Mothers will complain that children seem to take a perverse pleasure in evoking reproof, appeals, entreaties, and exhortations.  A small boy of four who had several times repeated the particular sin to which his attention had been directed by the frequency of his mother’s warnings and entreaties, finding that on this occasion she had decided to take no notice, approached her with a troubled face:  “Are you not angry?” he said; “are you not disappointed?” In reality the naughty child is often only the child who has become master of his mother’s or his nurse’s responses, and can produce at will the effect he desires.  The idea that the child possesses a strong will, which can and must be broken by persistent opposition, is based upon this tendency of the child.  It is an entire misconception of the situation:  Strength of will and fixity of purpose are among the last powers which the human mind develops.  In little children they are conspicuously absent.  What appears to us as a fixed and persistent desire to perform a definite action in spite of all we can say or do, is often no more than the desire to produce the familiar tones of reproof, to traverse again the familiar ground, to attract attention and to find himself again the centre of the picture.  If no one pays any attention and no one reproves, he soon gives up the attempt.  If too much is made of any one action of the child, a strong impression is made on his mind and he cannot choose but return to it again and again.

This little drama of the fireplace may teach us a great deal in the management of children.  The wise mother and nurse will find a hundred devices to catch the child’s attention and lure him away from the danger zone without the incident making any impression on his mind at all, and will not call attention to it by repeated reproofs or warnings which will certainly lead him straight back to the spot.

In matters of greater moment the same impulse to oppose the will of those around him is seen.  In considering the point of the child’s susceptibility to suggestion, we have mentioned the refusal of sleep and the refusal of food.  In both it is possible to detect the influence of this pronounced force of opposition.  As the child lies sobbing or screaming in bed, every new approach to him, every fresh attempt at pacification, renews the force of his opposition in a crescendo of sound.  But it is in his refusal of food that the child is apt to find his chief opportunity.  Meal-times degenerate into a struggle.  There at least he can show his complete mastery of the situation.  No one can swallow his food for him, and he knows it.  He can clench his teeth and shake his head and obstinately refuse every morsel offered.  He can hold food in his mouth for half an hour at a time and remain deaf to all the appeals of his helpless nurse.  If she tries force, he quells the attempt by a storm of crying.  If she declines upon entreaty and coaxing, he will not be persuaded.  It is the little scene of the fireplace over again.  The attempts at force or the attempts at persuasion, by making much of it, have concentrated the attention of the child upon the difficulty, and have taught him his own power to dominate the situation.