characteristics before strangers, or even uses an open-hearted,
confidential confession as an occasion for reproof at another
time.

The statement that no human being learns to understand another,
or at least to be patient with another, is true above all of
the intimate relation of child and parent in which,
understanding, the deepest characteristic of love, is almost
always absent.

Parents do not see that during the whole life the need of peace
is never greater than in the years of childhood, an inner peace
under all external unrest. The child has to enter into
relations with his own infinite world, to conquer it, to make
it the object of his dreams. But what does he experience?
Obstacles, interference, corrections, the whole livelong day.
The child is always required to leave something alone, or to do
something different, to find something different, or want
something different from what he does, or finds, or wants. He
is always shunted off in another direction from that towards
which his own character is leading him. All of this is caused
by our tenderness, vigilance, and zeal, in directing, advising,
and helping the small specimen of humanity to become a complete
example in a model series.

I have heard a three-year-old child characterised as "trying"
because he wanted to go into the woods, whereas the nursemaid
wished to drag him into the city. Another child of six years
was disciplined because she had been naughty to a playmate and
had called her a little pig,--a natural appellation for one who