A Treatise on Parents and Children

These rights have now become more important than they used to be, / because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be / more effectually violated. In a family of ten, eight, six, or even four / children, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take care of / themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too. Two adult parents, / in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn, can still interfere / to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one child. But / by the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not only outnumbered / two to one, but are getting tired of the thankless and mischievous job / of bringing up their children in the way they think they should go. The / old observation that members of large families get on in the world / holds good because in large families it is impossible for each child to / receive what schoolmasters call "individual attention. " The children / may receive a good deal of individual attention from one another in the / shape of outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule, and violent resistance / to their attempts at aggression; but the parental despots are compelled / by the multitude of their subjects to resort to political rather than / personal rule, and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making over / so many children, that each child has enough freedom, and enough sport / in the prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind their / backs, to escape with much less damage than the single child. In a large / school the system may be bad; but the personal influence of the head / master has to be exerted, when it is exerted at all, in a public way, / because he has little more power of working on the affections of the / individual scholar in the intimate way that, for example, the mother / of a single child can, than the prime minister has of working on the / affections of any individual voter.