either good nourishment, or good example, for the
tender heart feelings.

When a child does wrong, the nurse scolds it and displays an ill-feeling
which is the very contrary of tenderness and affection. That is bad
enough, but it is not half so bad as the fact that this same repellent
treatment is very often accorded a child when it has not done wrong at
all, but has merely obeyed some spontaneous and beautiful impulse of its
little nature, which an irritable nurse does not bother to understand.
The way that a nurse wishes a child to go is not usually prompted by any
loving consideration for the heart feelings of the child, but a very
selfish consideration for the convenience and prejudices of the nurse.

I have known many cases where the sensitive feelings of a little boy or
girl have been turned to violent dislike by a nurse, or a governess. For
days and weeks and months they have been obliged to live in the constant
companionship and under the constant influence of an antipathy which
sours and freezes their affections. I have known cases where a nurse, in
order to achieve her own ends and relieve herself of trouble, has told a
child to lie quietly in bed, when the light goes out, or a big and
horrible bugaboo will creep out of the darkness and spring upon it. In
such cases, the nurse takes good care to keep the child from giving a
hint of this to mother or father, under pain of equally terrifying
consequences. I have friends to-day, grown up men and women, who cannot
go into a dark room, anywhere, without a shiver and shudder of nameless
dread, which began with that same black bugaboo.

I have known countless cases, where a nurse has said to a child, who has
done something wrong or annoying: "I don't love you any more. I don't
like you now at all." And I have known countless cases where mothers,
themselves, have said and acted the same thing. And the effect of that
is to belittle and corrupt in the child's heart a bigger and deeper
conception of love, as a loyal and steadfast thing, with no string
attached to it. If a nurse, or a mother, can withdraw her love, for a
slight cause, then a child when it grows up can expect to do the same; a
wife can withdraw her love from her husband, if he does something to
displease her; a husband from his wife; a son and a daughter from their
parents; a sister from her brother. How sad that seems, at first, and
how it hurts! But little by little, as one sees and learns, and as the