There are parents whose behaviour when dealing with a mentally retarded child is--often quite unconsciously--that of a censorious judge upbraiding a criminal. They nag, they harass, they urge the child to greater effort, never questioning that he can of his own accord improve his ability to learn. Perhaps he is mentally deficient, perhaps he is suffering from some remediable physical cause of retardation, perhaps the method by which he is being taught is not suited to his type of mind. To all these possibilities the parents do not give a moment's thought. The child is stupid; it must be his fault; he should be forced to mend his ways. So they pester the little unfortunate. And when to retardation he gradually adds sullenness, they are more incensed than before. But, in point of cold fact, whose is the fault? Not the child's, surely. Perpetual nagging is a first-class means of producing sulkiness in any child, whether he be mentally retarded, unusually bright, or just a plain "average" child.
Another almost equally efficacious means is untruthfulness on the part of parents in their relations with the child. There are some parents who think it not at all amiss to deceive their children. They make promises to them which they do not intend to keep. They threaten them with punishments that never materialise. They make untruthful replies to questions the children put to them. The children are not imbeciles. They note these broken promises, these empty threats, these untruthful replies. They lose faith in their parents, and sometimes it happens that their loss of faith manifests itself in a gloomy brooding, a sullen resentment against the parents. The parents, on their side, regard the sulky child as maliciously naughty and evil-minded. Not an inkling do they have of their own share in the making of the condition of which they complain. They blame only the child.
Even the practice, common among parents, of telling their children "white lies" with regard to delicate matters is at times productive of sulkiness _as a symptom of nervousness due to inner mental conflict_. Almost every child is at an early age inquisitive about his origin and the manner of his coming into the world. If his questions on these subjects are evaded or answered in a fantastic way, the child's curiosity is likely to be increased rather than satisfied. In exceptional cases there may result an obsessional pondering of the evaded topic, intensified when the child discovers that his parents have deceived him. Extreme nervousness, accompanied with sullenness, is then a likely result. But, apart altogether from the possibility that nervousness and sulkiness may be caused by parental deception of this sort, the danger of losing control over their children is itself serious enough to warn parents to be straightforward in answering their children's queries regarding sex subjects.