The preface to Misalliance has such a wealth of quotable things in it that the only way to get them appreciated is to quote. Shaw has said much of this before, but it is all so valuable that it ought to be shouted from the housetops:
The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go.
What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it 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.
Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one within his reach.... Francis records the habit with bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman’s service to his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Free-thinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect.
Now Mr. Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared with the conventionally good father who deliberately imposes himself on his son as god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction; compared to this sort of abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a Providence.
A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman’s children would have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions.
The cruelty (of beating a child) must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretense of reluctance. It must be for the child’s good. The assailant must say “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty.
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.
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.