Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/187

Rh 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 development.

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 inappropriately 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 unmanageable.

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 commotions 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, certainly 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