Scolding Nervous Children.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 22, 25 November 1908, Page 57

Scolding Nervous Children.

Chfldrert are not all ‘‘little animals.” Some have siu-h keen sensibilities, such acute imaginations, such teeming little brains that they should be treated with all the thoughtfulness and consideration given to adults of the same tendencies. Such children have to be tenderly and constantly watched, and their delinquencies met with an amount of sympathy that gains and ‘holds their confidence. Those children who arc scolded and punished far the lest, delinquency Itecnme ■hardened in -wrong-doing or demoralised by -fear. Ju the latter case <leniora! : sed ia certainly not too strong a term for the results which follow injudicious punishutntrta. A nervous child becomes so afraid of doing wrong that at last he loses the power of discernment between what is wrong and what is right, and he naturally cfeoows the coarse wlii«-?i Ih> thinks least likely to lead t<S cha.si isemimt. He •will descend to sny amotmt of <i«s-eit and ntory-b-Hing to rave himself feomi the

retrult of his wrong-doing. and it in entirely out of the question that, it his first years are passed in such a mistaken and perverted way, he should ever up into an honest and straight .forward man. When children show themselves to be abnormally sensitive and nervous, they should be treated in a totally different to others who are healthy and boisterous; but they must not lx? spoiled, for that would simply aggravate the evil. They should have the bearfit of a frequent change of air, especially to •the seasuie. No stimulating drinks, such as coffee and tea, must be given. The food must be quite plain, but wholesome and nourishing—dish, eggs, vegetables, cooked fruit, and plenty of milk and milk pud dings. Above all avoid scolding them. One of the meanest forma of parental attack upon these unfortunate occasion* is the "post-mortems” that arc unjustly held over the fifty-seven different varieties of his misdoings in the supposed "dead past” of their commission. These are dug up with unfailing regularity and paraded before the child for his presumed moral benefit, but so far from being ithis, they are the deliberate slayers of the parental influence, the poisoners of filial love. The child’s keen sense of fair play had accepted almost without protest the rebuke that had naturally followed his indiscretion, «but the same keen sense of fair play had been outraged when the hi.w of his limitation had been ignored by the tactless and even hot headed par ent, leaving his victim a sore and even vengeful human being instead of -a sincerely contrite, struggler after the l>est of which he is capable. © © ©