_Suppose one is not at the Beginning_.

What has been said thus far relates obviously to cases where the mother is
at the commencement of her work of training. This is the way to _begin_;
but you can not begin unless you are at the beginning. If your children
are partly grown, and you find that they are not under your command,
the difficulty is much greater. The principles which should govern the
management are the same, but they can not be applied by means so gentle.
The prison, it may be, must now be somewhat more real, the terms of
imprisonment somewhat longer, and there may be cases of insubordination so
decided as to require the offender to be carried to it by force, on account
of his refusal to go of his own accord, and perhaps to be held there, or
even to be tied. Cases requiring treatment so decisive as this must be very
rare with children under ten years of age; and when they occur, the
mother has reason to feel great self-condemnation--or at least great
self-abasement--at finding that she has failed so entirely in the first
great moral duty of the mother, which is to train her children to complete
submission to her authority from the beginning.

_Children coming under New Control_.

Sometimes, however, it happens that children are transferred from one
charge to another, so that the one upon whom the duty of government
devolves, perhaps only for a time, finds that the child or children put
under his or her charge have been trained by previous mismanagement to
habits of utter insubordination. I say, trained to such habits, for the
practice of allowing children to gain their ends by any particular means is
really training them to the use of those means. Thus multitudes of
children are taught to disobey, and trained to habits of insubmission and
insubordination, by the means most effectually adapted to that end.