We cannot say it too often: We fuss too much with our children. There is too much theory in this matter of bringing up children. We pay too much attention to our children. Let us leave them their peaceful childhood, their merry games, the wondrous product of their untiring phantasy. Let us clearly realize that with our excessive affection we give ourselves a great deal of pleasure but that at the same time we are doing the children a great injury. Let no one discourage mothers from being affectionate to their children, from expending loving attentions on them, from making their youth as pleasant as possible. But the parents’ affection should not expend itself mechanically. It should be a uniformly warm fire that only warms, kindles no fire, and bursts into a bright flame only on life’s great holidays. WHY THEY QUARREL When a happy married couple laughingly assures me that the heaven of their marriage was always cloudless and that there were no thunder-storms and no lightning flashes I accept it as self-evident, but to myself I think: they are lying. When two friends assure me that they have never quarrelled I think the same thing. I know that they have not been telling the truth. That is, they are liars without the consciousness of lying. They are firmly convinced that they were telling only what was true, because they have “repressed” the unpleasant, the painful, the objectionable. And thus it comes to pass that lovers forget all the “scenes” that had occurred between them, and that friends become oblivious of the little unpleasantnesses that had caused them so much suffering, and that they can assert, with the utmost conviction, that they had never quarrelled. We do not quaff the lethe-potion of oblivion at our life’s end. No, we sip it daily, and it is this that enables us to maintain that optimism which ever looks hopefully into the future and anticipates thornless roses. There are people who must always be quarrelling, whose exuberant energy must be discharged in this way, to whom life does not seem worth while if it runs along smoothly. These are the everlastingly unsatisfied who have not found the ideals of their youth, who have not attained their dreams. They project their discontent, their internal distraction, upon all their daily experiences. That is why they so often appear to be overcharged with emotion; that is why the intensity of their excitement is incomprehensible to us. For it is a fact that they fly into rages about trivial matters. But it is this very intensity of emotion that shows that there is more behind these little rows than they will ordinarily admit, that the quarrel derives its fuel from a deeper source than appears on the surface.