A Treatise on Parents and Children

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither / straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it / substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that / the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural / infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and / the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it / in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into / "If you do that, angels wont never love you. " I remember a servant who / used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did / not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would / come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people / told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them. / Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked / resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of / pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and / there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which / brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork / their children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of this / type are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently / the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched.

The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote / themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is / called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows / the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the / horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by / Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another / for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious / and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own / convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame / to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a / sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that one / can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few / cinders when they are worrited.