Parenting & Family Quote by Samuel Richardson

A warning dressed up as parental common sense, Richardson’s line smuggles a whole moral system into the nursery. “Indulged or checked” isn’t just about manners; it’s a theory of human formation. Character, in this view, isn’t discovered later through self-knowledge or experience. It’s manufactured early, by someone else, through a steady diet of permission and restraint. The power dynamic is the point: the child is raw material, the adult is the sculptor, and the stakes are nothing less than “the happiness or misery of the future man.”

The phrasing does quiet ideological work. Calling youthful mistakes “follies” frames childhood as morally legible from the start, not a protected zone of innocence. “Ground is generally laid” sounds modest, almost empirical, but it’s an argument for intervention. Richardson nudges you toward the idea that allowing small missteps isn’t neutral; it’s negligence with long-term consequences.

Context matters: Richardson helped define the 18th-century English moral novel, a form obsessed with how private conduct becomes public fate. In Clarissa and Pamela, tiny choices metastasize into life sentences, especially for the vulnerable. This line reads like the domestic version of that narrative machinery: early indulgence breeds later ruin; early discipline yields virtue and stability. It also reflects a rising middle-class ethic where self-control is social currency. The child’s “future man” is implicitly a citizen and economic actor, not merely a soul. Richardson isn’t just advising parents; he’s recruiting the household into a broader project of producing orderly, governable adults.