Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/80

 coffee in bed, and while he was eating I got his bath ready and laid out his fresh clothes, and got his things in order for him to start to school. He'll learn in time if you are patient with him."

In addition to the fact that it was bad hygiene for Tommy to eat before he bathed, it was poor discipline which his mother subjected him to. He was an exaggerated type of the only son whose career in college was short because he had been coddled by a too loving and a too indulgent mother at home.

Let me explain at once that though I am not the only child, I am the youngest son, and so am writing without prejudice and not without experience. As a child I had more freedom and more privileges than any of my older brothers and sisters had been permitted to enjoy. I was the normal spoiled child, I think, petted by my older sisters and praised and coddled by father and mother. I went to school when I pleased, and worked when I wished to do so. When I was fifteen my father died.

It is a handicap, I am convinced, to be the only child or the youngest son or the son of but one parent. A beneficent creator when he wrote the directions for running the universe decreed that every normal child should have two parents, and I think that either a greater or a smaller number than this generally results in an ill effect upon the child; and he intended, also, until society made it unpopular, that there should be more than one child in every family, in order that one might help in the training and the education of the others. Sometimes a wise parent is able to overcome this handicap for his child; sometimes a clever independent child is able to manage