Severe parenting..........................

      Johnny absorbed from his father not a mixed but a mingled message:  Europe was wonderful but virtue lay elsewhere.  From Abigail, however, the message was more severe.  At times Abigail could be sportive, even whimsical, but her fear of the snares of the old world and the heedlessness of youth - of young men, above all - darkened her already somber tone.  "Improve your understanding," she wrote in her first letter to johnny, but bear in mind that learning "will be of little value and small Estimation, unless Virtue, Honor, Truth and integrity are added to them."  Let yourself be guided by religious sentiments and the precepts of your father, she went on, "for dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossed, or any untimely death crop you in your infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child."  This sentiment, shocking to our own ears, might have been stinging even to his.

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit

Ed. Note:  John Quincy Adams would have been eleven-years-old when he received that letter.  Ouch.