A Treatise on Parents and Children

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: / that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment / if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of / your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. / If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be / played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money / for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through / in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will / resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you / begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own / purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do. / Swear at a child, throw your boots at it, send it flying from the room / with a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as instructive to the / child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Place / tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one / within his reach. The effect on the young Places seems to have been / simply to make them keep out of their father's way, which was no doubt / what he desired, as far as he desired anything at all. Francis records / the habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his / father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of / it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his / country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only / sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose / religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and / I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared / with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself on / his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent / worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what / he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the / child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, / for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this sort of / abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a / Providence. Not that it is possible to live with children any more than / with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them. There / is a point at which every person with human nerves has to say to a child / "Stop that noise. " But suppose the child asks why! There are various / answers in use. The simplest: "Because it irritates me," may fail; for / it may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you; also / the child, having comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceive / your meaning vividly enough. In any case it may want to make a noise / more than to spare your feelings. You may therefore have to explain / that the effect of the irritation will be that you will do something / unpleasant if the noise continues. The something unpleasant may be only / a look of suffering to rouse the child's affectionate sympathy (if it / has any), or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plenty / of unnecessary violence; but the principle is the same: there are no / false pretences involved: the child learns in a straightforward way that / it does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made / the child learn the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.