Parenting & Family Quote by Havelock Ellis

Ellis lands a quiet provocation under the guise of parental advice: the real project of child-rearing is adult self-rearing. Coming from a psychologist who spent his career prying open the supposedly private machinery of sex, morality, and “normality,” the line reads less like a Hallmark bromide and more like an early warning about projection. Parents don’t just pass down rules; they transmit anxieties, prejudices, and unresolved conflicts with the efficiency of a family heirloom. Training a child without training yourself is, in Ellis’s framing, an exercise in outsourcing self-control to someone smaller and more captive.

The sentence’s structure does the rhetorical work. “Not only” concedes the obvious duty, then pivots to the destabilizing claim: self-training is “at least equal importance.” That qualifier is slyly radical. Ellis doesn’t let parents keep the moral high ground; he drags them into the same developmental category as their kids. The subtext is accountability: the parent as model, not merely manager. The child becomes an unflattering mirror, reflecting back the adult’s habits and contradictions.

Context matters. Ellis wrote in an era busy codifying respectability, policing bodies, and treating psychology as both science and social engineering. His insistence on parental self-scrutiny pushes against the Victorian impulse to fix the child as the problem. It’s also a humane democratization of growth: maturity isn’t a status you achieve and then impose; it’s a practice you keep doing, especially when someone is watching you most closely.