Emile, or On Education

the young shrub from the shock of human opinions! Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies; its fruits will one day be your delight. Form an enclosure around your child’s soul early on: another person may mark out its perimeter, but you alone must place the barrier there (*).

(1) Laws, always so oc-cupied with property and so little with people, because their object is peace and not virtue, do not give enough authority to mothers. However, their situation is more certain than that of fathers; their duties are more arduous; their care is more important to the good order of the family; generally, they have more attachment to their children. There are occasions where a son who lacks respect for his father may, in some way, be excused; but if, on any occasion whatsoever, a child were unnatural enough to fail in his duty to his mother, to the one who carried him in her womb, who nourished him with her milk, who, for years, forgot herself only to occupy herself with him, one should hasten to stifle this wretch, as a monster unworthy of seeing the light of day. Mothers, it is said, spoil their children. In this, no doubt, they are wrong, but perhaps less wrong than you, who deprave them. The mother wants her child to be happy, to be happy right now; in this, she is right: when she is mistaken about the means, one must enlighten her. The ambition, the avarice, the tyranny, the false foresight of fathers, their negligence, their harsh insensibility, are a hundred times more fatal to children than the blind tenderness of mothers. Furthermore, it is necessary to explain the meaning that I give to this name of mother, and that is what will be done hereafter.

(*) I am assured that M. Formey Jean-Henri Samuel Formey, a contemporary philosopher and adversary of Rousseau believed that I