H. Addington Bruce

“ Failing to receive it, jealousy is all too apt to seize him, and, out of jealousy, nervous symptoms or character kinks are a probable result—symptoms and kinks which may, perhaps, never be entirely overcome.
What, then, is the moral of all this? What practical suggestions may be made that will help parents to cope with the problem of children's jealousy? For one thing, and most important, there must be no showing of favouritism, if you have more than one child. By your whole attitude towards your children you must make plain to them that each one ought to be, and is, equally dear to you. ”

“ Is there no cure for me?"
Bizarre, startlingly unique as this must seem, it, after all, differs only in the single detail of the spectacles from hundreds of other cases which might be cited. All over the world are men and women who suffer agonies from an oppressive, and to them inexplicable, sense of timidity when brought into contact with other people. Many, to be sure, make a brave effort to conceal the true state of affairs, compelling themselves to mingle more or less freely in society, despite the torturing apprehensions they then feel. ”

“ I believe that a child may be feeble-minded in one environment—for example, in his own home—and may cease to exhibit feeble-mindedness when placed in a different environment. I also agree with those modern students of insanity who assert that the development of some forms of insanity may be averted by a proper course of discipline and training. Analogously, I contend that because a child of sixteen or twenty presents a hopeless case of feeble-mindedness, this is no evidence that proper treatment instituted at an earlier age might not have determined an entirely different course of development. ”

“ Many parents, though wholly unappreciative of the fact, inspire sulkiness in their children by setting them an example of sulkiness. A striking instance has lately come under my personal observation, in the experience of a mother who is continually being annoyed by the whining, sulky ways of her four-year-old daughter. She scolds the girl, she spanks her, but all to no good. Not once does it seem to occur to the mother that possibly her own habit of sulking when things do not go right may be blamed for the sulkiness of her child. ”

“ Hence, he develops feelings of awkwardness and embarrassment when others look at and speak to him. He fidgets, blushes, stammers, trembles; in a word, displays all the symptoms indicated by the term bashfulness. In the course of time one of two things will happen: either increased knowledge will reassure him, and he will, as the saying is, outgrow his bashfulness; or the hidden fear and shame—even though the original occasion for them may have completely lapsed from conscious remembrance—will fix themselves firmly in his mind, causing a habit of bashfulness which may torture him all his life. ”

“ All parents, indeed, ought to familiarise themselves with the physiology of anger and worry. Once really appreciative of the possible bodily effects of these emotional states, they would, on the one hand, be more careful to train their children early in emotional control, and, on the other, would be more chary about subjecting them to conditions involving emotional stress. Anger—and, equally, worry—is liable, for one thing, to derange profoundly the workings of the digestive organs. ”

“ Like the organic shyness of childhood, it is merely a product of inexperience, an expression of an instinctive reaction that is possibly "a far-off echo from the dim past, when fear of the unknown was a safeguard in the struggle for existence." ”

“ Truly, feeble-mindedness in an adult or child is not safely to be determined by relying merely on the results of a set of stereotyped mental tests. On the other hand, in deciding as to a child's actual mental state it is far more misleading to depend on unaided observation as a guide. Yet, since the beginning of scientific investigation into the causes of backwardness, cases have continually been coming to light in which teachers and even parents have mistakenly identified curable dullness with incurable feeble-mindedness, and have abandoned all effort at intellectual development. ”

“ The parents of a sullen child must always ask themselves if, through deception of any sort, they have forfeited the child's esteem for them. They must further ask themselves if, by intentional or unintentional unkindness of a persistent sort, they have embittered the child. They must also put to themselves the question: "Have I in some way erred so as to make my child sullen by the force of a bad example?" And, lastly, they must not forget to probe, through the aid of a skilled physician, for possible physical causes of mental and nervous stress. ”

“ Just the same, jealousy is never a smiling matter and is always something which parents should try to root out without delay. The jealous child, if uncorrected, is all too likely to grow into a jealous adult, with tendencies which bring misery to himself, and which, if it becomes a question of sex-jealousy, may bring death to others. The parent who fails to attack jealousy when it first shows itself need not be surprised at any distortion of character or vagary of conduct that appears in later life. ”

“ What the jealous wife really needed was psychical re-education to give her a saner philosophy of life, enabling her to get a better grip on her emotions, and, through this, to control better the workings of her nervous system. Here we touch on what is far and away the most important fact in the problem of jealousy—a fact unappreciated by too many parents, and, for that matter, likewise unappreciated by most writers on the pedagogy of childhood. ”

“ Childhood, to repeat a truism hackneyed to psychologists, but seemingly unappreciated by most people, is pre-eminently the suggestible period of life. It is then, when the critical faculty still is undeveloped, that whatever ideas are presented to the mind are most surely absorbed by it, to sink into its subconscious depths, and there form the nucleus for whole systems of thought afterward manifesting as habits. Herein lurks the special peril to the only child afflicted with over-loving, over-anxious parents. ”

“ Selfishness and lack of control—these, I insist, are the usual elements out of which divorces grow. And what are these but bad habits, for which good habits might have been substituted had proper precautions been taken by the parents in the plastic, formative period of youth? Even in respect to the sexual phase of marriage—that phase in which so many marriages come to grief—the trouble, when trouble occurs, may, in most cases, be wholly attributed to parental thoughtlessness or ignorance. On the sexual side, as on all sides of married life, the great need is for education for marriage. ”

“ Showing true love for their child, they must—and this is especially necessary in the case of an only child—cause the child unconsciously to realise that he is not, and should not be, the sole object of their thoughts; that they have other interests, other duties in life. Unless he is constitutionally abnormal, a child brought up in such an atmosphere of general, self-forgetting kindliness is almost certain to acquire the same healthy philosophy of life that his parents have—a philosophy inimical to jealousy in every form. ”

“ FROM what has been said in the foregoing pages, it is an irresistible inference that the greatest of all handicaps a child can have, short of being born hopelessly deficient, is to be born into a home where he will be exposed to mind-deadening or emotion-stressing influences—a home where he will receive neither adequate mental stimulus nor adequate moral training. ”

“ Study the history of every case of "nervous breakdown," of psychasthenic fear, of hysterical anxiety and disabilities, of neurasthenic aches and pains, and there will always be found a background of emotional intensity and self-centredness, persisting from early childhood. Hence, the demand of the modern neurologist and medical psychologist for training in youth that will foster control of the emotions and that will habituate the individual to forget self in useful activities. "The mind occupied with external interests will have neither time nor inclination to feed upon itself." ”

“ She forgets, too, that if the suggestions emanating from playmates are not invariably suggestions for good, they may easily be counteracted, without sacrificing the advantages to be gained from association with playmates, by proper training in the quiet of the home.
Always, let me repeat, it is the home training that counts for most. If the only child turns out well, the credit must go to the parents; if, alas! he turns out badly, if he becomes a monster of selfishness or a neurotic weakling, the blame must likewise be theirs. ”

“ Clearly, parents who would do their full duty by their children have no easy task before them. Yet everything combines to show that unless they make a business of parenthood—and, in especial, unless, by direct instruction and the force of good example, they develop in their children the virtues of self-control and self-forgetfulness—the after lives of those children, when themselves married, will be anything but happy, and may, in addition, be lives marred by some form of serious nervous or mental disturbance. ”

“ To put the matter briefly, training against selfishness is imperative in early life, if only as a safeguard against the functional nervous and mental maladies so common to-day.
When parents fail to teach their children to control their emotions; when they foster in them exaggerated notions of their importance by giving way to the children in everything, being over-solicitous about them, performing duties for them which the children should early be taught to perform for themselves, selfishness is an almost inevitable outgrowth. ”

“ For, as psychologists are insisting more and more emphatically, the health, happiness, and efficiency of adult life depend preponderantly on the home influences of early childhood; and, obviously, in a home where the parental attention can be concentrated on a single child, better results should be attained than when the work of training involves a division of the attention among several children. ”

“ Surely, it is worth while to watch for and eradicate jealousy in childhood. Surely, too, it is worth while to develop emotional control in your children while they still are very young, and to avoid giving reason for jealousy by showing a real neglect in satisfying their natural craving for sympathy and love. ”

“ But it is not only as a strange, irrational mode of fulfilling a wish that hysteria and other nervous disorders may become manifest in selfish people. Without this element of wishing entering in at all, nervousness is particularly likely to attack the selfish. Many nervous conditions are directly brought on by conscious or subconscious fixing of the thoughts on the bodily processes. We are so constituted that our internal organs work best when we pay no attention to them—or, more strictly, when we pay no attention to the physical sensations to which they give rise while working. ”

“ But the fact is that during the past few years—or since physicians began to appreciate the part played by childhood impressions in causing mental and nervous disease—evidence has been accumulating to indicate that the almost universal custom of telling fairy tales to children does entail grave risks to their character and their health. The child of normal nervous constitution is likely to be affected only in character; the supersensitive, neurotic child may be hurried, by the tales he hears or reads, into some more or less serious mental or nervous malady. ”

“ Here we come to the central fact in the whole problem of sulkiness, for, nine cases out of ten, it is the home environment—the training a child receives, the parents' attitude towards him—that is primarily responsible for his sulking. The healthiest child in the world will sulk if his parents surround him with a sulk-breeding environment. He will sulk because it is child nature to react appropriately to the suggestions received from the environment. ”

“ At night, however, the child is alone, and his little consciousness cannot find the support of others. [280] Before the kaleidoscope of his dreams pass the various images and accompanying emotions of his waking life, so that if any of these images has become linked with fear it is certain to bring with it terror, as it surges into dream in the night, and the child jumps up, awakened, in panic, finding no one near, upon whom to lean. ”

“ If there is more than one child in the family, it may be that the sulkiness is a symptom of jealousy. The parents should ask themselves in all seriousness whether they have given this particular child any reason to sulk, by showing greater favour, or seeming to show greater favour, to his brothers and sisters. Or, possibly, the sulkiness is indicative, not of jealousy, but of a feeling of inferiority due to the child's fear that he is not quite so bright as other children. ”

“ Sulkiness, again, may be associated with an insufficiency of physical exercise, or with failure to make sure that the child's living and sleeping quarters are properly ventilated. Fresh air is as essential as digestible food to the maintenance of nervous balance. When, as sometimes happens, children are obliged to spend their school hours in dusty, ill-ventilated classrooms, when they return to homes with few windows, and these seldom open, and when they sleep in a tainted, vitiated atmosphere, it is indeed hard for them to see life in bright colours. ”