the difficulty, is as surely to fail.  In the same way unwise suggestion can interfere with the passing of water at regular and suitable intervals.  There are children who constantly desire to pass water on any occasion, which is conspicuously inappropriate, because their attention has been concentrated on the sensations in the bladder.  Often enough when at great inconvenience opportunity has been found, the desire has passed away, and all the trouble has proved needless.  It is not too much to say that every occupation and every action of the day can be made delightful or hateful to the child, according to the suggestion with which it is presented and introduced.  Dressing and undressing, eating and drinking, bathing, washing, the putting away of toys, even going to bed, can be made matters of enthralling interest or delight, or a subject for tears and opposition, according to the bias which is given to the child’s mind by the words, attitude, and actions of nurses and mothers.

Here we approach very near to the heart of the subject.  Stripped of all that is not essential we see the problem of the management of children reduced to the interplay between the adult mind and the mind of the receptive suggestible child.  That which is thought of and feared for the child, that he rapidly becomes.  Placid, comfortable people who do not worry about their children find their children sensible and easy to manage.  Parents who take a pride in the daring and naughty pranks of their children unconsciously convey the suggestion to their minds that such conduct is characteristic of them.  Nervous and apprehensive parents who are distressed when the child refuses to eat or to sleep, and who worry all day long over possible sources of danger to him, are forced to watch their child acquire a reputation for nervousness, which, as always, is passively accepted and consistently acted up to.  Differences in type, determined by hereditary factors, no doubt, exist and are often strongly marked.  Yet it is not untrue to say that variations in children, dependent upon heredity, show chiefly in the relative susceptibility or insusceptibility of the child to the influences of environment and management.  It is no easy task to distinguish between the nervous child and the child of the nervous mother, between the child who inherits an unusually sensitive nervous system and the child who is nervous only because he breathes constantly an atmosphere charged with doubt and anxiety.

(c) THE CHILD’S LOVE OF POWER

Let us study briefly a third quality of the child which, for want of a better name, I have called after the ruling passion of mankind, his love of power.  Perhaps it would be better to call it his love of being in the centre of the picture.  It is his constant desire to make his environment revolve around him and to attract all attention to himself.  Somewhat later in life this desire to attract attention, at all costs, is well seen in the type of girl popularly