Find your moral compass
Georgian parents were expected to tease out their children’s innate goodness
Parents raising children in the 18th century were doing so at the very moment when Enlightenment ideas were sweeping Europe, a period when the continent’s greatest thinkers were considering the development of children’s minds as well as bodies.
The works of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a significant impact on Georgians’ perceptions of childhood. Locke taught parents to think of children as being “white paper, or wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases”. In contrast to many religious writers a century earlier, Rousseau believed that children were born innately good.
Whereas Rousseau thought children could be left to their own devices, Locke pursued a more interventionist approach to parenting. It was nurture not nature that made the difference. “That all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education,” he wrote.
Enlightenment philosophers believed that even the youngest of children had the ability to reason – so new parents were expected to harness this by teaching them the basics of right and wrong, as well as ensuring that they learned to read and write. What’s more, at this age, virtually all teaching was done at home, so the onus was on parents to provide it.
Parents also, of course, had to learn how to discipline their children. In the preceding centuries, they had been quick to resort to physical punishment. The Georgian era, however, witnessed a shift to a more forgiving attitude that rewarded children for good conduct. Wilful misbehaviour could result from children not knowing how to govern their emotions, it was thought, and parents were instructed to teach offspring to exercise their reason to achieve self- control.
Above all – no matter how unruly their child’s behaviour, no matter how exasperating they found the whole child-rearing experience – it was essential that parents remained calm. As the Quaker William Thompson wrote: “Some parents are greatly to blame, who when their children have committed a fault, presently fall into a passion… Like commonly begets its like, passion in parents, is apt either to generate the same in their children; or else to render them dumpish, and melancholick.”