"If you treat it [a child] 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 . . . .
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."
(From: "A Treatise on Parents and Children")
