erve, that parents would save themselves a
great deal of trouble, and their children some pain, if they would
pay some attention to their early education. The temper acquires
habits much earlier than is usually apprehended; the first impressions
which infants receive, and the first habits which they learn from
their nurses, influence the temper and disposition long after the
slight causes which produced them are forgotten. More care and
judgment than usually fall to the share of a nurse are necessary, to
cultivate the disposition which infants show, to exercise their
senses, so as neither to suffer them to become indolent and torpid
from want of proper objects to occupy their attention, nor yet to
exhaust their senses by continual excitation. By ill-timed restraints
or injudicious incitements, the nurse frequently renders the child
obstinate or passionate. An infant should never be interrupted in its
operations; whilst it wishes to use its hands, we should not be
impatient to make it walk; or when it is pacing, with all the
attention to its centre of gravity that is exerted by a rope-dancer,
suddenly arrest its progress, and insist upon its pronouncing the
scanty vocabulary which we have compelled it to learn. When children
are busily trying experiments upon objects within their reach, we
should not, by way of saving them trouble, break the course of their
ideas, and totally prevent them from acquiring knowledge by their own
experience. When a foolish nurse sees a child attempting to reach or
lift any thing, she runs immediately, "Oh, dear love, it can't do it,
it can't!--I'll do it for it, so I will!"--If the child be trying the
difference between pushing and pulling, rolling or sliding, the powers
of the wedge or the lever, the officious nurse hastens instantly to
display her own knowledge of the mechanic powers: "Stay, love, stay;
that is not the way to do it--I'll show it the right way--see
here--look at me love."--Without interrupting a child in the moment of
action, proper care might previously be taken to remove out of its way
those things which can really hurt it, and a just degree of attention
must be paid to its first experiments upon hard and heavy, and more
especially upon sharp, brittle, and burning bodies; but this degree of
care should not degenerate into cowardice; it is better that a child
should tumble down or burn its fingers, than that it should not learn
the use of its limbs and its senses. We should