The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

conflicting emotions. In this conflict their parental
happiness is lost. After all the care that they have
bestowed on the child, they find to their
mortification that he turns out quite different from
what they had hoped. They wanted him to be a
soldier, and they find him a pacifist, or, like
Tolstoy, they wanted him to be a pacifist, and he
joins the Black Hundreds. But it is not only in these
later developments that the difficulty is felt. If you
feed an infant who is already capable of feeding
himself, you are putting love of power before the
child’s welfare, although it seems to you that you
are only being kind in saving him trouble. If you
make him too vividly aware of dangers, you are
probably actuated by a desire to keep him
dependent upon you. If you give him demonstrative
affection to which you expect a response, you are
probably endeavouring to grapple him to you by
means of his emotions. In a thousand ways, great
and small, the possessive impulse of parents will
lead them astray, unless they are very watchful or
very pure in heart. Modern parents, aware of these
dangers, sometimes lose confidence in handling