Just in the same way, grown-up people, filled with anxiety because of the helplessness of the young child, unable to divest their minds of the fears of the hundred and one accidents that may befall, or that within their own experience have befallen, a little child at one time or another, unconsciously make unwise suggestions which fill his mind with apprehension and terror.  They do not like their children to show fear of animals.  Nor would they if it were not that their own apprehension that the child may be hurt communicates itself to him.  The child is not of himself afraid to fall, it is they who suffer the anxiety and show it by treating the fall as a disaster.  The child is not of himself afraid to be left alone in a room.  It is they who sap his confidence in himself, because they do not venture to leave him out of their sight, from a nameless dread of what may happen.  A little girl cut her finger and ran to her nurse, pleased and interested:  “See,” she said, seeing it bleed, “fingers all jammy.”  Only when the nurse grasped her with unwise expressions of horror did she break into cries of fear.  A town-bred nurse, who is afraid of cows, will make every country walk an ordeal of fear for the children.

Every mother must be made to realise the ease with which these unconscious suggestions act upon the mind of the little child, and should school herself to be strong to make her child strong, and to see to it that all this suggestive force is utilised for good and not for evil.

It is upon this susceptibility to suggestion that a great part of his early education reposes.  No one who is incapable of profiting by this natural disposition of the child can be successful in her management of him.  Turn where you will in his daily life the influence of this force of suggestion is clearly apparent.  The child does without questioning that which he is confidently expected to do.  Thus he will eat what is given him, and sleep soundly when he is put to bed if only the appropriate suggestion and not the contrary is made to him.  Again we have seen that a perversion of suggestion of this sort is a common source of constipation in early childhood.  If the child’s attention is directed towards the difficulty, if he is urged or ordered or appealed to to perform his part, if failure is looked upon as a serious misfortune, the bowels may remain obstinately unmoved.  In children as in adults a too great concentration of attention inhibits the action of the bowels, and constipation, in many persons, is due to the attempt to substitute will power for the force of habitual suggestion.  No matter what other treatment we adopt, the mother must be careful to hide from the child that his failure is distressing to her.  A cheerful optimism which teaches him to regard himself as one who is conspicuously regular in his habits, and who has a reputation in this respect to live up to is sure to succeed.  To talk before him of his habitual constipation, and to worry over