“Hysterical children, it has been my observation, usually have neurotic parents. At first I was disposed to see in this another evidence of the dread workings of heredity. But I am now inclined to the belief that it illustrates rather the influence of environment. All children, as you know, are highly imitative. They tend to copy, with exaggerations, whatever models are placed before them, and instinctively they take their parents as their chief models. If, then, the parents are flighty, excitable, passing rapidly from extreme to extreme of mood, it is only natural that the children should be likewise. Their minds undisciplined, their will-power undeveloped, they easily fall a prey to the baneful, hysteria-producing suggestions of their unhealthy surroundings. “To make matters worse, there is often, even among well-educated persons, an amazing disregard of the hygienic and dietetic requirements for neural stability. Children are allowed to sit up to unreasonable hours; they are permitted altogether too frequent attendance at parties, theatres, moving-picture shows, and similar places of entertainment, where they receive impressions too vivid and varied for them to absorb easily. Then, too, there is a tendency to give them at their meals an undue allowance of meat, and to permit them to drink tea, coffee, and other stimulants making for nerve disturbance. “All the while they are living in an atmosphere of parental uneasiness and unrest. Their mothers—and perhaps their fathers also—fuss and fume over them. They delight, it may be, in ‘showing them off’ to admiring visitors, thus suggesting to the already over-impressionable little ones undue ideas of their own importance. Presently signs of trouble appear—restless sleep, ‘night terrors,’ facial ‘tics,’ possibly even full-blown attacks of hysterical convulsions, paralysis, deafness, or what not—and the neurologist has another patient on his hands.” Surely the duty of parents is plain. To set before their children from earliest infancy examples of placidity and strength of character, to educate their will no less than their intellect, to guard them as far as possible from all harmful suggestions, to love them without idolising them, to study carefully their physical as well as their mental and moral needs—in this way, and in this way alone, can safety be had against the dread evil of hysteria and allied nervous troubles. Especially is such a course indispensable in view of the now well-demonstrated fact that a faulty upbringing may be primarily responsible for mental and nervous maladies, not of childhood but of adult life, and of a character to challenge the utmost skill of the best trained physicians. Of this, more in our next chapter. VIII THE MENACE OF FEAR