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If this writer could view the parent with the same degree of tolerance and understanding that he bestows upon the child, the book would be of greater value. It is strange that a student of psychology should have so little insight for one section of the problem with which he is dealing. He can see that the 'child is not naughty, but ill'. Yet parents, he seems to consider, pour out their prejudices upon their children and blight their lives because they deliberately choose to do so; or else because it is a traditional affair that must be continued, this battle between the past and the future.
The parent makes a convenient Aunt Sally for the quips of Mr. Neill's facile journalism. But he has very little understanding of the problems underlying the parental attitude, nor, apparently, for the causes which have led to its existence. Parents, one might think the author would have realized, cannot be bludgeoned into reformation, or even browbeaten into better behaviour or into a clearer understanding of their own mistakes, by literature of this type. 'To be tolerant is to have charity!' Cannot our charity stretch a little further and cover the parents too? On the whole they are well-meaning folk and their mistakes are made with the best intentions! On the whole they are much to be pitied, since they are so often in the unhappy position of the mother hen that one day hatched a duckling instead of the chick she expected. However, we are forced to believe from reading this book that were there no more parents to shock, and no conventions to contend with, this type of warfare would cease for want of interest.