d imaginary complaints.
These patients always feel that they are different from other people,
that something terrible is the matter with them or that something
awful is about to happen to them. Their brains constantly swarm with
fears and premonitions of disease, disaster, and despair, while their
otherwise brilliant intellects are confused and handicapped because of
these "spoiled" and "hereditary" nervous disturbances--with the result
that both their happiness and usefulness in life is largely destroyed.

The fundamental abnormal characteristic of that great group of
nerve-patients who throng the doctor's office is sensitiveness,
suggestibility, and lack of self-control. Sensitiveness is nothing
more or less than a refined form of selfishness, while lack of
self-control is merely the combined end-product of heredity and
childhood spoiling. I am a great believer in, and practitioner of,
modern methods of psychological child culture, but let me say to the
fond parent who has a nervous child, when you have failed to teach the
child self-control by suggestive methods, do not hesitate to punish,
for of all cases it is doubly true of the nervous child that if you
"spare the rod" you are sure to "spoil the child."

Let me urge parents to secure this self-control and enforce this
discipline before the child is three or four years of age; correct the
child at a time when your purpose can be accomplished without leaving
in his subconscious mind so many vivid memories of these personal and,
sometimes, more or less brutal physical encounters. Every year you put
off winning the disciplinary fight with your offspring, you enormously
increase the danger and likelihood of alienating his affections and
otherwise destroying that beautiful and sympathetic relationship which
should always exist between a child and his parents. In other words,
the older the child, the less the good you accomplish by discipline
and the more the personal resentment toward the parent is aroused on
the part of the child.

CRIME AND INTEMPERANCE

While it is generally admitted that feeble-mindedness lies at the
foundation of most crime, we must also recognize that failure on the
part of parents to teach their children self-control is also
responsible for many otherwise fairly normal youths falling into crime
and intemperance. The parents of a nervous child must recognize that
they will in all probability be subject to special danger along these
lines as