The oldest girl became insistent that she be allowed to sit up nights after the others had gone to bed.  She would study for awhile and then put her head on her arms and go to sleep.  One night her mother waited until she was asleep, went off to bed, and left her.  At three o’clock in the morning she came downstairs, lighted lamp in hand, and alarm clock set to go off.  As soon as the alarm-bell began to ring, the girl awoke, startled to see her mother standing there with the lighted lamp, herself cold and stiff with the discomfort of her position.  “And that was the end of that,” said the mother.

Here was common-sense, practical, hard-headed training instead of worry.  Bend your sense, your intellect, your time, your energy, to seeking how to train your children, instead of doing the senseless, foolish, inane, and utterly useless thing of worrying about them.

Imagine being the child of an anxious parent, who sees sickness in every unusual move or mood of her boy or girl.  A little clearing of the throat—­“I’m sure he’s going to have croup or diphtheria.”  The girl unconsciously puts her hand to her brow—­“What’s the matter with your head, dearie; got a headache?” A lad feels a trifle uncomfortable in his clean shirt and wiggles about—­“I’m sure Tom’s coming down with fever, he’s so restless and he looks so flushed!”

God forbid that I should ever appear to caricature the wise care of a devoted mother.  That is not what I aim to do.  I seek, with intenseness of purpose, to show the folly, the absurdity of the anxieties, the worries, the unnecessary and unreasonable cares of many mothers.  For the moment Fear takes possession of them, some kind of nagging is sure to begin for the child.  “Oh, Tom, you mustn’t do this,” or, “Maggie, my darling, you must be careful of that,” and the child is not only nagged, but is thus placed under bondage to the mother’s unnecessary alarm.  No young life can suffer this bondage without injury.  It destroys freedom and spontaneity, takes away that dash and vigor, that vim and daring that essentially belong to youth, and should be the unhampered heritage of every child.  I’d far rather have a boy and girl of mine get sick once in a while—­though that is by no means necessary—­than have them subjected to the constant fear that they might be sick.  And when boys and girls wake up to the full consciousness that their parents’ worries are foolish, unnecessary, and self-created, the mental and moral influence upon them is far more pernicious than many even of our wisest observers have perceived.

There never was a boy or girl who was worried over, who was not annoyed, fretted, injured, and cursed by it, instead of being benefited.  The benefit received from the love of the parent was in spite of the worry, and not because of it.  Worry is a hindrance, a deterrent, a restraint; it is always putting a curbing hand upon the natural exuberance and enthusiasm of youth.  It says, “Don’t, don’t,” with such fierce persistence, that it kills initiative, destroys endeavor, murders naturalness, and drives its victims to deception, fraud, and secrecy to gain what they feel to be natural, reasonable and desirable ends.