Your child, in the nursery, is like the tender plant. The storm of passion
and the chill of indifference and the oppression of parental tyranny should
not be heard and felt there; for where the storm rages and coldness freezes
and the hand of cruelty oppresses, we can have no beautiful and vigorous
development of physical or moral powers. There will be a stinted and
one-sided growth. At best it will be dwarfish, and tend to counteract the
spontaneous outflow of mental and moral life. The tender plant, when,
cramped and clogged by existing impediments, cannot spring up into
beauteous maturity. Neither can your child, when crammed with sweetmeats,
and oppressed and screwed into monstrous contortions by the cruel
inquisition of fashion and fashionable garments.
In this way the misdirected love and cruel pride of mothers often destroy
the health and beauty of their children. They cause a sickly and dwarfish
growth by too much confinement and mental taxation, by a too rigid choice
of diet, by daily, uncalled for decoctions of medicine, and by fitting the
body in a dress as the Chinese do their children's feet in shoes; in a
word, by making the entire nursery life too artificial, and substituting
the laws of art for those of nature. The result must be a delicate,
artificial constitution, too fragile for the trials and duties of life. The
body of your child has not the blooming, blushing form of nature, but the
cold marble cast of a statue; and it imprints itself upon the disposition,
the spirit, the mental faculties.
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