The difficulty of successfully enforcing authority, and of carrying off the victory if that authority is disputed, should make mothers wary of drawing too tight a rein.  The conflict between parent and child must always be distressing and must always be prejudicial to the child, whatever its outcome, whether it brings to him victory or defeat.  He learns from it either an undue sense of power or an undue sense of helplessness, and the knowledge of neither is to his benefit.  Although frequently worsted in the conflict, nurses will often return to the attack again and again and hour after hour, restraining, reproving, forbidding, and even threatening.  Nor do they see that they are really goading the children into disobedience by their misdirected efforts at enforcing discipline.  Reproof, like punishment, loses all its effect when it is too often repeated, and the child soon takes it for granted that all he does is wrong, and that grown-up people exist only to thwart his will, to misunderstand, to reprove, or even to punish.

In the nursery the word “naughty” is far too frequently heard.  It is naughty to do this, it is naughty to do that.  There is no gradation in the condemnation, and the child loses all sense of the meaning of the word.  He himself proclaims himself naughty almost with satisfaction:  his doll is naughty, the dog is naughty, his nurse and mother are naughty, and so forth.  In reality the little child is peculiarly sensitive to blame, if he is not reproof-hardened.  It is hardly necessary to use words of blame at all.  If he is asked kindly and quietly to desist, much as we would address a grown-up person, and does not, he can be made to feel that his conduct is unpopular by keeping aloof from him a little, by disregarding him for the time being, and by indicating to him that he is a troublesome little person with whom we cannot be bothered.

Any one who has had much to do with children will realise that, if wrongly handled, they are apt to take a positive delight in doing what they conceive to be wrong.  There is clearly a delightful element of excitement in the process of being naughty, of daring and of braving the wrath to come, with which they are so familiar and for which they care nothing at all.  But the perverseness of which we are now speaking has a different origin.  It arises only when children are reproved, appealed to, and expostulated with too often and too constantly.  Negativism is a symptom which is common enough in certain mental disorders.  The unhappy patient always does the opposite of what is desired or expected of him.  If he be asked to stand up he will endeavour to remain seated, or if asked to sit he will attempt to rise to his feet.  Like many other symptoms of nervous disturbance which we shall study later, this negativistic spirit is often displayed to perfection by little children when the environment is at fault and when grown-up people have too freely exercised authority.