l
is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light. Usually
that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the
group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary
acknowledgment of wrong. The boys--or girls--have for the first time
seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without
prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we
when convinced against our wishes.

When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still
not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle
it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to
insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent
training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side,
in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious
quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their
differences.

The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be
taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is
out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When
the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in
the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious
dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life
is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves
petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find
unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful
living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A
harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a
matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own
attitude.

Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the
family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he
occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes
radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he
quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new,
self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each
one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them.
Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not
try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he
will have to live