Children may, perhaps, be trained gradually to habits of obedience by a system of direct rewards, and in a manner, too, far more agreeable to the parent and better for the child than by a system of compulsion through threats and punishment.
_The Method of Indirect Rewarding_.
But there is another way of connecting pleasurable ideas and associations with submission to parental authority in the minds of children, as a means of alluring them to the habit of obedience--one that is both more efficient in its results and more healthful and salutary in its action than the practice of bestowing direct recompenses and rewards.
Suppose, for example, in the case above described, the mother, on leaving the children, simply gives them the command that they are not to leave the yard, but makes no promises, and then, on returning from the village with the bonbons in her bag, simply asks Susan, when she comes in, whether the children have obeyed her injunction not to leave the yard.

If Susan says yes, she nods to them, with a look of satisfaction and pleasure, and adds: "I thought they would obey me.

I am very glad.

Now I can trust them again." Then, by-and-by, towards the close of the day, perhaps, and when the children suppose that the affair is forgotten, she takes an opportunity to call them to her, saying that she has something to tell them.
"You remember when I went to the village to-day, I left you in the yard and said that you must not go out of the gate, and you obeyed.

Perhaps you would have liked to go out into the road and play there, but you would not go because I had forbidden it.