The great suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst had two childhood memories that stood out to her beyond any others. The first, perhaps her earliest, was of her parents taking her to a fundraiser in England for newly freed slaves across the ocean in America. The second was as she walked by a prison near her school in Manchester, where she saw the disassembled gallows that had just recently been used.
They were two demonstrations of the far ends of the human experience. One, charity and mercy. The other, violence and cruelty. Both these scenes changed her profoundly, putting her on a path to political activism and progressive causes. As she writes her memoir Suffragette, these incidents illustrate to her “the fact that the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and future conduct than heredity or education. I tell it also to show that my development into an advocate of militancy was largely a sympathetic process.”
The lesson, which we built the whole first month of The Daily Dad book around, is a simple one: Children learn by example. It doesn’t matter so much what adults tell them, what ideology they try to teach them, what matters is what children see. And that children are far more perceptive than we might think.
As she walked by those gallows, Pankhurst felt intuitively and instantly that there was something deeply wrong with the death penalty—especially delivered in such a cruel and crude fashion. She saw through the hypocrisy and the rhetoric and saw it for what it was.
Our children see that now. People wonder why kids these days are ‘woke.’ It’s because social media and other technologies have laid the world bare for them. Things have been exposed. Myths shattered. They know.
Conversely, though, think of how Pankhurst was changed for the better by the decent act her parents exposed her to, the example they set for her with their compassion and their kindness. They were helping people who lived thousands of miles away, of a different race, because they felt for them. And it was this example that partly inspired Pankhurst to become a fighter for women and their rights all over the world. They started that ‘sympathetic process’ for her.
None of us fully control what impressions our children will see or the effect certain things will have on them (surely, Pankhurst’s parents would have shielded her from seeing the spot of an execution if they could), but we can do our best to provide a good example. We can encourage their sympathies, we can strive to be on the right side of the right issues.
P.S. “Thou Shall Teach By Example” is the 1st Commandment in The Stoic Parent: 10 Commandments For Becoming A Better Parent. If you want to take your parenting to the next level, or just looking to set a better example as a parent, The Stoic Parent course is 10 days of the most important things that you can do to become the best parent you can be. Sign up today at the Daily Stoic Store!
