We sometimes hear the complaint that the training of the modern child is left almost entirely to the mother or to the woman school teacher, and that as a result the boy is becoming effeminate.  The indications are that this could not have been said of the colonial child; for, according to the records of that day, there was admirable co-operation between man and wife in the training of their little ones.  Kindly Judge Sewall, who so indiscriminately mingled his accounts of courtships, weddings, funerals, visits to neighbors, notices of hangings, duties as a magistrate, what not, often spared time from his activities among the grown-ups to record such incidents as:  “Sabbath-day, Febr. 14, 1685.  Little Hull speaks Apple plainly in the hearing of his grandmother and Eliza Jane; this the first word."[93]

And hear what Samuel Mather in his Life of Cotton Mather tells of the famous divine’s interest in the children of the household:  “He began betimes to entertain them with delightful stories, especially scriptural ones; and he would ever conclude with some lesson of piety, giving them to learn that lesson from the story....  And thus every day at the table he used himself to tell some entertaining tale before he rose; and endeavored to make it useful to the olive plants about the table.  When his children accidentally, at any time, came in his way, it was his custom to let fall some sentence or other that might be monitory or profitable to them....  As soon as possible he would make the children learn to write; and, when they had the use of the pen, he would employ then in writing out the most instructive, and profitable things he could invent for them....  The first chastisement which he would inflict for any ordinary fault was to let the child see and hear him in an astonishment, and hardly able to believe that the child could do so base a thing; but believing they would never do it again.  He would never come to give a child a blow excepting in case of obstinacy or something very criminal.  To be chased for a while out of his presence he would make to be looked upon as the sorest punishment in his family.  He would not say much to them of the evil angels; because he would not have them entertain any frightful fancies about the apparitions of devils.  But yet he would briefly let them know that there are devils to tempt to wickedness.”

Beside this tender picture we may place one of juvenile warfare in the godly home of Judge Sewall, and of the effect such a rise of the Old Adam had upon the soul of the conscientious magistrate:  “Nov. 6, 1692.  Joseph threw a knob of Brass and hit his sister Betty on the forhead so as to make it bleed and swell, upon which, and for his playing at Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks, I whipd him pretty smartly.  When I first went in (call’d by his Grandmother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle:  which gave me the sorrowfull remembrance of Adam’s carriage."[94]