How To Treat Children
There are many persons who have heard so much of family government that they think there cannot be too much of it They imprison their children in stiff rooms, where a fly is a band of music in the empty silence, and govern at morning, at noon, and at night, and the child goes all day long like a shuttle in the loom, back and forward, hit at both sides.
Children subjected to such treatment are apt to grow up infidels, through mere disgust. Many children grow up like plants under bell glasses. They are surrounded only by artificial and prepared influences.
There are house-bred, room-bred nurse-bred, mother-bred—everything but self-bred. The object of training is to teach the child to take care of himself; but many parents use their children only as a kind of spool on which to reel off their own experience; and they are bounded and corded until they perish by inanity, or break all bonds and cords, and rush to ruin by reaction.— BEECHER.