Elinor Smith Quotes

Mothers, train up your children in righteousness; do not attempt to save the world and let your own family fall apart.

I don’t want the Government to teach my kids’ family values.

Let us first fulfill Christ's injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves.

No one can teach your child like you can. No nanny, Bible school teacher, aunt, or uncle has your authority. What a phenomenal privilege is yours.

If we do not teach our children, societ will. And they-and we-will live with the results.

The Lord has directed, Bring up your children in light and truth. To me, there is no more important human effort. Being a father or a mother is not only a great challenge; it is a divine calling. It is an effort requiring consecration. President David O. McKay (1873-1970) stated that being parents is the greatest trust that has been given to human beings.

Educating a child won't be difficult if you get through to the parent.

I'm not a role model. I say parents should parent and monitor their kids.

Obviously, I feel a great sense of responsibility being a good parent and raising my children. I don't take that job very lightly. Who they are, what they become and what they contribute to the world is very important to me.

If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

It's very important, once you are a parent, that you educate your kid day by day.

At some point, some of these people are going to wake up to find that the great secular assault they see on their children was, in fact, a bogeyman created to hide their own bad parenting. If they can't convince their own kids of the appropriateness of their religion and values, then the religion, the values, or the convincing, must not have been very good.

We don’t want a village to raise a child. We want a family.

If parents would have their children blessed at church and school, let them beware they give their children no corrupt examples at home by any carelessness, profaneness or ungodliness. Otherwise, parents will do them more harm at home than both pastors and schoolmasters can do them good abroad.

I don't curse in front of my daughter. Well, sometimes.

One other thing I think a conservative believes is that the parents, not government, are and should be responsible for the upbringing and behavior of their children.

Upon the shoulders of you mothers rests; in a great measure, the responsibility of correctly developing the mental and moral powers of the rising generation...I have often said it is the mother who forms the mind of the child. Take men anywhere, at sea, sinking with their ship, dying in battle, lying down in death almost under any circumstances, and the last thing they think if, the last word they say is "mother." Such is the influence of woman.

I know of no more sacred duty than to rear and educate a child.

This is our first task-caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.

Work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it.

It must be emphasized that as a father, you are always teaching. For good or ill your family learns your ways, your beliefs, your heart, your ideas, your concerns. Your children may or may not choose to follow you, but the example you give is the greatest light you hold before your children, and you are accountable for that light.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

We cannot control what others choose to do, and so we cannot force our children to heaven, but we can determine what we will do. And we can decide that we will do all we can to bring down the powers of heaven into that family we want so much to have forever.

The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches- - that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can't fully control and for which we aren't fully responsible.

Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.