ing kissed is
apt to spoil the spontaneity of the child's caresses. We must not,
however, expect to find any trace in the young child of such a complex
quality as unselfishness or self-abnegation. The child's conception of
his own self has but just emerged. It is his single impulse to develop
his own experience and his own powers, and his attitude for many
years is summed up in the phrase: "Me do it." We must not expect him
to resign his toys to the little visitor, or the little visitor to
cease from his efforts to obtain them. In all our dealings with
children we must know what we may legitimately expect from them, and
judge them by their own standards, not by those of adult life. We
cannot expect self-sacrifice in a child, and, after all, when we come
to think of it, obedience is but another name for self-sacrifice. If
the tiny child could possibly obey all the behests that are heaped
upon him in the course of a day by many a nurse and mother, he would
truly be living a life of complete self-abnegation. Surely it is
because the virtue of obedience, the virtue that is proclaimed
proverbially the child's own, is so impossible of attainment that it
is become the subject of so much emphasis. As Madame Montessori has
put it: "We ask for obedience and the child in turn asks for the
moon." Only when we have developed the child's reasoning powers, by
treating him as a rational being, can we expect him deliberately to
defer his wishes to ours, because he has learned that our requests are
generally reasonable.

CHAPTER III

WANT OF APPETITE AND INDIGESTION

The mind of the child is so unstable and yet so highly developed, that
symptoms of nervous disturbance are more frequent and of greater
intensity than in later life. Only rarely and in exceptional cases do
certain symptoms, common in childhood, persist into adult life or
appear there for the first time, and then usually in persons who, if
they are not actually insane, are at least suffering from intense
nervous strain. We have already mentioned the symptom of negativism
and noted its occasional occurrence as an accompaniment of mental
disorder in adult life, and its frequency among children who are
irritable or irritated. Similarly, we may cite the digestive neuroses
of adult life to explain the common refusal of food and the common
nervous vomiting of the second year of life. Thus, for example, there
exists in adult life a disturbance of the nervous system which