-mastery on the mind and character of the nervous child.
We so often hear "mother love" eulogized. It is a wonderful and self-denying human trait; but, as a physician, I have been led to believe that "mother loyalty" is of almost equal or even greater value. All mothers love their children more or less, but only a few mothers possess that superb loyalty which is able to rise above human sympathy and maternal love, which qualifies the mother to stand smilingly by the side of the crib and watch her little one in a fit of anger—yelling at the top of its voice—and yet never touch the child, allow the little fellow to come to himself, to wake up to the fact that all his yelling, his emotion, his anger, and his resentment are absolutely powerless to move his mother. Thus has the mother—by her loyalty to the little fellow—taught him a new lesson in self-control, and thus has she added one more strong link in the chain of character which parent and child are forging day by day, and which finally must determine both the child's temporal and eternal destiny.