Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Fuller

Fuller’s line is a quiet rebuke disguised as a promise: your child is not a project to be managed, but a story that keeps rewriting itself. The phrasing “character and history” is doing double duty. “Character” suggests temperament and moral fiber, the stuff 19th-century America loved to sermonize about; “history” implies contingency, accidents, private dramas, the lived archive a child accumulates long before adulthood grants them official importance. By pairing them, Fuller insists a child is already a complete human subject, not merely raw material.

The most pointed subtext sits in the conditional: “if he will let it.” That “he” isn’t incidental. Fuller, a Transcendentalist critic with feminist bite, is needling the paternal posture of authority that assumes knowledge over curiosity. The parent’s obstacle isn’t ignorance; it’s control. “Let it” frames wonder as a choice, and implicitly, domination as the default setting. The line takes aim at the era’s rigid scripts of upbringing, where children were often treated as moral accounts to balance rather than minds to encounter.

Calling the experience “new and poetic” isn’t cute; it’s strategic. Poetry here means attention, interpretation, the capacity to be surprised by what you didn’t author. Fuller’s intent is to shift parenting from ownership to witness: to ask adults to practice humility in the face of a life they influence but cannot fully design. The sentence works because it flatters the parent’s desire for meaning while warning that meaning evaporates the moment you try to dictate the plot.