A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason

A Malicious Child––A child has an odious custom, so constant, that it is his quality, will be character, if you let him alone; he is spiteful, he is sly, he is sullen. No one is to blame for it; it was born in him. What are you to do with such inveterate habit of nature? Just this; treat it as a bad habit, and set up the opposite good habit. Henry is more than mischievous; he is a malicious little boy. There are always tears in the nursery, because, with ‘pinches, nips, and bobs,’ he is making some child wretched. Even his pets are not safe; he has done his canary to death by poking at it with a stick through the bars of its cage; howls from his dog, screeches from his cat, betray him in some vicious trick. He makes fearful faces at his timid little sister; sets traps with string for the housemaid with her water-cans to fall over; there is no end to the malicious tricks, beyond the mere savagery of untrained boyhood, which come to his mother’s ear. What is to be done? ‘Oh, he will grow out of it!’ say the more hopeful who pin their faith to time. But many an experienced mother will say, ‘You can’t cure him; what is in will out, and he will be a pest to society all his life.’ Yet the child may be cured in a month if the mother will set herself to the task with both hands and of set purpose; at any rate, the cure may be well begun, and that is half done.