‘Goya´s Caprichos are a compendium of some of the demands of those who shared the ideology of the Enlightenment: their criticism of society´s errors, vices and ignorance, and their confidence in the role of education, which led them to pursue the elimination of the bad practices in traditional childrearing in favour of new pedagogical models. In the 1780s, enlightened advisers of the Spanish government had prepared proposals to introduce the teaching methods of Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi…which had been applied successfully in other areas of Europe. The pedagogical principles supported by the enlightened minority emphasized the use of reason and the rejection of punishments and intimidation in the education of children. This is the context of the third plate in Los Caprichos, in which a mother frightens her children with the figure of the coco, or bogey-man, an imaginary being that was a common feature of Spanish popular culture. In the eighteenth century, the terrible coco was defined, according to the Diccionario de autoridades (1729), as a horrifying, ugly figure ... invented to frighten and control children. In the view of Enlightenment thinkers, teaching based on fear produced grave consequences when the child reached adulthood, for superstition reduced its capacity to reason, and intimidation turned it into a servile citizen, dominated by the force of authority…In addition to censuring bad practices in the education of children, however, this Capricho may have had another meaning, namely a moral judgement against adultery. The majority of the manuscript commentaries identify the phantasm with the woman´s lover: Bad mothers scare their children with the coco so they can speak alone with their lovers. In contrast to the children´s expressions of fear in this print, the mother´s spellbound look would seem to give her away. In the preparatory sketch in sanguine, one notes lines that have been described as the canopy of a bed, and below the mantle worn by the bogey-man, one can see the tips of the figure´s shoes, the same type that customers of prostitutes wear in other prints in the series.’

Blas Benito, J.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 212.