The Nervous Child

by Hector Charles Cameron

An attempt to deceive the child is almost always wrong, and because of our tendency to underestimate the child's intelligence it generally fails. If a little girl has a sore throat, and the doctor comes to see her, she knows quite well that she is the prospective patient. It is useless for the mother to begin proceedings by trying to convince her that this is not so—that mother has a sore throat too. Such a plan only arouses apprehension, because the child scents danger in the artifice.

Closely connected with the reasoning powers of the child is the difficult question of the growth of his appreciation of right and wrong, or, to put it in another way, the growth of obedience or disobedience. Sooner or later the child must learn to obey; on that there can be no two opinions. Nevertheless, I think there can be no doubt that far more harm is done by an over-emphasis of authority than by its neglect. If the nurse or mother is of strong character, and the authority is exercised persistently and remorselessly, so that the whole life of the child is dominated, much as the recruit's existence in the barrack yard is dominated by the drill sergeant, his independence of nature is crushed. He is certain to become a colourless and uninteresting child; he runs a grave risk of growing sly, broken-spirited, and a currier of favour. If a child is ruthlessly punished for disobedience from his earliest years, there is, it need hardly be said, a grave risk that he will learn to lie to save his skin. I have seen a few such cases of what I may call the remorseless exercise of authority, and the result has not been pleasing. Fortunately, perhaps, not many women have the heart to adopt this attitude to the waywardness of little children—a waywardness to which their whole nature compels them by their pressing need to cultivate tactile sensations, to experiment, and to explore. Therefore, much more commonly, the authority is exercised intermittently and capriciously, with the result that the child's judgment is clouded and confused. Conduct which is received indulgently or even encouraged at one moment is sternly reprimanded at another. Every one who has the management of little children must above all see to it, whatever the degree of stringency in discipline which they decide to adopt, that their attitude is always consistent. The less that is forbidden the better, but when the line is drawn it must be adhered to. If once the child learns that the force which restrains him can be made to yield to his own efforts, the future is black indeed. From that day he sets himself to strike down authority with a success which encourages him to further efforts. I have known a child of five years terrorise his mother and get his own way by the threat, "I will go into one of my furies."

The difficulty of successfully enforcing authority, and of carrying off the victory if that authority is disputed, should make mothers wary of drawing too tight a rein. The conflict between parent and child must always be distressing and must always be prejudicial to the child, whatever its outcome, whether it brings to him victory or defeat. He learns from it either an undue sense of power or an undue sense of helplessness, and the knowledge of neither is to his benefit. Although frequently worsted in the conflict, nurses will often return to the attack again and again and hour after hour, restraining, reproving, forbidding, and even threatening. Nor do they see that they are really goading the children into disobedience by their misdirected efforts at enforcing discipline. Reproof, like punishment, loses all its effect when it is too often repeated, and the child soon takes it for granted that all he does is wrong, and that grown-up people exist only to thwart his will, to misunderstand, to reprove, or even to punish.

In the nursery the word "naughty" is far too frequently heard. It is naughty to do this, it is naughty to do that. There is no gradation in the condemnation, and the child loses all sense of the meaning of the word. He himself proclaims himself naughty almost with satisfaction: his doll is naughty, the dog is naughty, his nurse and mother are naughty, and so forth. In reality the little child is peculiarly sensitive to blame, if he is not reproof-hardened. It is hardly necessary to use words of blame at all. If he is asked kindly and quietly to desist, much as we would address a grown-up person, and does not, he can be made to feel that his conduct is unpopular by keeping aloof from him a little, by disregarding him for the time being, and by indicating to him that he is a troublesome little person with whom we cannot be bothered.

Any one who has had much to do with children will realise that, if wrongly handled, they are apt to take a positive delight in doing what they conceive to be wrong. There is clearly a delightful element of excitement in the process of being naughty, of daring and of braving the wrath to come, with which they are so familiar and for which they care nothing at all. But the perverseness of which we are now speaking has a different origin. It arises only when children are reproved, appealed to, and expostulated with too often and too constantly. Negativism is a symptom which is common enough in certain mental disorders. The unhappy patient always does the opposite of what is desired or expected of him. If he be asked to stand up he will endeavour to remain seated, or if asked to sit he will attempt to rise to his feet. Like many other symptoms of nervous disturbance which we shall study later, this negativistic spirit is often displayed to perfection by little children when the environment is at fault and when grown-up people have too freely exercised authority. A mother, anxious to induce her little son to come to the doctor, and knowing well that her call to him to enter the room, as he stands hesitating at the door, will at once determine his retreat to the nursery, has been heard to say, "Run away, darling, we don't want you here," with the expected result that the docile child immediately comes forward. To the doctor, that such a device should be practised almost as a matter of course and that its success should be so confidently anticipated, should give food for thought. It may shed light on much that is to follow later in the interview.

The question of punishment, like that of reproof, is beset with difficulty. There are fortunately nowadays few educated mothers who are so foolish as to threaten punishment which they obviously do not intend to administer and which the child knows they will not administer. It is clear that punishment must be rare or else the child will grow habituated to it, and with little children we cannot be brutal or push punishment to the point of extreme physical pain. It is more difficult to say, as one is tempted to say, that all punishment is futile and should be discarded. Probably mothers are like schoolmasters in that no two schoolmasters and no two mothers obtain their effects in exactly the same way or by precisely the same means. Nor do all children accept reproof or submit to punishment in the same way. Some make light of it and take a pleasure in defying authority. Others are unduly cast down by the slightest adverse criticism. It is generally true that extreme sensitiveness to reproof is a sign of a certain elevation of character. Always we must remember that for a mother to inflict punishment, whether by causing physical pain or mental suffering, is to take on her shoulders a certain responsibility. It is a serious matter if she has misapprehended the child's act—if the sin was not really a sin, but only some perverted action, the intention of which was not sinful, but designed for good in the faulty reasoning of the child. A little girl, in bed with a feverish cold, was found shivering, with her night-dress wet and muddy. It was an understanding mother who found that her little brother, having heard somehow that ice was good for fevered heads, had brought in several handfuls of snow from the garden, not of the cleanest, and had offered them to aid his sister's recovery. It need hardly be said that punishment should always be deliberate. The hasty slap is nothing else than the motor discharge provoked by the irritability of the educator, and the child, who is a good observer on such points, discerns the truth and measures the frailty of his judge.

The frequent repetition of words of reproof and acts of punishment has a further disadvantage that the older children are quick to practise both upon their younger brothers and sisters. There is something wrong in the nursery where the lives of the little ones are made a burden to them by the constant repression of the older children. But although set and artificial punishments are as a general rule to be used but sparingly, the mother can see to it that the child learns by experience that a foolish or careless act brings its own punishment. If, for example, a child breaks his toy, or destroys its mechanism, she need not be so quick in mending it that he does not learn the obvious lesson. If the baby throws his doll from the perambulator, in sheer joy at the experience of imparting motion to it, she need not prevent him from learning the lesson that this involves also some temporary separation from it. Throughout all his life he is to learn that he cannot eat his cake and have it too. The use of rewards is also beset with difficulties. Their coming must be unexpected and occasional. They must never degenerate into bribes, to be bargained for upon condition of good behaviour. Rewards which take the form of special privileges are best.

The æsthetic sense of children develops very early. From the very beginning of the second year they take delight in new clothes, and in personal adornment of all sorts. They show evident pleasure if the nursery acquires a new picture or a new wall-paper. They have pronounced favourites in colours. Even tiny children show dislike of dirt and all unpleasant things. Personal cleanliness should be clearly desired by all children. A sense of what is pleasant and what is unpleasant should be encouraged. Any delay in its appearance is apt to imply a backwardness in development of mind or of body. Only children who are tired out by physical illness or by nervous exhaustion will lie without protest in a dirty condition.

Affection and the attempt to express affection appear clearly marked even in the first year. Too much kissing and too much being kissed is apt to spoil the spontaneity of the child's caresses. We must not, however, expect to find any trace in the young child of such a complex quality as unselfishness or self-abnegation. The child's conception of his own self has but just emerged. It is his single impulse to develop his own experience and his own powers, and his attitude for many years is summed up in the phrase: "Me do it." We must not expect him to resign his toys to the little visitor, or the little visitor to cease from his efforts to obtain them. In all our dealings with children we must know what we may legitimately expect from them, and judge them by their own standards, not by those of adult life. We cannot expect self-sacrifice in a child, and, after all, when we come to think of it, obedience is but another name for self-sacrifice. If the tiny child could possibly obey all the behests that are heaped upon him in the course of a day by many a nurse and mother, he would truly be living a life of complete self-abnegation. Surely it is because the virtue of obedience, the virtue that is proclaimed proverbially the child's own, is so impossible of attainment that it is become the subject of so much emphasis. As Madame Montessori has put it: "We ask for obedience and the child in turn asks for the moon." Only when we have developed the child's reasoning powers, by treating him as a rational being, can we expect him deliberately to defer his wishes to ours, because he has learned that our requests are generally reasonable.