Mothers will complain that children seem to take a perverse pleasure in evoking reproof, appeals, entreaties, and exhortations. A small boy of four who had several times repeated the particular sin to which his attention had been directed by the frequency of his mother's warnings and entreaties, finding that on this occasion she had decided to take no notice, approached her with a troubled face: "Are you not angry?" he said; "are you not disappointed?" In reality the naughty child is often only the child who has become master of his mother's or his nurse's responses, and can produce at will the effect he desires. The idea that the child possesses a strong will, which can and must be broken by persistent opposition, is based upon this tendency of the child. It is an entire misconception of the situation: Strength of will and fixity of purpose are among the last powers which the human mind develops. In little children they are conspicuously absent. What appears to us as a fixed and persistent desire to perform a definite action in spite of all we can say or do, is often no more than the desire to produce the familiar tones of reproof, to traverse again the familiar ground, to attract attention and to find himself again the centre of the picture. If no one pays any attention and no one reproves, he soon gives up the attempt. If too much is made of any one action of the child, a strong impression is made on his mind and he cannot choose but return to it again and again.
This little drama of the fireplace may teach us a great deal in the management of children. The wise mother and nurse will find a hundred devices to catch the child's attention and lure him away from the danger zone without the incident making any impression on his mind at all, and will not call attention to it by repeated reproofs or warnings which will certainly lead him straight back to the spot.
In matters of greater moment the same impulse to oppose the will of those around him is seen. In considering the point of the child's susceptibility to suggestion, we have mentioned the refusal of sleep and the refusal of food. In both it is possible to detect the influence of this pronounced force of opposition. As the child lies sobbing or screaming in bed, every new approach to him, every fresh attempt at pacification, renews the force of his opposition in a crescendo of sound. But it is in his refusal of food that the child is apt to find his chief opportunity. Meal-times degenerate into a struggle. There at least he can show his complete mastery of the situation. No one can swallow his food for him, and he knows it. He can clench his teeth and shake his head and obstinately refuse every morsel offered. He can hold food in his mouth for half an hour at a time and remain deaf to all the appeals of his helpless nurse. If she tries force, he quells the attempt by a storm of crying. If she declines upon entreaty and coaxing, he will not be persuaded. It is the little scene of the fireplace over again. The attempts at force or the attempts at persuasion, by making much of it, have concentrated the attention of the child upon the difficulty, and have taught him his own power to dominate the situation.
It is right that parents should realise that the disturbing and irritating element in the child's environment is nearly always provided by the intrusion of the adult mind and its contact with the child's. Some supervision and some intrusion, therefore, is of course absolutely necessary, but the best-regulated nursery is that in which it is least evident. Something is definitely wrong if a child of two years will not play for half an hour at a time happily and busily in a room by himself. It is an even better test if the child will play amicably by himself with nurse or mother in the room, without the two parties crossing swords on a single occasion, without reproof or repression on the one side or undue attempts to attract attention on the other. If the child is entirely dependent upon the participation of grown-up persons in his pursuits, then not only do those pursuits lose much of their educative force, but they become a positive source of danger because of the constant interplay of personality with personality. The child who, seated on the ground, will play with his toys by himself, rises with a brain that is stimulated but not exhausted. Only very rarely do we find that solitary play, or play between children, is too exciting. In older children of very quick intelligence and nervous temperament we occasionally find that the pace which they themselves set is too exciting or exhausting. I recall a little boy of seven, an only child of particularly wise and thoughtful parents, who was brought to me with the complaint that he exhausted himself utterly both in body and mind by the intense nervous energy which he threw into his pursuits. For instance, he had been interested in the maps illustrating the various fronts in the European War, with which the walls of his father's study were hung, and although left entirely by himself he had become intensely excited and exhausted by the eagerness with which he had spent a whole morning, with a wealth of imaginative force, in drawing a map of the garden of his house and converting it into the likeness of a war map, filled with imaginary Army Corps. Such excessive expenditure of nervous force is unusual even in older children, and as in this case is found usually only when there is a pronounced nervous inheritance. In little children in the nursery, solitary play or play between themselves seldom produces nervous exhaustion. It is quite otherwise when the child is dependent to a too great extent upon the participation of adults. It is almost impossible for the mother and nurse not to take the leading part in the exchange of ideas, and no matter what may be their good intentions, the pace set is apt to be too great. Environment, without the intrusion of the adult mind, is best able to adjust the necessary stimulus and produce development without exhaustion. Play with grown-up persons, the reading aloud of story books, the showing of pictures, and so forth, undoubtedly have their own importance, but they should be confined within strict limits and to a definite hour in the daily routine. There is sometimes too great a tendency for parents to make playthings of their little children. Save at stated times, they must curb their desire to join in their games, to gather them in their arms, to hold them on their knee, while they stimulate their minds by a constant succession of new impressions. With an only child, whose existence is the single preoccupation of the nurse and mother, and, often enough, of the father as well, it is difficult to avoid this fault. Yet, if wisdom is not learnt, the damage to the child may be distressingly serious. He rapidly grows incapable of supporting life without this excessive stimulation. Without the constant society and attention of a grown person, he feels himself lost. He cannot be left alone, and yet cannot enjoy the society he craves. He grows more and more restless, dominating the whole situation more and more, constantly plucking at his nurse's skirts, perversely refusing every new sensation that is offered him to still his restlessness for a moment. The result of all this stimulation is mental irritability and exhaustion, which in turn is often the direct cause of refusal of food, dyspepsia, wakefulness, and excessive crying.
The devices by which children will attract to themselves the attention of their elders, and which, if successful, are repeated with an almost insane persistence, take on the most varied forms. Sometimes the child persistently makes use of an expression, or asks questions, which produce a pleasant stir of shocked surprise and renewed reproofs and expostulations. One little boy shouted the word "stomachs" with unwearied persistence for many weeks together. A little girl dismayed her parents and continued in spite of all they could do to prevent her to ask every one if they were about to pass water.
Disorders of conduct of this sort are not really difficult to control. Suitable punishment will succeed, provided also that the child is deprived of the sense of satisfaction which he has in the interest which his conduct excites. His behaviour is only of importance because it indicates certain faults in his environment and a certain element of nervous unrest and overstrain.
The young child demands from his environment that it should give him two things—security and liberty. He must have security from shocks to his nervous system. It is true that from the greater shocks the children of the well-to-do are as a rule carefully guarded. No one threatens or ill-uses them. They are not terrified by drunken brawls or scenes of passion. They are not made fearful by the superstitions of ignorant people. Nevertheless, by the summation of stimuli little emotions constantly repeated can have effects no less grave upon their nervous system. From this constantly acting irritation the child needs security. In the second place, he requires liberty to develop his own initiative, which should be stimulated and sustained and directed. Without liberty and without security conduct cannot fail to become abnormal.
(d) The Reasoning Power of the Child
Before we proceed to a closer examination of the various symptoms of nervous unrest in detail, we may very briefly consider the scope and power of the child's understanding. As a rule I am sure that it is grossly underestimated. The mental processes of the child are far ahead of his power of speech. The capacity for understanding speech is well advanced, and an appeal to reason is often successful while the child is still powerless to express his own thoughts in words. Because he cannot so express himself there is a tendency to underestimate the acuteness of his reasoning, to talk down to him, and to imagine that he can be imposed upon by any fiction which seems likely to suit the purpose of the moment. A child of eighteen months is not too young to be talked to in a quiet, straightforward, sensible way. Only if he is treated as a reasonable being can we expect his reasoning faculties to develop. Children dislike intensely the unexplained intervention of force. If a pair of scissors, left by an oversight lying about, has been grasped, the first impulse of the mother is to snatch the danger hurriedly from the child's hands, and her action will generally be followed by resistance and a storm of weeping. She will do better to approach him quietly, telling him that scissors hurt babies, and show him where to place them out of harm's way. Watch a child at play after his midday meal. He has been out in his perambulator half the morning, and for the other half has been deep in his midday sleep. Now that dinner is over he is for a moment master of his time and busily engaged in some pursuit dear to his heart. At two o'clock inexorable routine ordains that he must again be placed in the perambulator and wheeled forth on a fresh expedition. If the nurse does not know her business she will swoop down upon him, place him on her knee, and begin to envelop his struggling little body in his outdoor clothes, scolding his naughtiness as he kicks and screams. If she has a way with children she will open the cupboard door and call on him to help find his gaiters and his shoes because it is time for his walk. In a moment he will leave his toys, forgetting all about them in the joy of this new activity.
If the reason for things is explained to children they grow quick to understand quite complicated explanations. A little girl, not yet two, was playing with her Noah's Ark on the dining-room table with its polished surface. The mother interposed a cloth, explaining that the animals would scratch the table if the cloth were not there. Within a few minutes the child twice lifted the cloth, peering under it and saying, "Not scratch table." Yet how often do we find facetiously-minded persons confound their reasoning and confuse their judgment by foolish speeches and cock-and-bull tales, which, just because of their foolishness, seem to them well adapted to the infant intelligence.