Though the number of children has conspicuously decreased, the care and attention given them has increased in inverse proportion.  The woman with six children or more turned over the younger children to the older ones, so that her burden, though heavy, was much less than it may seem.  Further, though she loved and cared for them, she knew far less of hygiene than her descendant; she did not try to bring them up in a germless way; and her household activities kept her too busy to allow her to notice each running nose, or each “festering sore.”  Not having nearly so much knowledge of disease, she had much less fear and was spared this type of deenergization.  Her daughter views with alarm each cough and sneeze, has sinister forebodings with each rash; pays an enormous attention to the children’s food, and through an increasing attention to detail in her child’s life and actions has a greater liability to break under the greater responsibility and conscientiousness.

It must be remembered that the feeling of responsibility and apprehensive attention is not merely “mental.”  It means fatigue, more disturbance of appetite, and less restful sleep.  These are things of great importance in causing nervousness; in fact, they constitute a large part of it.

Perhaps another generation will find that hygiene can be taught without producing fussiness and fear.  Certainly popular education has its value, but it has a morbid side that now needs attention.  This morbid side is not only bad for the mother but is unqualifiedly bad for the child.

For the child of to-day, the center of the family stage in his attention, is often either spoiled or made neurasthenic by his treatment.  Either he is frankly indulged, or else an over-critical attitude is taken toward him.  “Bad habits must not be formed” is the actuating motive of the overconscientious parents, for they do not seem to know that the “trial and error” method is the natural way of learning.  Children take up one habit after another for the sake of experience and discard them by themselves.  For a child to lie, to steal, to fight, to be selfish, to be self-willed is not at all unnatural; for him to have bad table manners and to forget admonition in general and against these manners in particular is his birthright, so to speak.

Yet many a mother of to-day torments her child into a bad introspection and self-consciousness, herself into neurasthenia, and her husband into seething rebellion, because of her desire for perfection, because of her fear that a “bad act” may form into a habit and thence into a vicious character.

Especially is this true of the overaesthetic, overconscientious types described in Chapter III.  I have seen women who made the dinner table less a place to eat than a place where a child was pilloried for his manners,—­pilloried into sullen, appetiteless state.

So, too, an unfortunate publicity given to child prodigies brought with it for a short time an epidemic of forced intellectual feeding of children, that produced only a precocious neurasthenia as its great result.  Similarly the Montessori method of child training which made every woman into a kindergarten teacher did a hundred times more harm than good, despite the merits of the system.  That a child needs to experiment with life himself means that it will be a long time before the average mother will know how to help him.