for the time being he is out of the picture and he is intent on
producing the expected response, the reproof tone from his mother
which he knows so well. He approaches it warily, often anticipating
his mother's part and vigorously scolding himself. He desires nothing
more than that his mother should repeat the reproof, forbidding him a
dozen times. The mind of all little children tends easily to work in a
groove. It delights in repetition and it evoking not the unexpected
but the expected. If his sport is stopped by his mother losing
patience and removing him bodily from the danger zone, his sense of
impotence finds vent in passionate crying. But if his mother takes no
notice, the sport soon loses its savour. He is conscious that somehow
or other it has fallen flat, and he flits off to other employment.

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