The Nervous Child
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THE IMITATIVENESS OF THE CHILD
It is in the second and third years of the child's life that the rapidity of the
development of the mental processes is most apparent, and it is with that age
that we may begin a closer examination. At first sight it might seem more
reasonable to adopt a strictly chronological order, and to start with the in-
fant from the day of his birth. Since, however, we can only interpret the
mind of the child by our knowledge of our own mental processes, the study
of the older child and of the later stages is in reality the simpler task. The
younger the infant, the greater the difficulties become, so that our task is
not so much to trace the development of a process from simple and early
forms to those which are later and more complex, as to follow a track which
is comparatively plain in later childhood, but grows faint as the beginnings
of life are approached.
At the age, then, of two or three the first quality of the child which may arrest
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our attention is his extreme imitativeness. Not that the imitation on his part
is in any way conscious; but like a mirror he reflects in every action and in
every word all that he sees and hears going on around him. We must recog-
nise that in these early days his words and actions are not an independent
growth, with roots in his own consciousness, but are often only the reflec-
tion of the words and actions of others. How completely speech is imitative
is shown by the readiness with which a child contracts the local accent of his
birthplace. The London parents awake with horror to find their baby an
indubitable Cockney; the speech of the child bred beyond the Tweed pro-
claims him a veritable Scot. Again, some people are apt to adopt a somewhat
peremptory tone in addressing little children. Often they do not trouble to
give to their voices that polite or deferential inflection which they habitually
use when speaking to older people. Listen to a party of nurses in the Park
addressing their charges. As if they knew that their commands have small
chance of being obeyed, they shout them with incisive force. "Come along
at once when I tell you," they say. And the child faithfully reflects it all back,
and is heard ordering his little sister about like a drill sergeant, or curtly bid-
ding his grandmother change her seat to suit his pleasure. If we are to have
pretty phrases and tones of voice, mothers must see to it that the child habit-
ually hears no other. Again, mothers will complain that their child is deaf,
or, at any rate, that he has the bad habit of responding to all remarks ad-
dressed to him by saying, "What?" or, worse still, "Eh?" Often enough the
reason that he does so is not that the child is deaf, nor that he is particularly
slow to understand, but simply that he himself speaks so indistinctly that
no matter what he says to the grown-up people around him, they bend over
him and themselves utter the objectionable word.
We all hate the tell-tale child, and when a boy comes in from his walk and
has much to say of the wicked behaviour of his little sister on the afternoon's
outing, his mother is apt to see in this a most horrid tendency towards tale-
bearing and currying of favour. She does not realise that day by day, when
the children have come in from their walk, she has asked nurse in their hear-
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