n will generally be
followed by resistance and a storm of weeping. She will do better to
approach him quietly, telling him that scissors hurt babies, and show
him where to place them out of harm's way. Watch a child at play after
his midday meal. He has been out in his perambulator half the morning,
and for the other half has been deep in his midday sleep. Now that
dinner is over he is for a moment master of his time and busily
engaged in some pursuit dear to his heart. At two o'clock inexorable
routine ordains that he must again be placed in the perambulator and
wheeled forth on a fresh expedition. If the nurse does not know her
business she will swoop down upon him, place him on her knee, and
begin to envelop his struggling little body in his outdoor clothes,
scolding his naughtiness as he kicks and screams. If she has a way
with children she will open the cupboard door and call on him to help
find his gaiters and his shoes because it is time for his walk. In a
moment he will leave his toys, forgetting all about them in the joy of
this new activity.

If the reason for things is explained to children they grow quick to
understand quite complicated explanations. A little girl, not yet two,
was playing with her Noah's Ark on the dining-room table with its
polished surface. The mother interposed a cloth, explaining that the
animals would scratch the table if the cloth were not there. Within a
few minutes the child twice lifted the cloth, peering under it and
saying, "Not scratch table." Yet how often do we find
facetiously-minded persons confound their reasoning and confuse their
judgment by foolish speeches and cock-and-bull tales, which, just
because of their foolishness, seem to them well adapted to the infant
intelligence.

An attempt to deceive the child is almost always wrong, and because of
our tendency to underestimate the child's intelligence it generally
fails. If a little girl has a sore throat, and the doctor comes to see
her, she knows quite well that she is the prospective patient. It is
useless for the mother to begin proceedings by trying to convince her
that this is not so--that mother has a sore throat too. Such a plan
only arouses apprehension, because the child scents danger in the
artifice.

Closely connected with the reasoning powers of the child is the
difficult question of the growth of his appreciation of right and
wrong, or, to put it in another way, the growth of obedience or
disobedience.