The Child is Father to the Man by George Bernard Shaw

Is he? Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat
children on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh,
these fathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have
godfathers, forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it
ever struck you as curious that in a country where the first article
of belief is that every child is born with a godfather whom we all
call "our father which art in heaven," two very limited individual
mortals should be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that
they are its godparents, and that they will look after its salvation
until it is no longer a child. I had a godmother who made herself
responsible in this way for me. She presented me with a Bible with a
gilt clasp and edges, larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my
sisters, because my sex entitled me to a heavier article. I must have
seen that lady at least four times in the twenty years following. She
never alluded to my salvation in any way. People occasionally ask me
to act as godfather to their children with a levity which convinces me
that they have not the faintest notion that it involves anything more
than calling the helpless child George Bernard without regard to the
possibility that it may grow up in the liveliest abhorrence of my
notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father
of all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the
true representative of God at the christening is the child itself.
But such posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little
customs, or, as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or
must originally have meant something, and that we understand and
believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current
thought and practice which shews that on the subject of children we
are very deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no
theory may be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of
its immediate physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like
with it as far as it will let them. It has no rights and no
liberties: in short, its condition is that which adults recognize as
the most miserable and dangerous politically possible for themselves:
namely, the condition of slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the
natural affection of the parties, and to public opinion. A father
cannot for his own credit let his son go in rags. Also, in a very
large section of the population, parents finally become dependent on
their children. Thus there are checks on child slavery which do not
exist, or are less powerful, in the case of manual and industrial
slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall into two classes, which are
really the same class: namely, the children whose parents are
excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting children, and
the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual
luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of
our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers,
or fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law
designed to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to
make money for the household. Such legislation has always been
furiously resisted by the parents, even when the horrors of factory
slavery were at their worst; and the extension of such legislation at
present would be impossible if it were not that the parents affected
by it cannot control a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic
life a great deal of service is done by children, the girls acting as
nursemaids and general servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the
country both boys and girls do a substantial share of farm labor.
This is why it is necessary to coerce poor parents to send their
children to school, though in the relatively small class which keeps
plenty of servants it is impossible to induce parents to keep their
children at home instead of paying schoolmasters to take them off
their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and
children does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights
involves in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it,
sometimes mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront
one another as two classes in which all the political power is on one
side; and the results are not at all unlike what they would be if
there were no immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white
and the other black, or one enfranchised and the other
disenfranchised, or one ranked as gentle and the other simple. Not
that Nature counts for nothing in the case and political rights for
everything. But a denial of political rights, and the resultant
delivery of one class into the mastery of another, affects their
relations so extensively and profoundly that it is impossible to
ascertain what the real natural relations of the two classes are until
this political relation is abolished.