Explore "A Treatise on Parents and Children" by George Bernard Shaw on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more / sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhood / frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrous / principle that little children should be seen and not heard, and to / enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitation / with children as convenient as possible for adults without the smallest / regard for the interests, either remote or immediate, of the / children. This system tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid, / unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in / undetected sinning; and in certain phases of civilization people of this / kind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientious / races and classes. They have the ferocity of a chained dog, and are / proud of it. But the end of it is that they are always in chains, / even at the height of their military or political success: they / win everything on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it. Their / civilizations rest on intimidation, which is so necessary to them that / when they cannot find anybody brave enough to intimidate them they / intimidate themselves and live in a continual moral and political panic.
In the end they get found out and bullied. But that is not the point / that concerns us here, which is, that they are in some respects better / brought up than the children of sentimental people who are always / anxious and miserable about their duty to their children, and who end / by neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable life for / themselves. A selfish tyrant you know where to have, and he (or she) at / least does not confuse your affections; but a conscientious and kindly / meddler may literally worry you out of your senses. It is fortunate that / only very few parents are capable of doing what they conceive their duty / continuously or even at all, and that still fewer are tough enough to / ride roughshod over their children at home.