Herbert Spencer

A stronger affection to be displayed by child for parent in later life, must be established by a closer intimacy between parent and child in early life. . . . When the minds of children are no longer stunted and deformed by the mechanical lessons of stupid teachers — when instruction, instead of giving mutual pain gives mutual pleasure, by ministering in proper order to faculties which are eager to appropriate fit conceptions presented in fit forms — when among adults wide-​spread knowledge is joined with rational ideas of teaching, at the same time that in the young there is an easy unfolding of the mind such as is even now shown by exceptional facility of acquisition — when the earlier stages of education passed through in the domestic circle have come to yield, as they will in ways scarcely dreamed of at present, daily occasions for the strengthening of sympathy, intellectual and moral, then will the latter days of life be smoothed by a greater filial care, reciprocating the greater parental care bestowed in earlier life.

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, Part III: Domestic Institutions, from the concluding paragraph (1898).