to their satisfaction. Such a management will make them in love with the hand that directs them, and the virtue they are directed to.
This farther advantage may be made by a free liberty permitted them in their recreations, that it will discover their natural tempers, show their inclinations and aptitudes, and thereby direct wise parents in the choice both of the course of life and employment they shall design them for, and of fit remedies, in the meantime, to be applied to whatever bent of nature they may observe most likely to mislead any of their children.
§109. 2. Children who live together, often strive for mastery, whose wills shall carry it over the rest: whoever begins the contest, should be sure to be crossed in it. But not only that, but they should be taught to have all the deference, complaisance, and civility one for the other imaginable. This, when they see it procures them respect, love and esteem, and that they lose no superiority by it, they will take more pleasure in, than in insolent domineering; for so plainly is the other.
The accusations of children one against another, which usually are but the clamours of anger and revenge desiring aid, should not be favourably received, nor hearkened to. It weakens and effeminates their minds to suffer them to complain; and if they endure sometimes crossing or pain from others without being permitted to think it strange or intolerable, it will do them no harm to learn sufferance, and harden them early. But though you give no countenance to the complaints of the querulous, yet take care to curb the insolence and ill nature of the injurious. When you observe it yourself, reprove it before the injured party: but if the complaint be of something really worth your notice, and prevention another time, then reprove the offender by himself alone, out of sight of him that complained and make him go and ask pardon, and make reparation: which coming thus, as it were from himself, will be the more cheerfully performed, and more kindly received, the love strengthened between them, and a custom of civility grow familiar amongst your children.