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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: make moral monsters of our own children. 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
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