e parents who are distressed when the child
refuses to eat or to sleep, and who worry all day long over possible
sources of danger to him, are forced to watch their child acquire a
reputation for nervousness, which, as always, is passively accepted
and consistently acted up to. Differences in type, determined by
hereditary factors, no doubt, exist and are often strongly marked. Yet
it is not untrue to say that variations in children, dependent upon
heredity, show chiefly in the relative susceptibility or
insusceptibility of the child to the influences of environment and
management. It is no easy task to distinguish between the nervous
child and the child of the nervous mother, between the child who
inherits an unusually sensitive nervous system and the child who is
nervous only because he breathes constantly an atmosphere charged with
doubt and anxiety.

(_c_) THE CHILD'S LOVE OF POWER

Let us study briefly a third quality of the child which, for want of a
better name, I have called after the ruling passion of mankind, his
love of power. Perhaps it would be better to call it his love of being
in the centre of the picture. It is his constant desire to make his
environment revolve around him and to attract all attention to
himself. Somewhat later in life this desire to attract attention, at
all costs, is well seen in the type of girl popularly regarded as
hysterical. The impulse is then a morbid and debased impulse; in the
child it is natural and, within limits, praiseworthy. A girl of this
sort, who feels that she is not likely to attract attention because of
any special gifts of beauty or intellect which she may possess,
becomes conscious that she can always arouse interest by the severity
of her bodily sufferings. The suggestion acts upon her unstable mind,
and forthwith she becomes paralysed, or a cripple, or dumb, presenting
a mimicry or travesty of some bodily ailment with which she is more or
less familiar. "Hysterical" girls will even apply caustic to the skin
in order to produce some strange eruption which, while it sorely
puzzles us doctors, will excite widespread interest and commiseration.
Now little children will seldom carry their desire to attract
attention so far as to work upon the feelings of their parents by
simulating disease. They have not the necessary knowledge to play the
part, and even if they make the attempt, complaining of this or that
symptom which they notice has aroused the interest of t