“Some mothers tell me that my way of treating and teaching infants and children in these cases is cruel, cold and distant. But the real trouble is that these mothers and others do not see their _own_ cruelty and indifference. The cruelties and negligence these mothers practice on their children are perfectly shocking to me. They are cruelties which their poor children must carry with them all their lives. Let me see if I can make my meaning clear to you. Crying, especially when accompanied with anger, is a violent strain on the nervous system; it also causes a physiological waste, which must be repaired by additional food. Now this additional food tends to impair digestion, and the impaired digestion affects circulation--the function of the heart. Thus, the violent exertion of crying, which is nearly all brought about by your vicious training and teaching, produces nervousness, weakness and general ill-health. Nearly all your children one meets are affected more or less in this manner; and children who are affected thus would continue to be fretful for a while, no matter how favorable the conditions would be made; yes, even if they were taken in the society of Mars. It seems so strange to me that parents can not see these plain facts; but, as a rule, they do not see them here, and seem to care less about discovering them. Thus many of your parents make imbeciles of their children and they do not know it; and if this is not cruelty and coldness, I am sure I do not know what is. “Allow me to inform you of one other very vicious practice in your nursery. Long-continued superfluous paternalism and parental assistance, like many of your parents and other adults unwisely lavish upon offspring, even at the present age of your world, greatly and perniciously _lengthen_ the period of infancy in an _individual_. Many of your young men and women are, on this account, little more than grown-up babies, having scarcely any self-reliance and originality. Thus is the period of infancy lengthened in an individual; and such superfluous paternalism and assistance lavished upon offspring as a _race_ during countless ages, is, in the opinion of the Marsites, one of the causes of the lengthened period of infancy and helplessness which we find existing in the offspring of the different species of organisms, as we ascend in the scale of the animal kingdom. But, as mankind rise to a certain point of intelligence, they direct their course of action by conscious wisdom acquired by long-continued ancestral and personal experience, instead of following only the thoughtless, primitive instinct.