Informed at the outset by a fine moral feeling and a practical tact as to what ought to be expected, the wise mother is concerned before everything to make her laws appear as much a matter of course as the daily sequences of the home life, as unquestionable axioms of behaviour; and this not by a foolish vehemence of inculcation but by a quiet skilful inweaving of them into the order of the child’s world. To expect the right thing, as though the wrong thing were an impossibility, rather than to be always pointing out the wrong thing and threatening consequences; to make all her words and all her own actions support this view of the inevitableness of law; to meet any indications of a disobedient spirit, first with misunderstanding, and later with amazement; this is surely the first and fundamental matter. The effectiveness of this discipline depends on the simple psychological principle that difficult actions tend to realise themselves in the measure in which the ideas of them become clear and persistent. Get a child steadily to follow out in thought an act to which he is disinclined and you have more than half mastered the disinclination. The quiet daily insistence of the wise rule of the nursery proceeds by setting up and maintaining the ideas of dutiful actions, and so excluding the thought of disobedient actions. It has recently been pointed out that in this moral control of the child through suggestion of right actions we have something closely analogous to the action of suggestion upon the hypnotised subject. The mother, the right sort of mother, has on the child’s mind something of the subduing influence of the Nancy doctor: she induces ideas of particular actions, gives them force and persistence so that the young mind is possessed by them and they work themselves out into fulfilment as occasion arises. In order that this effect of ‘obsession,’ or a full occupation of consciousness with the right idea, may result, certain precautions are necessary. As observant parents know, a child may be led by a prohibition to do the very thing he is bidden not to do. We have seen how readily a child’s mind moves from an affirmation to a corresponding negation, and conversely. The ‘contradictoriness’ of a child, his passion for saying the opposite of what you say, shows the same odd manner of working of the young mind. Wanting to do what he is told not to do is another effect of this “contrary suggestion,” as it has been called, aided of course by the child’s dislike of all constraint.[195] If we want to avoid this effect of suggestion and to secure the direct effect, we must first of all acquire the difficult secret of personal influence, of the masterfulness which does not repel but attracts; and secondly try to reduce our forbiddings with their contrary suggestions to a minimum. ----- Footnote 195: On the nature of this contrary suggestion see Mark Baldwin, _Mental Development in the Child and the Race_, p. 145 f. -----