Massachusetts Child-rearing Ways: Breaking of Will

Puritan conventions of child-naming were closely related to customs of child rearing in New England—a business of high importance in this culture. “Remember … the children,” Puritan minister John Wilson told his New England congregation, “you came hither for your children.” In their concern for the young, the builders of the Bay Colony brought to America a special set of child-rearing customs which were shaped by Puritan ideas and East Anglian experiences.¹

Behind these practices lay an explicit assumption, deeply rooted in Calvinist theology, about the natural depravity of the newborn child. The Puritans believed that in consequence of Adam’s sin, all infants were born ignorant and empty of all good things, and that small children were naturally disposed to do evil in the world. This Calvinist dogma appeared in Puritan sermons and child-rearing books, and also in New England autobiographies, which commonly remembered childhood not with the nostalgia of modern memoirs but with persistent feelings of pain and guilt. The same attitude suffused the high literature of New England, as in Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “The Four Ages of Man,” which makes Childhood speak these words:

Ah me! conceiv’d in sin, and born in sorrow,

A nothing, here to day, but gone tomorrow.

Whose mean beginning, blushing cann’t reveal,

But night and darkness, must with shame conceal. …

With tears into this world I did arrive;

My mother still did waste, as I did thrive:

Who yet with love, and all alacrity,

Spending was willing, to be spent for me.

With wayward cries, I did disturb her rest;

Who sought still to appease me, with her breast.

With weary armes, she danced, and Bye, Bye, sung,

When wretched I (ungrate) had done the wrong.

When infancy was passed, my childishness,

Did act all folly, that it could expresse …

From birth stained, with Adam’s sinful fact

Fron thence I ‘gan to sin as soon as act.

A perverse will, a love to what’s forbid:

A serpent’s sting in pleasing face lay hid.

A lying tongue as soon as it could speak,

And fifth commandment do daily break.²

This dual idea of the depravity of infants and the perversity of their natural will led Puritans to the conclusion that the first and most urgent purpose of child rearing was what they called the

“breaking of the will.” This was a determined effort to destroy a spirit of autonomy in a small child—a purpose which lay near the center of child rearing in Massachusetts.³

The idea of “will-breaking” was not invented in New England. It also appeared among Puritan clergy in the east of England, and among Calvinist writers from the Netherlands to Hungary. One of the classical texts was written by English Puritan John Robinson, a Cambridge scholar who had preached in the East Anglian metropolis of Norwich before moving to the Netherlands where he became minister to the Pilgrims. On the subject of child rearing, he declared:

Children … are a blessing great but dangerous. … how great and many are their spiritual dangers, both for nourishing and increasing the corruption which they bring into the world with them. … parents must provide carefully … that children’s wills and willfulness be restrained and repressed. … Children should not know, if it could be kept from them, that they have a will of their own, but in their parents’ keeping. Neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, “I will,” or “I will not.” And, [if] will be suffered at first to sway in them in small and lawful things, they will hardly after be restrained in great and ill matters.⁴

This process of will-breaking was achieved in Puritan households by strict and rigorous supervision. Fathers took an active and even a leading part. The Puritan diaries of Samuel Sewall in New England and Ralph Josselin in East Anglia, both described their busy child-rearing roles. The care of infants was mainly in the hands of the mother, but Sewall and Josselin both taught their youngsters to read and write, instructed them in religion, and took sons and daughters on day-trips. They made the major decisions about naming their children, schooling, discipline and the decision to send their children into other homes. Sewall and Josselin helped their children to make the major decisions about work and marriage. A close relationship continued to the end of life.

The Sewall and Josselin diaries suggest that the tone of these relationships was normally warm and affectionate. Both fathers expressed deep concern about the welfare and happiness of their

Will-breaking was mainly a form of mental discipline, but when all else failed New England parents did not hesitate to use physical constraints. Restless children were rolled into small squirming human balls with their knees tied firmly beneath their chins, and booted back and forth across the floor by their elders. Other youngsters were dangled by their heels out of windows, or forced to kneel on sharp sticks, or made to sit precariously for long periods on a one-legged stool called the unipod, or compelled to wear a painful cleft stick on the tip of the nose. Partners in juvenile crime were yoked together in miniature versions of an oxbow. Small malefactors were made to wear shame-signs that proclaimed their offenses: “Lying Ananias,” or “Bite-Finger-Baby.” Large children were caned or whipped; little ones were slapped with ferules, and tiny infants were tapped sharply on the skull with hard ceramic thimbles. Another common punishment was a wooden bit called the whispering stick, firmly set between the teeth and fastened by a cord behind the neck. To the front was added a shame-paper that read, “he whispers.” Several of these devices have survived, and are sketched here from old photographs.

children, and wrote of them with love and tenderness. Both subscribed to the Puritan epigram, “better whipped than damned,” but they disliked corporal punishment and used it only in extreme circumstances (commonly when a child threatened danger to itself or others), and much preferred to lead their children by precept, example, reward and exhortation.⁵

Both of these Puritan fathers, New Englander Samuel Sewall and East Anglian Ralph Josselin, trained their children to regard elders with what one English Puritan called “filial awe and reverence,” in which love and fear were mixed. Children were required to stand and bow when their parents approached. They were forbidden to show that “fondness and familiarity [which] breeds and causeth contempt and irreverence.” This ritual display of deference was another method of curbing the will.⁶

An important part of child-rearing in Massachusetts was the custom called “sending out.” Parents routinely sent away their youngsters to be raised in other homes, sometimes at the same time that they took in children of the same age from other families.⁷ This folkway often had a practical purpose—to place a child close to a school, to prepare it for a calling, to remove it from a pestered place, or to put it in an intact family after the loss of a parent. At the same time, sending out also had another purpose—a child was thought to learn better manners and behavior in another home.⁸

Sending out was customary in Puritan families of all ranks—high and low, rich and poor, urban and rural. The diary of Samuel Sewall recorded the sending out of all his children in much detail. Sewall’s purposes varied. One sickly youngster was put into the home of a famous healer. Another studious child was sent away to school. Two girls were dispatched to housewives to learn sewing and knitting. The eldest son was apprenticed to several tradesmen in Boston until he found his calling. The children were consulted in the choice of a home, but they were compelled to go, often much against their will. Sewall recorded the unhappiness of his daughter Hannah when she was sent away to Salem.

When her father carried her away to new home, the thirteen-year-old child wept bitterly, begging not be be abandoned. “Much adoe to pacify my dear my dear daughter, she weeping and pleading to go with me,” the father wrote. A similar scene occurred when Samuel Sewall junior was sent to learn a trade in Boston. His father recorded that “Sam was weeping and much discomposed and loth to go.” But Sam went.⁹

The age at which Sewall’s children were sent away from home varied with the cause. Those who were “put out” for their health tended to go at an exceptionally early age. But most departures occurred near the age of puberty. A twentieth-century scholar observes that “It is surely more than a coincidence that it was exactly at this age that they all left home to be subjected to outside discipline and freed from the incestuous dangers of crowded living.” Whether or not this modern reading is correct, there were undoubtedly deeper motives than the rationale itself.

These were not casual arrangements. The terms were settled with great care between households.¹⁰ The custom of sending out was much the same among Puritans in East Anglia and Massachusetts, and very different from child-rearing ways in other regions of British America.¹¹