George F. Will Quotes

In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

Parents who obsess about every detail of child-rearing and orchestrate their children's 'resumes' may run themselves ragged while their own personal identities and adult relationships wither for lack of care.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

Kids are very sensitive to the value system of their parents, and I just felt my parents were attaching too much importance, too much meaning, to things.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents.

In terms of parenthood, I think the pressure has amped up massively too. Some parents are setting the bar ludicrously high in terms of doing things "right," and seeing children more as products to be perfected than simply children.

I always feel like the odd mom out, because trust me when I tell you I'm on my girls. And every time I am, I know from the outside it looks like I'm an overbearing, controlling parent. But I don't think we have any responsibility to anybody else but our kids and ourselves.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

Lot of things depend on the up bringing of a child.

The first decade of your life is really important; it's formative.

Where you raise your children isn't as important as how you raise your children.

Interactions between fathers and children are the starting point of education.

I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.

Maybe the perceived fact that smart, rich parents tended to have smart, rich kids was largely due to the fact that they also tended to have stay-at-home moms or nannies who read to their kids, held them, put mobiles over their cribs, playing those annoying ditties, and sent them off for SAT training at six months.

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

I'm scared of screwing up my kids.

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women.

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

I think it's probably a universal experience that all parents think they're not hovering, but perhaps we all are.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

Kids watch their parents, right? And when kids are three, four, five-years-old, that's when they're like a sponge, and who they are is really developed by the time they are seven.