Your child is now eight years old; make him acquainted with the Gospel, teach him to believe in God, and that in the most orthodox fashion. This is a sine qua non; otherwise you can’t make a fine human being out of your child, but at best a sufferer, and at worst — a careless lethargic ‘success’, which is a still more deplorable fate. You will never find anything better than the Saviour anywhere, believe me.
Suppose now that your child at sixteen or seventeen (after some intercourse with corrupted school-friends) comes to you or to its father, and puts this question: “Why am I to love you, and why do you represent it as my duty?” Believe me: no sort of questions or knowledge will help you then; you won’t be able to give any answer. Therefore it is that you must try to act so that it will never once occur to your child to come to you with that question. But that will be possible only if your child is attached to you by such love as would prevent such a question from ever coming into its head; true, that at school such views may be for a while your child’s, but you will find it easy to separate the false from the true. And even if you should really have to listen to that question, you will be able to answer with just a smile, and quietly go on doing well.
From ‘Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends’ (?1914), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), edited and translated by Alexander Eliasberg (1878-1924) and Ethel Colburn Mayne (?-1941).