TEACHING SELF-CONTROL
When nervous children grow up, especially if their parents are well to do, and they are not forced to work for a living, they are prone to develop into erratic, neurasthenic, and hysterical women, and worrying, inefficient, and nervous men; and in later years they throng the doctor's offices with both their real and imaginary complaints. These patients always feel that they are different from other people, that something terrible is the matter with them or that something awful is about to happen to them. Their brains constantly swarm with fears and premonitions of disease, disaster, and despair, while their otherwise brilliant intellects are confused and handicapped because of these "spoiled" and "hereditary" nervous disturbances—with the result that both their happiness and usefulness in life is largely destroyed.
The fundamental abnormal characteristic of that great group of nerve-patients who throng the doctor's office is sensitiveness, suggestibility, and lack of self-control. Sensitiveness is nothing more or less than a refined form of selfishness, while lack of self-control is merely the combined end-product of heredity and childhood spoiling. I am a great believer in, and practitioner of, modern methods of psychological child culture, but let me say to the fond parent who has a nervous child, when you have failed to teach the child self-control by suggestive methods, do not hesitate to punish, for of all cases it is doubly true of the nervous child that if you "spare the rod" you are sure to "spoil the child."
Let me urge parents to secure this self-control and enforce this discipline before the child is three or four years of age; correct the child at a time when your purpose can be accomplished without leaving in his subconscious mind so many vivid memories of these personal and, sometimes, more or less brutal physical encounters. Every year you put off winning the disciplinary fight with your offspring, you enormously increase the danger and likelihood of alienating his affections and otherwise destroying that beautiful and sympathetic relationship which should always exist between a child and his parents. In other words, the older the child, the less the good you accomplish by discipline and the more the personal resentment toward the parent is aroused on the part of the child.