The Anatomy of Melancholy

Others, at the opposite extreme, do just as much harm through excessive laxity. They provide no upbringing, no occupation to keep their charges busy or give them a livelihood, teach them no trade and set them on no good course. As a result, their servants, children and pupils are swept away in the stream of drunkenness, idleness, gambling and many such unruly ways, until in the end they rue it, curse their parents and bring harm upon themselves.

Too much indulgence has the same effect: “a father’s foolish mildness and perverse willingness to give way”. Like Micio, with too much freedom and too generous an allowance, they indulge their children’s whims, let them revel, chase women, riot, swagger and do whatever they please, and then punish them with a band of musicians.

Let him feast, drink and smell of perfume at my expense. Is he in love? I shall give him money when it suits. Has he broken down doors? They shall be replaced. Has he torn A garment? It shall be mended. Let him do as he likes, Take, spend, squander: I have resolved to put up with it.

But as Demea told him, “You allow him to be corrupted”: your leniency will undo him. “I seem already to foresee the day when, destitute, he will run away somewhere to serve as a soldier”: I foresee his ruin.

So parents often err, especially many foolishly fond mothers, who dote on their children like Aesop’s ape until in the end they crush them to death: “nurses of their bodies, stepmothers of their souls”, pampering their bodies to their souls’ undoing. They will not let them be corrected or restrained, but insist that they be indulged in everything they do, until in the end they “bring sorrow, shame and grief to their parents” (Ecclesiasticus, chapter 30, verses 8–9), and become wanton, stubborn, wilful and disobedient: rude, wicked, headstrong, incorrigible and graceless.

They love them so foolishly, says Cardano, that they seem rather to hate them, bringing them up for wrongdoing instead of virtue, for riotous living instead of learning, for every pleasure and kind of licence instead of a sober life and conduct.

Who has so little experience that he does not know this saying of Fabius to be true? Education is a second nature, altering the mind and will. And would to God, he says, that we ourselves did not spoil our children’s characters by excessive coddling and delicate upbringing, weakening the strength of their bodies and minds. This creates habit, and habit becomes nature, and so on.

For these reasons Plutarch, in On the Education of Children, and Jerome, in book 1, letter 17, to Laeta on bringing up her daughter, give parents a most particular charge and many good cautions about raising children. They must not entrust them to indiscreet, hot-tempered, mad tutors, or to frivolous, giddy or greedy people. They must spare no expense to have them well brought up and taught, since the matter is of such great consequence.