Neuropathic children are super-emotional, and from them come prodigies, geniuses, perverts and madmen. They are usually spare of build, with pale, sallow complexions, and dark rings under the eyes.
They can never sit still, but wriggle restlessly about on their seats, pick their nostrils, and bite their nails. They are always wanting to be doing something, but soon tire of it, and start something else, which is as quickly cast aside; their energy is feverish but fitful. They jump to conclusions, quickly grasp ideas; as quickly forget them. Having no capacity for calm, reasoned judgment, they are creatures of impulse, imperative but timid, suffer from strange ideas, and worry over trifles.
The affections are strong and vehement, likes and dislikes are taken without reason, while intense personal attachments—often unrequited—occur, but not seldom swing round to indifference, or even bitter enmity. The passions and emotions are all abnormal, for owing to deficiency in the higher inhibitory centres, the victim is blown about by every idle emotional wind that blows. The slightest irritation may provoke
an outburst of maniacal rage, or a fit. Consequently, they require the most careful, but firm training, right from birth, to bring them up with a minimum of nerve-strain. Twitchings, night or day terrors, sleep walking, and incontinence of urine often trouble them. They should be examined by a doctor once a year.
These children have no balance, and are usually selfish, always garrulous, with a love of romancing, while a ready wit combined with fertile imagination often gains them a bubble reputation for learning they do not possess. Invention, poetry, music, artistic taste and originality are occasionally of a high order, and the memory is sometimes phenomenal; but desultory, half-finished work, and shiftlessness are the rule.
Their appetite is fitful and fanciful, they like unsuitable foods, and their digestive system is easily upset. At puberty, sexual perversity is common, and the animal appetite, is as a rule, very strong, though rarely, it may be absent. During adolescence, there is excessive shyness or bravado, always introspection, and exaggerated self-consciousness.
As they grow older, they readily contract hypochondria, neurasthenia, hysteria, alcoholism, insomnia and drug habits, and react unduly to the most trifling external causes, even to the weather, by which they are exhilarated or depressed.
Education. Send them to school only when the law compels you, and observe them closely while there, for health is far more important to them than education. "Infant prodigies" lack the mental staying power and physical robustness which real success demands, though they may do well for a time. Go to your old school: the successes of to-day were dunces twenty years ago; about those whose names are proudly emblazoned in fading gold on Rolls of Honour, a discreet silence is maintained.
Keep a keen lookout for symptoms of over-effort.
Sleepiness, languor, a vacant expression, forehead wrinkled, eyebrows knit, eyes dull, sunken and surrounded by dark rings, twitchings, restlessness, or loss of appetite are all warnings that the pace is too strong for the child.