The compelling power of mother-love and father-love must, of a truth, be recognised in extenuation of the spoiling of the only child. But the fact of the spoiling remains, and the fact also that when the spoiling is achieved the parental pride and joy will be turned to grief and bitter lamentation. The pity of it is that the only child, simply because he is the only child, ought to be able to grow up healthier, wiser, and more efficient than other children. For, as psychologists are insisting more and more emphatically, the health, happiness, and efficiency of adult life depend preponderantly on the home influences of early childhood; and, obviously, in a home where the parental attention can be concentrated on a single child, better results should be attained than when the work of training involves a division of the attention among several children. Unhappily, when it is a question of training an only child, too many parents seem to take it for granted that training is entirely unnecessary, that their child is innately so good that he will develop of his own accord into one of the best of men. In reality, as modern psychology has made very clear, every child at the outset of his life is much like every other child, a plastic, unmoral little creature, exceedingly impulsive and exceedingly receptive, readily impressed for good or evil by the influences that surround him. Childhood, to repeat a truism hackneyed to psychologists, but seemingly unappreciated by most people, is pre-eminently the suggestible period of life. It is then, when the critical faculty still is undeveloped, that whatever ideas are presented to the mind are most surely absorbed by it, to sink into its subconscious depths, and there form the nucleus for whole systems of thought afterward manifesting as habits. Herein lurks the special peril to the only child afflicted with over-loving, over-anxious parents. Their perpetual solicitude for him, acting as a suggestion of irresistible force, tends to engender in him a mental attitude out of which may afterward spring, according to the subsequent circumstances of his life, a cold, heartless, calculating selfishness, or a morbid self-anxiety, perhaps eventuating in all sorts of neurotic symptoms. If, as a boy, he is too closely and constantly associated with his mother, the force of suggestion again, acting largely through the imitative instinct, may lead to a development of those feminine traits frequently characteristic of male only children, and often involving pathological conditions of dire social as well as individual significance. Further still, by restricting unduly the intercourse of only children with playmates of their own age, as is often done, one of the finest agencies in development through the power of suggestion is left unutilised. There is a world of truth in the lament of the only child from whose autobiography I have already quoted: