STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 175 



she administers. It secures ready compliance with a large part 

 of the discipline enforced. When the impulse urging toward 

 license has been too strong, and disobedience ensues, this same 

 instinct comes to the aid of order and good conduct by inflicting 

 pains which are the beginning of what we call remorse. 



By and by other forces will assist. The affectionate child will 

 reflect on the misery his disobedience causes his mother. A boy 

 of four years and nine months must, one supposes, have woke up 

 to this fact when he remarked to his mother : " Did you choose to 

 be a mother ? I think it must be rather tiresome." The day 

 when the child first becomes capable of thus putting himself into 

 his mother's place and realizing, if only for an instant, the trouble 

 he has brought on her, is an all-important one in his moral de- 

 velopment. 



As our illustrations have suggested, and as every thoughtful 

 parent knows well enough, the problem of moral training in the 

 first years is full of difficulty. Yet our study surely suggests 

 that it is not so hopeless a problem as we are sometimes weakly 

 disposed to think. Perhaps a word or two on this may not inap- 

 propriately close this essay. 



I will readily concede that the difficulty of inculcating in 

 children a sweet and cheerful obedience arises partly from the 

 nature of the child. There are trying children, just as there are 

 trying dogs that howl and make themselves disagreeable for no 

 discoverable reason but their inherent " cussedness." There are, 

 I doubt not, conscientious, painstaking mothers, who have been 

 baffled by having to manage what appears to be the utterly un- 

 manageable. 



Yet I think that we ought to be very slow to pronounce any 

 child unmanageable. I know full well that in the case of these 

 small growing things there are all kinds of hidden physical com- 

 motions which breed caprices, ruffle the temper, and make them 

 the opposite of docile. The peevish child who will do nothing, will 

 listen to no suggestion, is assuredly a difficult thing to deal with. 

 But such moodiness and cross-grainedness springing from bodily 

 disturbances will be allowed for by the discerning mother, who 

 will be too wise to bring the severer measures of discipline to bear 

 on a child when subject to its malign influence. Waiving these 

 disturbing factors, however, I should say that a good part, cer- 

 tainly more than one half, of the difficulty of training children is 

 due to our clumsy, bungling modes of going to work. 



Sensible persons know that there is a good and a bad way of 

 approaching a child. The wrong ways of trying to constrain 

 children are, alas ! numerous. I am not writing an " advice to 

 parents," and am not called on therefore to deal with the much- 

 disputed question of the Tightness and the wrongness of corporal 



