The Free Child
AS Neill
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INSTRUCTIONS TO EXPECTANT FATHERS
In my last book I quoted a few Instructions for Expectant Mothers issued
by the Hospital of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania ...
“The habit of thumb and finger sucking may be prevented by placing
the infant’s arms in a cardboard tube in order that it may not be able
to bend the arm at the elbow.”
“Private Parts. These should be kept scrupulously clean, to avoid discomfort,
disease, and the formation of bad habits. (my italics).”
Inspired by this medieval document, I want to say something to fathers,
who are too often left out of any discussion of children.
O.K. fathers. Stay in the background when things begin to hum; if you
don’t the doctor and nurse will tell you to get away as far as possible.
You are of no importance then; you are just a man. The danger is that this
initial phase of being a nonentity will give you such an inferiority complex
that you will go on looking wistfully on from afar. If you have theories
about feeding and nappies and clothing, keep them to yourself at this stage.
If your wife and you have previously agreed about theories, then you can
stay smoking in the kitchen knowing that all will be well. The trouble
is that you may not agree. I know a man who is mad about selfregulation,
but his wife believes in timetable feeding and is shocked when the baby
touches its genitals. Poor fellow, what can he do? I suggest, therefore,
if you will allow me to go back a bit, that before you marry you should
thresh out this question of treatment of infants. It possibly will not
keep you from marrying the girl if you love her, for, fond fellow, you
will keep hoping that you will convert her to your way of thinking, as
doubtful an accomplishment as that of the girl who marries a drunkard to
reform him.
It may be, of course, that you are the wrong type of father, the stern moulder of character. In that case shut this book: you are incurable, lost, damned. There is no hope for you, sir, unless you have a dim idea that part of you is feminine, just as part of your wife is masculine. Your greatest danger is the upbringing that made you suppress everything that was gentle and soft in your character. They told you when you were a boy that only girls ever weep; they trained you to be a man, brave, conventional, normal; your whole environment shouted at you that you must never betray your feelings. What a dangerous man to be a father, especially if the infant is a son! What a terrible man to be a husband, for, if you cannot weep, cannot betray your gentleness, your lovemaking must have been, if not brutal, clumsy, selfish, sadistic! I fear that too many men spell the word sex RAPE. Love means giving and receiving all the time, and the patriarchal man cannot give, and if he cannot give to his wife he certainly will never be able to give to his children.
However let us leave the obviously bad type of father. Let us talk to the ordinary, decent, sympathetic husband who comes home with the 5.20 every evening. I know you, John Brown. I know you want to love your children and be loved by them in return. I know that when your son of five wakes at two in the morning and yells persistently without any apparent cause, you will not feel much love for him at the moment. Be assured he has some sort of cause even if you cannot discover what it is. If you are angry try not to show it. A man’s voice is more terrifying to a baby than is that of a woman, and you never know what lifetime fears may be instilled into a baby by a noise of anger. “Don’t lie in bed with the baby,” says the egregarious Pennsylvania pamphlet. Forget it; give your infant as much hugging and petting as you can, but beware of spoiling; in other words have freedom but not licence. My wife tells me that Zoë can twist me round her little finger, so that I may be the wrong man to give you advice. It is better to err on the soft side than on the hard one.
You will find your situation complicated by the family triangle. Once your baby is born you are, in some measure, odd man out. Some women lose all desire for a sex life after having a baby. In any case divided love will enter the home, and you should be conscious of what is happening, otherwise you will find yourself being jealous of your own child. In my school I have had scores of children who suffered from either maternal or paternal jealousy, mostly cases in which the father’s jealousy had made him stern, often brutal to the son. If you are of the Peter Pan type of father you will always vie with your children for the love of mother, and your children will be more or less neurotic. But, seeing that you will not recognise the Peter Pan in yourself, this statement will not help you, although you might be able to recognise the Peter Pan in the neighbour over the garden wall, and will no doubt warn him of his danger.
Do not try to guard your children from what you consider evil influences, the vulgar children over the way, the language of the butcher’s boy; you will only make them exceedingly attractive. Guard your child from the moralist only.
Cut out all false modesty, and cease to think that girls are pure and should be kept innocent, meaning of course ignorant. Many fathers who demand purity in their children bring home pornographic stories to their wives .
that is why they attach so much value to purity; they try to find the purity they lack in their children. Never try to be the boss in the house, the censor, the ogre your wife implies when she says: “Wait till Daddy comes home !“ Don’t stand for that; it means that you will get the hate that should have gone to your wife. And do not put yourself on a pedestal. If your boys ask you if you ever wet the bed or ever masturbated, tell them the truth valiantly and sincerely. If you are a boss you will get their respect, but respect of the wrong kind, the one mixed with fear; if you come down to their level and tell them how cowardly you were as a boy at school, you will get their true respect, the respect that contains love, and understanding, and a complete absence of fear. If you want your children to grow up without being neurotic you must not, dare not, stand aloof from them; you must play with them, not only in their games sometimes, but play in the sense that you are one of them, able to enter into their life, their interests. If you have any silly dignity you will not be able to do this.
The schooling question may be difficult. Your wife may have been to a coed progressive school, and you may have been a prefect in a Public School. There may be a clash. I have seen the difficulty solved by an agreement to send the child to the local day school. Possibly the worst situation is where either you or your wife is a Roman Catholic, or for that matter, a Communist. I have no advice to offer here. Ideological or religious gulfs are too often unbridgeable. I can only say that some of my most difficult pupils were the result of differences of opinion of the parents. A boy whose father was against my school, but gave way for peace sake, never really made progress, for he knew his father disapproved. It is a tragic situation for any child to be in. He never finds any security of tenure, fearing that any day his father will decide to send him to a disciplined school.
Do not give your children everything they ask for. I may not be entirely objective here, for a father who owes me a lot of money has just sent his son back with a new, super racing bicycle, costing over £20, and I do not like it. Generally speaking children today get far too much, so much that they cease to have any appreciation of their gifts... I stumbled over the super bike last night in the rain.I make it a rule that when I go to London I do not bring Zoë a present each time, and in consequence she does not expect one. On the other hand you should not be mean with your children; you are the only one they can rely on. Parents who overdo the giving of presents are too often those who do not love their children enough, and have to compensate by making a show of parental love by showering expensive presents on them. One of the characters in Dear Brutus tells his sweetheart that every time she is nice to him he gives his wife a fur coat.
Now, John, I feel a bit awkward in touching on this subject . . . the unhappy home. You may have a mistress or at least a lady friend, and you may take infinite trouble in keeping this fact from your wife and family. You get very anxious. You go away “on business” and are scared most of the time that some acquaintance will see you dining with your lady friend in a distant hotel. You lie to your wife, as she would do to you in similar circumstances. Your life becomes an artificial, hidden, guilty life. Your children do not know anything, but they feel something. They feel that their Daddy is living a lie. This lie naturally reacts on the lady love, and thus you and she and your wife and family are more or less unhappy. The question is not a moral one. You cannot help loving another woman if you have ceased to love your wife, or if she has become cold towards you. There should be no guilt in it at all, and the necessity of lying should be absent. If you are fair to yourself you will realise that you lie to your wife because you do not want to hurt her, because you are afraid of her maybe, because you know that she is possessive about you. You certainly are in a hole. If you leave your wife you leave your children; if you renounce your love you stay at home with a bitter grouse or at least with a sad heart. Again I have no solution to give you. Who can solve the problem of the difference between a man and a woman, the old problem that a woman ages sooner than a man, so that when a woman’s sex appeal begins to fade, a man is tempted to look for someone younger? I can only tell you of different solutions that have been tried, I mean solutions that affect the children. “I don’t love Mummy any more, and I am going to live with a lady I love. You will now have two homes; you can go to Mummy for the Christmas holidays and come to me and my new wife for Easter.” That is an honest way and I wish I could say it always works. Usually it seems to work, but one detects a sadness, a loneliness in the children. I note how embarrassed they are when father comes down to school bringing his new lady. The sad part here is that thcy go home to a lonely, pcrhaps embittered mother, who tries to dissemble. If she has found a new lover or husband the situation for the children may be a better one; much depends on the new father and the old father’s new wife.
I have seen another way tried, the lying way. “Mummy, why doesn’t Daddy live with us any longer ?“ She replies:
“He is so busy; he has to live near his office.” A sigh. “So that is why he always hurries away when he comes to see us.” This is a very bad way, a very dangerous way. Sooner or later the child will find out the truth, and his trust in both parents will evaporate for ever. No one knows how many marriages are unhappy because the partners lost their trust in their own parents long before.
The common way is for the parents to continue living together with a gulf of indifference between them. “We must not part because of the children.” Often it would be better if they did part. If they part the child has something definite to go on, something real if miserable, but if they go on living in hate, or at best with irritation, the children can never find happiness. There is too much danger of projection, of taking it out on the children, and even if parents are careful not to do that, the Stimmung of the home is loveless. So, John, take your choice, bless you.
Do not map out your children’s career. Maybe you have a thriving factory and you naturally want your son to continue the business ofsaymaking boots. I am not being cynical when I suggest that if he does want to continue making boots he may be inferior, unenterprising, seeing security instead of launching out on his own. I know one or two successful business men who go about with long, sad faces because their sons are determined to be potters or actors or writers. You, like me, had your profession decided for you. I began as a clerk in a gas meter factory in Edinburgh at the age of fourteen. The new generation does not seem to be so pliable as we were; their values are not what ours were, and you cannot do a thing about it, John. I have seen more than one good business go to ruin because the second generation went into it without enthusiasm or talent or enterprise. Clever fathers do not necessarily have clever sons and daughters. What great man ever had a son who was great? Wagner, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt? No. I have never seen a son or daughter of an old musichall favourite who could approach the talent of the father or mother. So it is in business, a fact recognised in the Lancashire proverb that there are three generations between clogs and clogs.
If you have been an unsuccessful man the danger is greater, for then you will want your son to reach the heights that you failed to reach yourself. You will spur him on to pass exams, nag him to be industrious; if you regret that you never had a musical education you may keep the poor lad practising scales at a piano he hates. In my young days the ambition of most Scottish parents was to see their son wag his head in a pulpit, and this may have some bearing on the deadness of the Auld Kirk and the dreary Sabbath. The ideal way would be to allow each child to find his own level, so that if the son of the magnate were only fit to cart coal, he would cart coal, but that is not practical politics, for it leaves out the environment that affords opportunities to the upper and middle classes, opportunities that are not available to the lad from a workingclass street who has to begin to earn when he is fifteen. Equality of opportunity is a myth; the lad from Limehouse does not start level with the boy from Eton . . . or Summerhill. The saddest letter I have to write is the one replying to a wageearner who wants to send his child to my school; then I do understand the Socialist aim to make all education available to all. You see, John, if you are a wageearner you have not the same motive in choosing a career for your child that the successful business or professional man has. You are possibly not a climber, a snob. All you can do is to give your boy or girl freedom to choose a job. It may be a deadend one, but that does not matter if your child has initiative; he will soon aim at something better. You may find that advice will not be taken. I gave up trying to advise children long ago, when my advice to a talented girl to go on the stage was rejected, when a boy with great talent for mathematics decided to be a journalist. I find that advice is taken only when it is the advice the child wants... and it is the same with the adult.
At no stage of your child’s progress should you ever strike him or her. If you do you will implant a fear that will never completely die, and not only a fear but a buried hate. But if your love is genuine you will never want to beat your child. And if your boy is beaten at school, raise hell; most probably the magistrate will take the side of the beating teacher, but make your public protest every time. I hope you read the recent case in which a judge told two erring brothers that if they had had a few good hidings they would not have appeared in court. It transpired that they had been beaten by their father almost nightly.
Do not attempt to make your child think as you do, in politics, religion, philosophy; do not compel him to go to church or to political meetings. Your child does not think; he feels, and all you do is to catch his emotion. If you are accustomed to anathematise “those bloody capitalists” when you read your paper, your child will get an anticapitalist complex without knowing what capitalism is. Most political beliefs are founded on emotion and not reason. Some fifty years ago I shied a tomato at Sir Winston Churchill when he contested Dundee as a Liberal; I was prompted by a young lady I was very much in love with; her father was a local Conservative agent . . . I have always claimed that emotion is of greater importance than intellect; it is older and deeper and universal. Your boy at school has had his emotional life neglected, worse still, suppressed, so that when you influence him emotionally he has no balance, no foundation. True many outside factors catch his emotionsbad films, comics, cheap music, pornographic talk, crime stories, and you cannot do anything to guard him against these evils. One consolation is that these do not become faiths, lifelong prejudices; one can grow up with a fairly open mind in spite of them. You can never have an open mind when you have been schooled to take sides emotionally. We see it daily. A Conservative home automatically condemnssaythe execution of leading Communists in Prague, whilst a Communist home automatically agrees with the verdict. Neither reasons; the attitude is an emotional one. John, if you can keep yourself from fixing your children’s emotion on anything, do so if you want to see them grow up free people.
Your big headache will come when your daughter of sixteen wants to live her own life. She will come in at midnight, but on no account ever ask her where she has been, for, if she has not been selfregulated, she will lie to you just as you lied and I lied to our parents. If I live long enough to see my daughter sixteen and find her being made love to by some tough whom I dislike, I shall have more than one headache; I know that I shall be powerless to do anything, but, I hope, will have the sense not to try to put her against the youth. Since she has been selfregulated I do not anticipate that she will fall for any undesirable type of young man. One can never tell. This sixteen stage should not be difficult if your daughter has been your friend and not your subordinate. You will have to face the truth that no one can live another’s life, that one cannot hand on experience in essential things, emotional things. I am sure many a bad companionship is fundamentally a protest against parental authority. “My parents don’t trust me, and I don’t care; I’ll do what I like and if they don’t like it they can lump it.” Your deep fear will be that she will be seduced, but girls are not as a rule seduced; they are partners in a seduction. So that it all comes back to the question of the home attitude to sex. If it has been healthy you can safely give your daughter a latchkey; if it has been unhealthy she will seek sex in the wrong way, possibly with the wrong men and you arc powerless.
So with your son. You will not be so worried about him because he cannot become pregnant, yet if you know he is pubcrawling, or chumming with a gang, you will have worry enough. If lie is you can take it from me that you have failed him; you have made home something secondary to him. I do not mean that you should hasten to buy a miniature billiards table or a table tennis set to entice him to stay in of an evening; I am referring to spiritual matters, to home atmospheres, to trust, to love. A boy must go out from the best home, he must seek companions of his own age. As I write now there are six adolescents in the neighbouring room, playing some kind of a card game. It would bore me stiff to join in, and they know it. So will your son know that there are interests and pleasures that he cannot share with you. All you can do is to leave him alone, to trust that your previous treatment of him will carry him over all temptations to stray from the narrow path . . . or rather walk the broad path without succumbing to all that is meretricious and dishonest.
And now, John, if you have treated your child properly when he was two years old, nearly all this fatherly advice of mine has been an act of supererogation.
Communist Education