When the little one is discovered to be nervous, fretful, impatient, and easily irritated early in the morning, it should be left alone in its bed or in the nursery until it quiets down. If it has a good, healthy crying spell, leave it alone. Let it early get used to living with itself--teach the little fellow to get along with the world as it is--and you will do a great deal toward preventing a host of neurasthenic miseries and a flood of hysterical sorrows later on in life. You must not expect to train the nervous child by the simple and easy methods which are successful in the case of a normal child; that is, you cannot repeat a simple discipline two or three times and have the child learn the lesson. In the case of the high-strung nervous child it requires "line upon line and precept upon precept;" for, whereas a normal child will respond to a certain discipline after it is repeated a half dozen times, the nervous child will require the persistent repetition of such a discipline from twenty-five to one hundred times before the lesson sinks into his consciousness sufficiently to enable him to gain control of his erratic and unbalanced nervous mechanism. SPOILING THE CHILD As bad as all spoiling methods are in child culture, they are decidedly disastrous--almost fatal--in the case of the nervous child; and yet it is these delicate, sensitive, cute little things that are the very ones who are most frequently the worst spoiled. Nervous children simply must not be played with all the time. They must be by themselves a great deal, at least this is true in their earlier years. The nervous baby must early learn absolute respect for authority, so that what it lacks in its own nervous control may be partially made up for by parental suggestion and discipline. Of course, as suggested in a later chapter, the more ideal methods of suggestion, education, and persuasion should be employed in your efforts to secure obedience and promote self-control; but, when through either the deep-rooted incorrigibility of a child, or the inefficiency of the parent's efforts in the employment of suggestion--no matter what the cause of the failure of your ideal methods to control temper, stop crying, or otherwise put down the juvenile rebellion, whether the child has been spoiled on account of company, sickness or through your carelessness--when you cannot effectively and immediately enforce your will any other way, do not hesitate to punish; spank promptly and vigorously and spank repeatedly if necessary to accomplish your purpose. You must not fail in the case of the nervous child to accomplish exactly what you start out to do.