A mother, anxious to induce her little son to come to the doctor, and knowing well that her call to him to enter the room, as he stands hesitating at the door, will at once determine his retreat to the nursery, has been heard to say, “Run away, darling, we don’t want you here,” with the expected result that the docile child immediately comes forward.  To the doctor, that such a device should be practised almost as a matter of course and that its success should be so confidently anticipated, should give food for thought.  It may shed light on much that is to follow later in the interview.

The question of punishment, like that of reproof, is beset with difficulty.  There are fortunately nowadays few educated mothers who are so foolish as to threaten punishment which they obviously do not intend to administer and which the child knows they will not administer.  It is clear that punishment must be rare or else the child will grow habituated to it, and with little children we cannot be brutal or push punishment to the point of extreme physical pain.  It is more difficult to say, as one is tempted to say, that all punishment is futile and should be discarded.  Probably mothers are like schoolmasters in that no two schoolmasters and no two mothers obtain their effects in exactly the same way or by precisely the same means.  Nor do all children accept reproof or submit to punishment in the same way.  Some make light of it and take a pleasure in defying authority.  Others are unduly cast down by the slightest adverse criticism.  It is generally true that extreme sensitiveness to reproof is a sign of a certain elevation of character.  Always we must remember that for a mother to inflict punishment, whether by causing physical pain or mental suffering, is to take on her shoulders a certain responsibility.  It is a serious matter if she has misapprehended the child’s act—­if the sin was not really a sin, but only some perverted action, the intention of which was not sinful, but designed for good in the faulty reasoning of the child.  A little girl, in bed with a feverish cold, was found shivering, with her night-dress wet and muddy.  It was an understanding mother who found that her little brother, having heard somehow that ice was good for fevered heads, had brought in several handfuls of snow from the garden, not of the cleanest, and had offered them to aid his sister’s recovery.  It need hardly be said that punishment should always be deliberate.  The hasty slap is nothing else than the motor discharge provoked by the irritability of the educator, and the child, who is a good observer on such points, discerns the truth and measures the frailty of his judge.