p. 7 | The Sensitive Child by Alice M. Ashton

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 22, 1910

The Sensitive Child

By Alice M. Ashton

“THEY are both very attractive children,” I observed to their aunt as they left the room.

“Most people prefer Pauline,” she said, suggestively. “Annis is less open-natured, more deceitful, though I can not make their mother think so.”

The little girl certainly appeared shy and retiring, but there was not a trace of slyness or deceit in her sweet, honest little face. I wondered where the trouble lay.

Next morning, while at some rough, outdoor play, each child tore her dress. “Now, what will your mother say?” exclaimed the aunt.

“I don’t care what she says,” answered Pauline, with an independent toss of her head. But Annis, her face crimson, stole quietly to her mother’s room, and began sewing up the ugly rent.

“Didn’t I tell you so?” said the aunt.

But the truth of the matter was that Annis was very sensitive to unpleasant conditions. She gave up her honest rights rather than fight for them; and when Pauline and the little brother emphatically settled their frequent disputes, she would hasten to another room, where she could not hear.

“I don’t like fussing,” she confided to me one day. “I don’t see what makes them so ugly. It does not do a bit of good; for they have to mind mother in the end. Why can not people be pleasant?”

The sensitive child is not difficult to manage, but certainly needs careful handling. There is usually a strong imagination, an active conscience, and a deep-seated affection in his nature, and it requires stimulating rather than repulsing. There is often something very fine, and susceptible of great possibilities, in the sensitive child, yet these children are more often ruined by rough handling than any others.

“I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil,” should be the watchword of the mother of sensitive children. Do not repress them by sharpness or lack of sympathy into reticence or deceitfulness. It is difficult for some mothers to realize how hard they make it for their children to be quite truthful and frank. This nature is not less truthful, but it is more easily induced to deceit by its dread of any unpleasantness. When the sensitive child must be reproved, speak gently and kindly, remembering that its capacity for suffering is very intense. If stimulated and strengthened in youth, the sensitive child often grows into the noblest manhood and womanhood.—Alice M. Ashton, in the Housewife.