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Ours is the responsibility, now and for some time to come, for making most of the major decisions which will affect our children's lives. They need to trust us to know better than they do in many matters, and often, for convenience' sake, they have to do as they are told without going into the whys and wherefores. However, that does not mean to say that, if they have any perception, we can pull the wool over their eyes to hide our imperfections and our mistakes in handling them. It's a basically very uncertain parent who always has to be right. “Do this because I tell you to” is all right for the moment when other things are clamouring for attention, and on those occasions when it's clear that an argument isn't going to get anyone anywhere. But from a very early age, that varies from one child to another, children's interest in the connections between things leads them to want to know why we tell them to do this, forbid them to do that. Sometimes it's possible to explain, to enlist their reasoned co-operation.
For little children, their fathers and mothers are in the beginning the kings and queens in the story books, sometimes beneficent, sometimes bad and unjust. Some