en to a party of nurses in the Park addressing their charges. As
if they knew that their commands have small chance of being obeyed,
they shout them with incisive force. "Come along at once when I tell
you," they say. And the child faithfully reflects it all back, and is
heard ordering his little sister about like a drill sergeant, or
curtly bidding his grandmother change her seat to suit his pleasure.
If we are to have pretty phrases and tones of voice, mothers must see
to it that the child habitually hears no other. Again, mothers will
complain that their child is deaf, or, at any rate, that he has the
bad habit of responding to all remarks addressed to him by saying,
"What?" or, worse still, "Eh?" Often enough the reason that he does so
is not that the child is deaf, nor that he is particularly slow to
understand, but simply that he himself speaks so indistinctly that no
matter what he says to the grown-up people around him, they bend over
him and themselves utter the objectionable word.

We all hate the tell-tale child, and when a boy comes in from his walk
and has much to say of the wicked behaviour of his little sister on
the afternoon's outing, his mother is apt to see in this a most horrid
tendency towards tale-bearing and currying of favour. She does not
realise that day by day, when the children have come in from their
walk, she has asked nurse in their hearing if they have been good
children; and when, as often happens, they have not, the nurse has
duly recounted their shortcomings, with the laudable notion of putting
them to shame, and of emphasising to them the wickedness of their
backsliding--and this son of hers is no hypocrite, but speaks only, as
all children speak, in faithful reproduction of all that he hears.
Those grown-up persons who are in charge of the children must realise
that the child's vocabulary is their vocabulary, not his own. It is
unfortunate, but I think not unavoidable, that so often almost the
earliest words that the infant learns to speak are words of reproof,
or chiding, or repression. The baby scolds himself with gusto,
uttering reproof in the very tone of his elders: "No, no," "Naughty,"
or "Dirty," or "Baby shocked."

Speech, then, is imitative from the first, if we except the early baby
sounds with reduplication of consonants to which in course of time
definite meaning becomes attached, as "Ba-ba," "Ma-ma," "Na-na,"
"Ta-ta," and so forth. Action only becomes imitative at a som