Handicaps of Childhood

by H. Addington Bruce

Summoning the mother to a private conference, the physician learned that, from early childhood, his patient had been very obstinate and self-willed. Her mother, through mistaken affection, had pampered her. She had literally made herself a slave to the daughter, even to the extent of giving up evening engagements that she might sit by her daughter's bed, gently stroking her head until she fell asleep.

"She cannot sleep unless I do this," said the mother, "and though I have lately tried to discontinue it, I cannot, because she cries and shrieks until I come to her."

To the neurologist the situation was now perfectly clear. The daughter's nervous symptoms were manifestly the not surprising reaction of a personality untrained in emotional control and unexpectedly confronted by a novel and painful state of affairs—the mother's half-hearted attempt to break away from her self-imposed slavery. However, it would hardly do to tell the mother that her early mismanagement of the child was responsible for the neurotic condition which had developed, and that this neurotic condition was, in reality, only a subconsciously originated device to reassert the daughter's waning authority over her mother. What the neurologist did say was:

"Madam, if you want your daughter to get well, you must at once stop this practice of stroking her to sleep. I must ask you to begin to-night. Send your daughter to her room, leave her in bed, shut and lock the door, and let her shriek. This may seem hard and cruel, but it is actually a greater kindness than a continuance of the stroking would be. It is, indeed, a first and necessary step in her cure."

The mother obeyed. For two nights the house resounded with the girl's cries. The third night she went to bed and to sleep without a protest. Then the physician once more sent for the mother.

"You are soon leaving town for the summer, I understand," he said. "What are you going to do with your daughter?"

"Why, take her with us, of course."

"You must do nothing of the sort. Instead, send her to a girls' camp. She needs contact with other girls; she needs the discipline such contact will give her. It is far and away the best medicine she can have. Her recovery depends solely on her developing a new point of view, a mental outlook that will extend beyond herself. This is what a good camp for girls can give her."

The outcome vindicated his words. That fall the nervously depressed girl came back from a summer in camp radiantly happy and with a vastly altered disposition. Since then her parents have had no trouble with her.