A factor that tends to perplex the mother and hurts the training of the child is her doubt as how “to discipline.”  Shall it be the old-fashioned corporal punishment of a past generation, the appeal to pain and blame?  Shall it be the nowadays emphasized moral suasion, the appeal to conscience and reason?  With all the preachers of new methods filling her ear she finds that moral suasion fails in her own child’s case, and yet she is afraid of physical punishment.

This is not the place to study child training in any extensive manner, yet it needs be said that praise and blame, pleasure and pain, are the great incentives to conduct.  One cannot drive a horse with one rein; neither can one drive a child into social ways, social conformity by one emotion or feeling.  Corporal punishment is a necessity, sparingly used but vigorously used when indicated.  Of course praise is needed and so is reward.

What is here to be emphasized is that a sense of great responsibility and an over-critical attitude toward the children is a factor of importance in the nervous state of the modern housewife.  Increasing knowledge and increasing demand have brought with them bad as well as good results.  Here as elsewhere a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a more serious difficulty is this,—­though fads in training arise that are loudly proclaimed as the only way, there is as yet no real science of character or of character growth.

The tragedy of illness is acute everywhere, and the sick child is in every household.  In many cases I have traced the source of the housewife’s neurosis to the care and worry furnished by one child.  There are truly delicate children who “catch everything”, who start off by being difficult to nurse, and who pass from one infection to another until the worried mother suspects disease with every change in the child’s color.  A sick child is often a changed child, changed in all the fundamental emotions,—­cranky, capricious, unaffectionate, difficult to care for.  A sick child means, except where servants and nurses can be commanded, disturbed sleep, extra work, confinement to the house, heavy expense, and a heightened tension that has as its aftermath, in many cases, collapse.  The savor of life seems to go, each day is a throbbing suspense.

With recovery, if the woman can rest, in the majority of cases no marked degree of deenergization follows.  But in too many cases rest is not possible, though it is urgently needed.  The mother needs the care of convalescence more than does the child.

There is an extraordinary lack of provision for the tired housewife.  True there are sanataria galore, with beautiful names, in pretty places, well equipped with nurses and doctors to care for their patients.  But these are prohibitive in price, and at the present writing the cheapest place is about forty dollars per week.  This rate puts them out of the reach of the great majority who need them.