Daily Gazette & Comet [Baton Rouge, LA], October 12, 1860
We have often deprecated the system of training which multitudes of children receive. We turn in vain for a spot where childhood is properly trained; where it is respected as childhood and allowed to be childhood. In solitary instances, perhaps, we might find families who understand what is due to infancy and the wants of nature demand for the growing child. But they are few and far between. Children, now a days are looked upon as so many puppets n which to display lace, jewels, gimcrackery, and the last new modes in flounce and whalebone. Corsetted , be starched, be furbelowed, and bidizened off, they look like so many men and women grown down, until even in face and conversation they lose the freshness and simplicity of childhood in the monkeyisms of grown up folly. What of childhood may be left in them—these miniature cards of fashion—is crushed out of them by the idea of being little belles and beaux, by minature flirtations, among which their time is spent in vieing , to the utmost particular, with the affectations, rivalries, jealousies, and appointments making of their elder, though not models.
Turn where we will, childhood is abused. They are allowed their own way; they become men and women before they have passed the threshold of youth; they have no respect for seniors, and are as mannerless as bears. They have indoctrinated into them false views and false notions of society; they are puffed up with pride and conceit; they are trained into fops and dolts by fashionable mammas and indulgent pappas, as animals are trained by show masters—for exhibition. What then are we to look for from the coming age? Naught else but the follies, extravagances, debaucheries and depravities of the present age will be increased to a four fold degree. The next generation will truly illustrate the ‘visiting the sins of fathers upon their children.’