irritated and satisfied with none of her ordinary pleasures. A nervous, irritable parent will breed these qualities in bis children, because his personal contact will overstimulate them and they will be in a state of chronic fatigue. Such a parent will be apt to nag his children, to be constantly forbidding or commanding, and this arouses emotions which draw off the energies from the brain very rapidly. Antagonism is a breeder of nerve fatigue, and some children seem hardly ever to be free from it during waking hours.
Again, in many homes older children make the life of the smaller ones wretched much of the time. The writer knows a family where there are three children, the youngest about two years of age. The older ones seem to find no greater pleasure than to tease the babe on every opportunity, for she occasions them much merriment by her violent vocal and bodily expressions whenever she is tormented beyond endurance. One does not need to remain about this home long before seeing plainly that this child is being worried into an ugly disposition. Even at two years she has reached the point where she is intolerable much of the time, showing her unbalanced condition by flying into a passion over every little thing that occasions her displeasure. The attitude of the older children serves to keep her in a more or less constant state of fatigue, and the actions performed in this condition are rapidly forming habits, thus determining her character.
The evil effects of overstimulation are evident also in the attempts of parents and teachers to hasten as rapidly as possible the intellectual development of the children under their care. It has come to be regarded as desirable that a little child should begin hard work in school at five, and keep it up continuously until the college course is completed. Many think it creditable to a child to be precocious in his learning, and so he is encouraged to sit still and study instead of being spontaneously active in play milch of the time. He is subjected in school to the great strain of appearing before his elders in "speaking pieces," etc., all of which tends to overstimulate, and hence to fatigue easily and unnecessarily. There is in our midst a feeling that maturity ought to be reached as early as possible and by the shortest cuts, but science shows that excessive rapidity in development is secured at the expense of mental health and attainment of the highest ultimate ends.[1] It assures us that too early and rapid organization of the nervous system through undue stimulation or educative influence of any kind finally results in arrested growth. Precocity is usually succeeded by mediocrity, if by nothing
- ↑ Cf. Spencer, op.cit., p. 262
