Your child will be
trained to hate the law, to despise authority, and to regard his obedience
as a compromise of true liberty. He will, therefore, seek liberty only in
the usurpation of law and government. He will contemn love, because where
it should have been disinterested, and shown in its greatest tenderness and
purity,--in the parent's heart, it was abused and silenced.
That discipline, therefore, which is ever magnifying trifles, finding
fault, scolding and storming, and threatening and whipping, and falling
upon the child, like the continual dropping of rain in a winter day, casts
a withering gloom over home, makes it repulsive to the child, gives to the
parent a forbidding aspect, until the children become provoked to wrath,
and regard their home as a prison, their life as a slavery, and long for
the time when they may leave home and parents forever. Such discipline
makes the reign of the parent a reign of terror. It reminds one of the laws
of Draco, written in blood. It produces in the child a broken spirit, a
reckless desperation, a hardened contumacy, a deep and sullen melancholy, a
mental and moral hardihood which prepares him for deeds of outrage upon law
and humanity. It is unnatural, revolting to human nature, to beat and
crush, as if with an iron rod, the tender child of our hearts and hopes. It
extinguishes natural affection; and no subsequent kindness can rekindle the
flame.
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