Parenting & Family Quote by Francois Fenelon

Fenelon’s line lands like a quiet indictment from inside the nursery: the people with the most authority in a child’s life are often the least willing to submit to the same scrutiny they demand. The first move is disarming. Children, he reminds us, are not blank slates so much as vigilant auditors. They clock tone, hypocrisy, and small cruelties long before they have the vocabulary to argue back. That observation isn’t sentimental; it’s tactical. If you can’t hide your “slightest defects” from a child, power can’t rely on performance. It has to rely on integrity.

Then Fenelon turns the knife. The real target isn’t childhood misbehavior but adult self-exoneration: “forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.” The parallel structure makes the imbalance feel systematic, not occasional. “Govern” is doing heavy work here, too. This isn’t parenting as tenderness; it’s rule, discipline, management. He’s describing a miniature state, where the ruler polices the subject with zero mercy and grants the ruler total amnesty.

Context matters. As a Catholic clergyman and tutor to French royalty, Fenelon knew how moral authority gets laundered into entitlement. His religious world prized confession and humility, yet social hierarchy encouraged the opposite: the superior is presumed right by default. The quote’s subtext is theological and political at once: if adults want obedience without hypocrisy, they must model the restraint and forgiveness they preach. Children don’t just learn rules; they learn who rules get to protect.