yed by the attitude of the person
who puts the child to bed. Often the nurse is uniformly successful,
while the mother, who is perhaps more distressed by the sobbing of the
child, as consistently fails, because she has been unable to hide her
apprehension from him, and has conveyed to his mind a sense of his own
power.

Just in the same way, grown-up people, filled with anxiety because of
the helplessness of the young child, unable to divest their minds of
the fears of the hundred and one accidents that may befall, or that
within their own experience have befallen, a little child at one time
or another, unconsciously make unwise suggestions which fill his mind
with apprehension and terror. They do not like their children to show
fear of animals. Nor would they if it were not that their own
apprehension that the child may be hurt communicates itself to him.
The child is not of himself afraid to fall, it is they who suffer the
anxiety and show it by treating the fall as a disaster. The child is
not of himself afraid to be left alone in a room. It is they who sap
his confidence in himself, because they do not venture to leave him
out of their sight, from a nameless dread of what may happen. A little
girl cut her finger and ran to her nurse, pleased and interested:
"See," she said, seeing it bleed, "fingers all jammy." Only when the
nurse grasped her with unwise expressions of horror did she break into
cries of fear. A town-bred nurse, who is afraid of cows, will make
every country walk an ordeal of fear for the children.

Every mother must be made to realise the ease with which these
unconscious suggestions act upon the mind of the little child, and
should school herself to be strong to make her child strong, and to
see to it that all this suggestive force is utilised for good and not
for evil.

It is upon this susceptibility to suggestion that a great part of his
early education reposes. No one who is incapable of profiting by this
natural disposition of the child can be successful in her management
of him. Turn where you will in his daily life the influence of this
force of suggestion is clearly apparent. The child does without
questioning that which he is confidently expected to do. Thus he will
eat what is given him, and sleep soundly when he is put to bed if only
the appropriate suggestion and not the contrary is made to him. Again
we have seen that a perversion of suggestion of this sort is a common
source of con