Prudence Primrose

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Who Benefits From Your Child's Broken Will

14 January 2026 · 2 min read

It wasn't even about "cleaning up after yourself." The child resisted slightly to the teaching and Mr. Kaufman decided to turn it into a contest of wills, and to break the child's will1 as much as possible. It's not about chores, it's about enforcing submission2, which is bad btw

It is very very close minded and shallow to assume that the ideas that revolve around how to deal with a Child's will are universal, yet everyone in this conversation appears to be doing just that. The fact of the matter is, the way you treat a child's will has been the main subject of nearly all cultural analysis of parenting for the past 600 years, and what have we learned from it? Nothing

The reason we have learned nothing is because ultimately you raise your children to adapt in a certain way3 to the world around them.

If you want your children to be meek, submission, and have anger issues, you "break their will", you do everything in your power to make them understand that someone is always 'above' them4, and that their freedom always is at the hands of a superior.

This is the canonical parenting style of much of the Earth, because most of the Earth are composed of Slaves, Serfs, and Peasants. For them this parenting style protects them from the world. Raise them as an 'Aristocrat' or a 'Bourgeoise' with a guided or bended will5 (respectively) then you end up with a child who gets killed on his first day of farm labor for disobedience.

"Spare the rod, spoil the child6", or rather, "If I don't beat you, the taskmaster will -kill- you, so this is my way of protecting you and understanding the gravity of not being submissive."

Yet, we are English speakers, we are part of the West, the "First World", there is no taskmaster that is going to beat you senseless, no teacher is going to whip you, you have -human rights-7, and thus a child's will doesn't actually need to be broken for their own good anymore. It serves them no benefit. They are actively harmed by it being broken in an increasingly competitive zero-sum world where competitiveness and cunning are rewarded above all else, where the poorest become billionaires from sheer aura and swag8 alone.

The only benefit to breaking a child's will is to reinforce the behavior that makes their station and position in their class the most easily manageable and low maintenance.

So for the good of all the bourgeoise of our beautiful nation, remember; break the child's will, how else will these Starbucks baristas learn their fucking place? Only -you- can sabotage your family's class mobility.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. The aim of "conquering" a child's will appears in Susanna Wesley's 1732 letter to her son John on child-rearing, which says the first step is to "conquer their will, and bring them to an obedient temper." ↩
  2. The same device was aimed at whole peoples. In Why I Wholly Reject Nationalism she shows children punished at school for speaking their own language, as with the Welsh Not. Breaking the will of a child and breaking the speech of a folk work the same way. ↩
  3. Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods (2003) found two styles split by class. Middle-class parents practised "concerted cultivation," teaching children to question authority. Working-class and poor parents gave directives and expected respect for authority. Each prepares children for the work their class tends to do. Spanking research agrees: Straus and Donnelly (1994) found lower-class parents spank more often. source ↩
  4. Alice Miller's For Your Own Good (1980) made this the centre of her case. She took the term "poisonous pedagogy" from Katharina Rutschky's Schwarze Pädagogik (1977) and argued that child-rearing which teaches children to accept harm "for their own good" produces adults who defer to authority. source ↩
  5. John Locke wrote for the gentry. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) he rejected beating, warning that "slavish discipline makes a slavish temper," and argued that children love to be treated as rational creatures. source ↩
  6. The familiar wording comes from Samuel Butler's mock-heroic poem Hudibras (Part II, 1663-64). It adapts Proverbs 13:24, "He that spareth his rod hateth his son," which does not contain the word "spoil." source ↩
  7. This is recent. Sweden removed parental physical discipline from its Penal Code in 1966 and on 1 July 1979 became the first country to ban all corporal punishment of children. As of 2018, 58 countries had followed. source ↩
  8. "Aura" is Gen Z slang for a person's perceived coolness or charisma, scored informally as "aura points" that smooth moves add and cringeworthy ones subtract. The related phrase "aura farming" spread in 2025. ↩