This industry is by no means peculiar to China. The Chinese (they say)
make physical monsters. We revile them for it and proceed to make moral
monsters of our own children. The most excusable parents are those who
try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says
to his child: "I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore
imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back"
(a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who,
with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking. If you must hold
yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all
necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. But
you had much better let the child's character alone. If you once allow
yourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufacture
into any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the
experiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does
not know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be
wrong: the child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the
Will of God); and you cannot feel it for him. Handel's parents no doubt
thought they knew better than their child when they tried to prevent
his becoming a musician. They would have been equally wrong and equally
unsuccessful if they had tried to prevent the child becoming a great
rascal had its genius lain in that direction. Handel would have been
Handel, and Napoleon and Peter of Russia _them_selves in spite of all
the parents in creation, because, as often happens, they were stronger
than their parents. But this does not happen always. Most children
can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are
ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being
ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to force
their children into their moulds. Every child has a right to its own
bent. It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its parents be
convinced atheists. It has a right to dislike its mother or father or
sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it. It
has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way
seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right
to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it
were its own father.