Читать книгу The Nervous Child онлайн

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In little children the suggestion of sleep, provoked by being placed in bed, sometimes acts very irregularly. Often it may succeed for a week or two, and then some untoward happening breaks the habit, and night after night, for a long time, sleep is refused. The wakeful child put to bed, resents the process, and cries and sobs miserably, to the infinite distress of his mother. It then becomes just as likely that the child will connect his bed in his mind, not with rest and sleep, but with sobbing and crying on his part, and mingled entreaties and scoldings from his nurse or mother. An important part in this perversion of the suggestion is played by the attitude of the person who puts the child to bed. Often the nurse is uniformly successful, while the mother, who is perhaps more distressed by the sobbing of the child, as consistently fails, because she has been unable to hide her apprehension from him, and has conveyed to his mind a sense of his own power.

Just in the same way, grown-up people, filled with anxiety because of the helplessness of the young child, unable to divest their minds of the fears of the hundred and one accidents that may befall, or that within their own experience have befallen, a little child at one time or another, unconsciously make unwise suggestions which fill his mind with apprehension and terror. They do not like their children to show fear of animals. Nor would they if it were not that their own apprehension that the child may be hurt communicates itself to him. The child is not of himself afraid to fall, it is they who suffer the anxiety and show it by treating the fall as a disaster. The child is not of himself afraid to be left alone in a room. It is they who sap his confidence in himself, because they do not venture to leave him out of their sight, from a nameless dread of what may happen. A little girl cut her finger and ran to her nurse, pleased and interested: "See," she said, seeing it bleed, "fingers all jammy." Only when the nurse grasped her with unwise expressions of horror did she break into cries of fear. A town-bred nurse, who is afraid of cows, will make every country walk an ordeal of fear for the children.