[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  Kindergarten games afford the intercourse with other children necessary to the child’s development]

Teaching self-control is quite a different matter from the foregoing, and one which requires infinitely more work and patience.  The first step is, however, the same.  If you would have sympathy, show sympathy.  If you would have self-control in a child, control yourself.  Remember the strength of the imitative instinct.  Next, strive to obtain control in the young child in some small matter where control is easy.  Any normal child will learn that control pays—­if you make it pay.  Encourage the hungry child to stop crying while you prepare his food, but prepare it quickly, or he will begin to cry again to make you hurry.  Mothers usually work hard to teach control of bodily functions, but often far less to obtain control of mental and moral conditions.  Obedience, considered from time immemorial the chief virtue of childhood, is really only of value as it conduces to self-control in later life.  The wise parent, therefore, while requiring obedience for the convenience of the family and the safety of the child, will lay far more stress upon teaching the child to control himself.  The work must be done almost entirely by indirect methods during the early years.  Offering artificial rewards and dealing out artificial punishments are the crudest forms of encouraging effort.  The natural reward and the inevitable natural punishment are far better when they can be employed.

[Illustration:  Courtesy of the United Charities of Chicago A group of children at the Mary Crane Nursery, Chicago.  Children acquire self-control by learning to help themselves]

The child who overcomes his tendency to play before or during his dressing may be rewarded by some special morning privilege which will automatically regulate itself.  In our family it is the joyful task of bringing in and distributing the morning mail.  The child not dressed “on time” necessarily loses the privilege.  We are not punishing, but “we can’t wait.”  Lack of control of temper presupposes solitude.  “People can’t have cross children about.”  Quarrels inevitably bring cessation of group play or work—­solitude again.  The child’s love of approbation may also be made of great assistance.  Always we must remember that doing what we tell him to do is not after all the main thing.  It is doing the right thing, being willing to do the right thing, and being able to hold back the impulse to do the wrong thing, that count.  We are working “to train self-directed agents, not to make soldiers.”