ie, to steal,
to fight, to be selfish, to be self-willed is not at all unnatural; for
him to have bad table manners and to forget admonition in general and
against these manners in particular is his birthright, so to speak.

Yet many a mother of to-day torments her child into a bad introspection
and self-consciousness, herself into neurasthenia, and her husband into
seething rebellion, because of her desire for perfection, because of her
fear that a "bad act" may form into a habit and thence into a vicious
character.

Especially is this true of the overaesthetic, overconscientious types
described in Chapter III. I have seen women who made the dinner table
less a place to eat than a place where a child was pilloried for his
manners,--pilloried into sullen, appetiteless state.

So, too, an unfortunate publicity given to child prodigies brought with
it for a short time an epidemic of forced intellectual feeding of
children, that produced only a precocious neurasthenia as its great
result. Similarly the Montessori method of child training which made
every woman into a kindergarten teacher did a hundred times more harm
than good, despite the merits of the system. That a child needs to
experiment with life himself means that it will be a long time before
the average mother will know how to help him.

A factor that tends to perplex the mother and hurts the training of the
child is her doubt as how "to discipline." Shall it be the old-fashioned
corporal punishment of a past generation, the appeal to pain and blame?
Shall it be the nowadays emphasized moral suasion, the appeal to
conscience and reason? With all the preachers of new methods filling her
ear she finds that moral suasion fails in her own child's case, and yet
she is afraid of physical punishment.

This is not the place to study child training in any extensive manner,
yet it needs be said that praise and blame, pleasure and pain, are the
great incentives to conduct. One cannot drive a horse with one rein;
neither can one drive a child into social ways, social conformity by one
emotion or feeling. Corporal punishment is a necessity, sparingly used
but vigorously used when indicated. Of course praise is needed and so is
reward.

What is here to be emphasized is that a sense of great responsibility
and an over-critical attitude toward the children is a factor of
importance in the nervous state of the modern housewife. Increasing
knowledge and increasing demand ha