PEDIATRICS Vol. 65 No. 6 June 1980, pp. 1067
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INSTRUCTIONS OF AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH FATHER TO HIS DAUGHTER ON HOW TO RAISE HER SON

T. E. C. Jr MD

John Taylor (1694-1761), the editor of the first Hebrew Concordance of the English Bible, offered his daughter in his pamphlet entitled The Value of a Child (1752) the following advice on raising her son.1

Let him be well established in liberty (liberty to use and improve his understanding) and the rights of conscience; but for others as well as himself. Address his understanding; encourage his enquiries, and use him betimes to think and reason. Represent vice in the most odious, virtue in the most amiable colours. Especially give him a deep sense of truth and integrity, and an abhorrence of all manner of falsehood, fraud, craft, subterfuge and dissimulation, as base and dishonourable, and highly displeasing to God. You cannot cherish veracity too much. Never be severe for any fault he ingenuously acknowledges. But while you are convincing him of the wrong he has done, honour and commend him for the truth he has spoken. Make him sensible [that] bodily appetites and passions are very dangerous, if not duly restrained. Give him a low, opinion of splendor and show, and deceive him not into wrong thoughts of himself by gaudy ornaments. Teach him to reverence the human nature even in the poorest and suffer him not to treat any with contempt. Cherish modesty and check a forward, bold behaviour; it may grow into an unruly dissolute insolence. Suffer him not to be a man, but as years and understanding allow. Boys are by no means fit to govern themselves, or to direct others.