It is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are no longer children.

It is quite true that the children may go astray even when they have ceased to be children.

But the time to implant the seeds of virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.
If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust.

If it was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.
So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents circles round again to that of the parents to the child.

The wise parent realises that childhood is simply a preparation for the free activities of later life, that the parents exist in order to equip children for life and not to shelter and protect them from the world into which they must be cast.