Parents Are Role Models Quotes

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

If your kid needs a role model and you ain't it, you're both fucked.

A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?

You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop - the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership. Ill-fitting is always stylish. But be more creative - wear your clothes inside out, backward, upside down. Throw bleach in a load of colored laundry. Follow the exact opposite of the dry cleaning instructions inside the clothes that cost the most in your thrift shop. Don’t wear jewelry - stick Band-Aids on your wrists or make a necklace out of them. Wear Scotch tape on the side of your face like a bad face-lift attempt. Mismatch your shoes. Best yet, do as Mink Stole used to do: go to the thrift store the day after Halloween, when the children’s trick-or-treat costumes are on sale, buy one, and wear it as your uniform of defiance.

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by.

Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud....

Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership.

Keep those that influence you for the better close and never give them a reason to keep you far away.

Exactly what are you wanting to teach your children? -How to love and care for themselves, or how to neglect and abandon themselves? Self-sarifice is NOT setting a good example.

Instruction is good for a child; but example is worth more.

Teaching a boy to be a man is the primary job of a father.

When a boy feels as if no one cares about him, or as if he will never amount to anything, he truly believes it doesn’t matter what he does.

There’s a wound most troubled boys share, which, at its core, comes from the feeling that they don’t have their father’s unconditional love.

The greatest joy a parent can have and an affirmation of being an outstanding role model is when your child tells you she wants to be just like you. So be the most outstanding you because when you become a parent one day, your children will be proud to be just like you. - Kailin Gow on Life, Balance, Parenting, and Being a Role Model

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.

Let’s get something straight: I’m supposed to be the bad guy. I will always disappoint you. Your parents will hate me. You should not root for me. I am not your role model.

Let's get something straight. I'm supposed to be the bad guy. I will always disappoint you. Your parents will hate me. You should not root for me. I am not your role model. I don't know why everyone seems to forget that. I never do.

Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn't want to become them, but we had no other role models--or "maps," Alex kept saying. "My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn't ever lead me anywhere." And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn't want to go-- and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. If almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.

Since parents are the role model, you’ll hear your child speak to his sister or brother using your words and tone of voice. Children

You’re a role model. Act like one.

FUN FACT ABOUT me: I am a fairly mellow person, but I happen to have a very violent fantasy life. Maybe it’s an overactive amygdala. Maybe it’s too much estrogen. Maybe it’s the lack of parental role models in my formative years. I honestly don’t know what the cause is, but the fact remains: I sometimes daydream about murdering people. By “sometimes,” I mean often. And by “people,” I mean Levi Ward. I have my first vivid reverie on my third day at NASA, when I imagine offing him with poison.

Children are constantly focused on their parents and will mirror them. Therefore, what they experience in the home will be crucial for their empathy development. Parents have a big responsibility because they are the primary example of empathy and must practice being empathic themselves.

Despite what you might believe right now, your son’s future is bright. You only need the right tools to help him get there.

Parents are a role model for their youngsters and how they act with these small ones or in front of them can be grasped easily.

Real Fathers are Role Models worthy of emulation. They choose to live exemplary lifestyles of leadership and excellence

Today, for most kids in the United States and Canada, kids’ primary attachment is to other kids. “For the first time in history,” Neufeld observes, “young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role—their own peers. .

One of a mother’s greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet.

If you read many of my Middle Grade and YA book series, you would notice the common theme of how the main characters always choose to be good. That's because when you write for YA, as an author, you automatically become a person of authority. Be a good role model yourself as a YA author. Help teens grow up into responsible and good adults. YA Authors - Don't get accused of sexual harassment (like some authors) or of encouraging your teen readers to gang up on and bully /harass an author. I've been the receiving end of that kind of behavior, and it is cyberbullying and harassment. Authors and anyone in a position of authority who encourage teens and kids to cyberbully another human being is not a good role model. Parents and Teachers should help their kids choose books and role models. When a teen has committed cyberbullying as a minor, but grows it, they can still be held accountable for that. In many states, cyberbullying is a crime. - Strong by Kailin Gow

I don't believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models.... It's not like it was when I was growing up. My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be. If I didn't like it, they said, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out." Parents have to take better control.

You are your children’s role models and they will learn to treat you (and others) the way you treat your own parents. If your children see you acting in impatient, rude, resentful, and angry ways toward your parents, how do you think they will behave toward you when you grow older? They will treat you just as poorly as you treated your parents, and why shouldn’t they? They’ll be faithful to your own teachings. If you can treat your parents with genuine service, then your children will learn to treat you the same way. They will learn to serve others, as well, and they will prosper for it.

As the writer Jeffrey Kluger puts it in The Sibling Effect, ‘From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and cautionary tales . . . Our spouses arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents eventually leave us. Our siblings may be the only people we’ll ever know who truly qualify as partners for life.

What is important is that you get your house in order at each stage of the journey so that you can proceed. “If some day it be given to you to pass into the inner temple, you must leave no enemies behind.”—de Lubicz For example, if you never got on well with one of your parents and you have left that parent behind on your journey in such a way that the thought of that parent arouses anger or frustration or self-pity or any emotion . . . you are still attached. You are still stuck. And you must get that relationship straight before you can finish your work. And what, specifically, does “getting it straight” mean? Well, it means re-perceiving that parent, or whoever it may be, with total compassion . . . seeing him as a being of the spirit, just like you, who happens to be your parent . . . and who happens to have this or that characteristic, and who happens to be at a certain stage of his evolutionary journey. You must see that all beings are just beings . . . and that all the wrappings of personality and role and body are the coverings. Your attachments are only to the coverings, and as long as you are attached to someone else’s covering you are stuck, and you keep them stuck, in that attachment. Only when you can see the essence, can see God, in each human being do you free yourself and those about you. It’s hard work when you have spent years building a fixed model of who someone else is to abandon it, but until that model is superceded by a compassionate model, you are still stuck. In India they say that in order to proceed with one’s work one needs one’s parents’ blessings. Even if the parent has died, you must in your heart and mind, re-perceive that relationship until it becomes, like every one of your current relationships, one of light. If the person is still alive you may, when you have proceeded far enough, revisit and bring the relationship into the present. For, if you can keep the visit totally in the present, you will be free and finished. The parent may or may not be . . . but that is his karmic predicament. And if you have been truly in the present, and if you find a place in which you can share even a brief eternal moment . . . this is all it takes to get the blessing of your parent! It obviously doesn’t demand that the parent say, “I bless you.” Rather it means that he hears you as a fellow being, and honors the divine spark within you. And even a moment in the Here and Now . . . a single second shared in the eternal present . . . in love . . . is all that is required to free you both, if you are ready to be freed. From then on, it’s your own individual karma that determines how long you can maintain that high moment.

A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them. And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father.

We look at the way some kids behave and instantly blame the parents, and more often than not we’re correct. The school bully is often a sign of poor parenting. That’s the immediate cause, but if we search for the root cause we have to dig much deeper than that. What on earth in that kid’s head makes it seem okay to bully people? Why are the parents doing such a poor job of bringing up their children? Probably because they didn’t have very effective role models themselves when they were growing up. It could go back generations

I often ask myself is how on earth is it that we empaths can survive under the domination of a narcissist? How is it that we do not become bitter and cruel as adults, with the role models we survived under? How is it that being an empath stays with us and cannot be beaten down? We always get up again and keep on going, being an empath still. I also wonder, if I had not been so tightly wrapped up in my mother’s web and she had let me fly instead, what kind of person would I have been, then?

You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop—the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents—that is the key to fashion leadership.

IFS can be seen as attachment theory taken inside, in the sense that the client’s Self becomes the good attachment figure to their insecure or avoidant parts. I was initially amazed to discover that when I was able to help clients access their Self, they would spontaneously begin to relate to their parts in the loving way that the textbooks on attachment theory prescribed. This was true even for people who had never had good parenting in the first place. Not only would they listen to their young exiles with loving attention and hold them patiently while they cried, they would firmly but lovingly discipline the parts in the roles of inner critics or distractors. Self just knows how to be a good inner leader.

I was never taught how to handle my celebrity status. I don’t tell kids it’s right to be Mike Tyson. Parents serve as better role models.

Healing, it turns out, is a journey. It doesn’t happen all at once.

According to most studies on the subject, boys who grow up without fathers grow up at a disadvantage.

Good begets good. Calm begets calm. It isn´t the child who is bad; it is the action that is bad.

Watch your children grow, and they will teach you what you’ve taught them.

We have to be role models. We have to be curious. Above all, we have to pay attention and be part of the conversation while our kids are still listening to us.

The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them. They don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.

The culture in which you parent, mentor, or educate boys exhorts them to be individualistic and group-oriented at once, but does not give them a tribal structure in which to accomplish both in balance. It used to be that the tribe formed a boy's character while the peer group existed primarily to test and befriend that character. Nowadays, boys' characters are often formed in the peer group. Mentors and intimate role models rarely exist to show the growing boy in any long-term and consistent way how both to serve a group and flourish as an independent self.

The public debate plays out in an infinite regress of blame over who’s responsible for those who fail to fit the standard erotic mold. This is variously ascribed to the people choosing to be the deviants they are, porn, the Devil (always a shoo-in), bad parents, poor role models, our sexually repressed culture, or the psychiatrists who keep needling sexual minorities by branding them mentally ill. It’s a rabbit hole of endless (and usually endlessly bad) arguments. Morally, all that matters—and allow me to reiterate that because I feel it’s quite important, all that matters—is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it’s not, and we reject the person anyway, then we’re not the good guys in this scenario; we’re the bad guys.

Emotional Shades of Meaning There are hundreds of emotions, ranging in degree and sometimes with only subtle differences between them. For instance, anger can range from mild irritation or annoyance to rage and fury; sadness can range from feeling a little blue to utter despair and hopelessness. It's important to understand the distinctions among emotions as well as to be able to assess how you feel. Because you feel annoyed with someone doesn't mean you should fly into a rage and swear never to speak to them again. Because you feel sad about something that happened today doesn't mean the world will end and you should give up all hope of ever feeling better. Emotion dysregulation is a hallmark of BPD, and children raised by a parent with it may not have had the best emotional role model to learn from.

We really can’t control our kids—and doing so shouldn’t be our goal. Our role is to teach them to think and act independently, so that they will have the judgment to succeed in school and, most important, in life. Rather than pushing them to do things they resist, we should seek to help them find things they love and develop their inner motivation. Our aim is to move away from a model that depends on parental pressure to one that nurtures a child’s own drive. That is what we mean by the self-driven child.

Where did we learn about the American dream? What role models were available to us? You pontificate on the meaning of Michael Chang. Do the lessons passed down to us by books or movies to TV apply to our lives as Asian kids with Asian parents, or do they make us feel inadequate? Why are we always working so hard, proving our smarts, living up to someone else's standards? Maybe it's all a trap. Why are we looking out for help, when it's all around us? We are not men without a culture. We just have to make it ourselves.

Don’t think for a moment that there’s nothing to be learned from the people who’ve failed us. For some of the greatest lessons that we’ve been granted are from those who showed us how ‘not’ to do something. And we’d be wise to remember that some of those people are us.

Don't get so busy on your career that you forget to have a life. You CAN do both. You can make lots of money, become a millionaire AND enjoy time with family, friends AND be a great role-model as a parent. - Neil B Wood - The Best Practices of Successful Financial Advisors

You may feel overwhelmingly guilty because you have been so ineffectual in your intimate relationships. Even if you learn nothing else from reading this book, please accept, right now, that you are not to blame for the pain you have suffered—and inflicted—to this point. You didn’t have an effective role model for loving relationships. You have had to make it all up. What you did know is that you didn’t want to be like your parents, but you didn’t know how to filter the destructive actions from the good actions. So you created a fantasy about how ideal relationships work from a fanciful blend of what you imagined, saw at a distance or observed on TV.

When I was a kid, my parents were very careful about who was “acceptable” as my heroes if you will, because they didn’t want me being influenced by athletes who lacked morals. Cal Ripken and Dale Murphy were at the top of my mom’s list of players she felt were good role models, so of course I was a diehard fan of both those guys.

My Dad did nothing to elevate himself, for selflessness was a trait within himself that compelled him to live outside of himself. And while I doubt that he ever grasped the immensity of his selflessness as it was unleashed into the lives of his children, that forever unleashed life within us that is now being unleashed outside of us.

From a very early age Edison became used to doing things for himself, by necessity. His family was poor, and by the age of twelve he had to earn money to help his parents. He sold newspapers on trains, and traveling around his native Michigan for his job, he developed an ardent curiosity about everything he saw. He wanted to know how things worked—machines, gadgets, anything with moving parts. With no schools or teachers in his life, he turned to books, particularly anything he could find on science. He began to conduct his own experiments in the basement of his family home, and he taught himself how to take apart and fix any kind of watch. At the age of fifteen he apprenticed as a telegraph operator, then spent years traveling across the country plying his trade. He had no chance for a formal education, and nobody crossed his path who could serve as a teacher or mentor. And so in lieu of that, in every city he spent time in, he frequented the public library. One book that crossed his path played a decisive role in his life: Michael Faraday’s two-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity. This book became for Edison what The Improvement of the Mind had been for Faraday. It gave him a systematic approach to science and a program for how to educate himself in the field that now obsessed him—electricity. He could follow the experiments laid out by the great Master of the field and absorb as well his philosophical approach to science. For the rest of his life, Faraday would remain his role model. Through books, experiments, and practical experience at various jobs, Edison gave himself a rigorous education that lasted about ten years, up until the time he became an inventor. What made this successful was his relentless desire to learn through whatever crossed his path, as well as his self-discipline. He had developed the habit of overcoming his lack of an organized education by sheer determination and persistence. He worked harder than anyone else. Because he was a consummate outsider and his mind had not been indoctrinated in any school of thought, he brought a fresh perspective to every problem he tackled. He turned his lack of formal direction into an advantage. If you are forced onto this path, you must follow Edison’s example by developing extreme self-reliance. Under these circumstances, you become your own teacher and mentor. You push yourself to learn from every possible source. You read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit. As much as possible, you try to apply your knowledge in some form of experiment or practice. You find for yourself second-degree mentors in the form of public figures who can serve as role models. Reading and reflecting on their experiences, you can gain some guidance. You try to make their ideas come to life, internalizing their voice. As someone self-taught, you will maintain a pristine vision, completely distilled through your own experiences—giving you a distinctive power and path to mastery.

In fact, the same intervention or response may even have the opposite effect on two different clients with contrasting developmental histories and cultural contexts. For example, if a client’s parent was distant or aloof, the therapist’s judicious self-disclosure may be helpful for the client. In contrast, the same type of self-disclosure is likely to be anxiety-arousing for a client who grew up serving as the confidant or emotional caregiver of a depressed parent. Greater sharing with the therapist may help the first client learn that, contrary to her deeply held beliefs, she does matter and can be of interest to other people. In contrast, for the second client, the same type of self-disclosure may inadvertently impose the unwanted needs of others and set this client back in treatment as, in her mind, she experiences herself back in her old caretaking role again—this time with the therapist. This unwanted reenactment occurs because the therapeutic relationship is now paralleling the same problematic relational theme that this client struggled with while growing up.

I am a proud father in the accomplishments of my son, who fills my heart with joy and my mind with favourable wonderings. He enhances my purpose on this wondrous planet. Parents, be aware that not only are you a model for your children, but in some fashions they are models for you— taking life easy, with a spirit of adventure. Encourage your kids to be kids!

Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?

Yet even more important than role modeling is love. For even in chaotic and disordered homes genuine love is occasionally present, and from such homes may come self-disciplined children. And not infrequently parents who are professional people—doctors, lawyers, club women and philanthropists—who lead lives of strict orderliness and decorum but yet lack love, send children into the world who are as undisciplined and destructive and disorganized as any child from an impoverished and chaotic home. Ultimately love is everything. The mystery of love will be examined in later portions of this work. Yet, for the sake of coherency, it may be helpful to make a brief but limited mention of it and its relationship to discipline at this point.

You didn’t have an effective role model for loving relationships. You have had to make it all up. What you did know is that you didn’t want to be like your parents, but you didn’t know how to filter the destructive actions from the good actions. So you created a fantasy about how ideal relationships work from a fanciful blend of what you imagined, saw at a distance or observed on TV.

It is not a bad idea, Ayele, as you grow into adulthood, to fix your eye on people of your parents’ generation, or perhaps those even older, to find those you can admire for their qualities of character and contribution. Heroes and role models are important, especially because when you think of them they have the ability to buoy your spirits and ignite your energies to move you onward. In

every life is difficult in its own way. But we do know that, in order to become self-confident and capable adults, it helps enormously to have grown up with steady and predictable parents; parents who delighted in you, in your discoveries and explorations; parents who helped you organize your comings and goings; and who served as role models for self-care and getting along with other people.

The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage.

Our role is to teach them to think and act independently, so that they will have the judgment to succeed in school and, most important, in life. Rather than pushing them to do things they resist, we should seek to help them find things they love and develop their inner motivation. Our aim is to move away from a model that depends on parental pressure to one that nurtures a child’s own drive. That is what we mean by the self-driven child.

Every now and then, I'm lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists - although heavy on the wonder side, and light on skepticism. They're curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. I'm asked follow-up questions. They've never heard of the notion of a 'dumb question'. But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize 'facts'. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts has gone out of them. They've lost much of the wonder and gained very little skepticism. They're worried about asking 'dumb' questions; they are willing to accept inadequate answers, they don't pose follow-up questions, the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers. They come to class with their questions written out on pieces of paper, which they surreptitiously examine, waiting their turn and oblivious of whatever discussion their peers are at this moment engaged in. Something has happened between first and twelfth grade. And it's not just puberty. I'd guess that it's partly peer pressure not to excel - except in sports, partly that the society teaches short-term gratification, partly the impression that science or mathematics won't buy you a sports car, partly that so little is expected of students, and partly that there are few rewards or role-models for intelligent discussion of science and technology - or even for learning for it's own sake. Those few who remain interested are vilified as nerds or geeks or grinds. But there's something else. I find many adults are put off when young children pose scientific questions. 'Why is the Moon round?', the children ask. 'Why is grass green?', 'What is a dream?', 'How deep can you dig a hole?', 'When is the world's birthday?', 'Why do we have toes?'. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation, or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. 'What did you expect the Moon to be? Square?' Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys the grown-ups. A few more experiences like it, and another child has been lost to science.

For many people they are the only way that the false values they absorbed as children are ever questioned, reevaluated, and put in the wastebasket. This is not to say that there are no values at all in one’s roles. It is the over-identification with them that makes it difficult or even impossible to fulfill them. Perhaps the only way to become a great parent is to be willing not to be one; for example, to let grownup children become whoever they want to be without regard to oneself. A similar letting go process is needed for every role model.

A NEW, MORE FRACTURED LIGHT Dear Sugar, My parents recently decided to get a divorce. To be more accurate, my father left my mother for a younger woman. A cliché story, except when it happened to my family I was shattered, as if it was the first time it had ever happened. I’m an adult. I’ve always been close with my father. I looked up to him as a role model. To find out he’d been seeing someone else without telling my mom and that he’d been lying to all of us about it was very painful. Suddenly I can’t trust this man I’ve always counted on and loved.

teachers, surrogate grandparents, babysitters, friends’ parents—decided I was worthy of their time, their interest. They provided examples, role models, family meals at dinner tables, reprimands that didn’t come with a swat or a cutting remark or end in the questions Why don’t you ever listen, Benny? Why are you so stupid sometimes? People around me invited me into homes that operated on a schedule and where parents spoke encouraging words. They showed me what a stable life could look like. If they hadn’t bothered, how would I have even known there was another way to live? You can’t aspire to something you’ve never seen.

Girls and young women are also starving because the women’s movement changed educational institutions and the workplace enough to make them admit women, but not yet enough to change the maleness of power itself. Women in “coeducational” schools and colleges are still isolated from one another, and admitted as men manqué. Women’s studies are kept on the margins of the curriculum, and fewer than 5 percent of professors are women; the worldview taught young women is male. The pressure on them is to conform themselves to the masculine atmosphere. Separated from their mothers, young women on campus have few older role models who are not male; how can they learn how to love their bodies? The main images of women given them to admire and emulate are not of impressive, wise older women, but of girls their own age or younger, who are not respected for their minds. Physically, these universities are ordered for men or unwomaned women. They are overhung with oil portraits of men; engraved with the rolling names of men; designed, like the Yale Club in New York, which for twenty years after women were admitted had no women’s changing room, for men. They are not lit for women who want to escape rape; at Yale, campus police maps showing the most dangerous street corners for rape were allegedly kept from the student body so as not to alarm parents. The colleges are only marginally concerned with the things that happen to women’s bodies that do not happen to the bodies of the men. Women students sense this institutional wish that the problems of their female bodies would just fade away; responding, the bodies themselves fade away.

We live in a world where we have to sacrifice our comfort for the sake of others. Where we have to go an extra mile to meet others' needs. Where we have to dig deep in our resources to please others. I have gone out of my comfort zone for some people. Some people have gone out of their comfort zone for me. And I'm grateful. It's life. It's a common thing. There is no right or wrong to this behaviour. We do it because either we want to or that we must. By the way, our self-sacrificing service can be unhealthy to us. Some people burn themselves down trying to keep others warm. Some break their backs trying to carry the whole world. Some break their bones trying to bend backwards for their loved ones. All these sacrifices are, sometimes, not appreciated. Usually we don't thank the people who go out of their comfort zone to make us feel comfortable. Again, although it's not okay, it's a common thing. It's another side of life. To be fair, we must get in touch with our humanity and show gratitude for these sacrifices. We owe it to so many people. And sometimes we don't even realise it. Thanks be to God for forgiving our sins — which we repeat. Thanks to our world leaders and the activists for the work that they do to make our economic life better. Thanks to our teachers, lecturers, mentors, and role models for shaping our lives. Thanks to our parents for their continual sacrifices. Thanks to our friends for their solid support. Thanks to our children, nephews, and nieces. They allow us to practise discipline and leadership on them. Thanks to the doctors and nurses who save our lives daily. Thanks to safety professionals and legal representatives. They protect us and our possessions. Thanks to our church leaders, spiritual gurus and guides, and meditation partners. They shape our spiritual lives. Thanks to musicians, actors, writers, poets, and sportspeople for their entertainment. Thanks to everyone who contributes in a positive way to our society. Whether recognised or not. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

Like her [mother], I attempted to give the impression to Vida that I was a perfect person, had no complicated history and had never put a foot wrong in life. (What kind of a role model is that for a child?) Divorce made an honest woman of me. Vida was eight when my marriage began to disintegrate and I couldn't bear pretending to her or anyone else any more. I was sick of trying to appear normal. Vida didn't reject me for showing my true self – that's what I imagined would happen. Far from it, we grew even closer. She especially enjoyed my swearing. (I only swore in front of her when she was older. Everything has to be revealed at an appropriate time.) A child derives a sense of safety from knowing the person who looks after them is respectful enough to be honest. Vida has never rooted around in my cupboards and drawers or turned the house upside down searching for letters and scraps of evidence to help her piece her mother together like I did. On the contrary, she knows too much. She's not fascinated by secrets because I haven't hidden anything from her, not even the ugly stuff.

For example, if you never got on well with one of your parents and you have left that parent behind on your journey in such a way that the thought of that parent arouses anger or frustration or self-pity or any emotion... you are still attached. You are still stuck. And you must get that relationship straight before you can finish your work. And what, specifically, does "getting it straight" mean? Well, it means re-perceiving that parent, or whoever it may be, with total compassion... seeing him as a being of the spirit, just like you, who happens to be your parent... and who happens to have this or that characteristic, and who happens to be at a certain stage of his evolutionary journey. You must see that all beings are just beings... and that all the wrappings of personality and role and body are the coverings. Your attachments are only to the coverings, and as long as you are attached to someone else's covering you are stuck, and you keep them stuck, in that attachment. Only when you can see the essence, can see God, in each human being do you free yourself and those about you. It's hard work when you have spent years building a fixed model of who someone else is to abandon it, but until that model is superceded by a compassionate model, you are still stuck.

Of course, there were innumerable conversions during these years, as Christianity became the religion of Western Europe and Christendom took its characteristic shape. Many of these were undramatic – serfs responding to the importunity of their lords – or group events, as in the conversion of Clovis’s troops. But for many others there was no longer need of conversion. The contours of Christian experience had shifted. Whereas up to the time of Augustine there had been four stages of initiation and incorporation into the church, there were no typically two. The first stage was brief and obligatory – baptism in the days or months after birth. The second stage would happen later and would take longer – if it took place at all – when confirmation happened and when parents instructed their children and godparents instructed their godchildren in the beliefs and behavior of the Christian church. Indeed, at this time of the rapid spread of Christianity into new territories, it was vitally necessary that the baptizands be taught well. The heroic and valorous values of the folk, the glorious narratives of warriors, the adulation of wealth and strength – all of these were as firmly in place in seventh-century Gaul as the pagan values and narratives had been in third-century Rome. If Christianity were to be a religion of revelation that could challenge the commonplaces of Gallic society, if new habits were to be taught and new role models were to be adopted, there would have to be some form of postbaptismal pastoral follow-up.

In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause

As the months rolled on, John and Sarah began to understand themselves less as teachers and more as parents, living into the names Baba and Kama Kiwawa. It was clear the boys needed something Keu couldn’t provide, consistent support and affection. Sarah started giving out hugs and bandages, and John role-modeled manhood by providing food, shelter, and an education. But unlike many parents, John and Sarah didn’t dole out punishments. They left that to the council. On his first visit, Keu had appointed six boys with hair sprouting on their chins as the elders of Kiwawa. He spent a week with them on a hill near Kiwawa where he instructed them in the ways of a traditional elder council, showing them how to resolve problems that might arise according to the Pokot traditions. And each night after the guard heard John’s snores rumbling out of the camper, the council built a fire and legislated the day’s problems according to the nomadic values they had learned, sometimes choosing to defer ruling on more complicated matters until Keu returned. Stolen writing stick? The elders huddled together in the shadow of the illuminated acacia tree. The oldest returned and pointed at the offender: “Water-fetching duty for a week.” “Oee,” the boys would shout, the Pokot version of Amen. “Refusing to share meat?” “Three rope whippings.” “Oee.” “Crying because you miss your mother?” “Spend more time with Kama,” the oldest boy would say with compassion. “Oee.” “We were modeling the Pokot elders by becoming the keepers of justice and fairness. You see, Pokot elders can never settle a matter based on anger or some personal retribution. That is so unacceptable,” Michael explained. “A punishment is meant to reform the person as quickly as possible so the criminal can be brought back into the group. This is because every single person has a job to do, whether it is to fetch water, herd cows, or stand guard against Karamoja. And if you are gone, then someone else has to work harder in your absence. Nomads do not have prisons like the modern world, which changes our whole entire judicial system. In America you can lock somebody up in prison for two years for just a small crime like stealing a cow. And while in prison they are taken out of the community and are expected to think about what they have done. And then after those two years of isolation, a group of psychologists and lawyers and I don’t know who else will examine that person and see if they have changed their stealing ways. If not, then they lock them back up,” he said, turning an invisible key. “In America there is the potential to give up on somebody, to leave them outside of the community. But there are no prisons in the desert, and without prisons the elders are left with two choices: reform you or kill you. And as I said, if they kill you, they are not only losing a good worker, but also a brother and a son. And the desert has already taken so many of our sons.

She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undeflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice, because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning toward quick, sometimes cutting, interventions, usually enough to capture their attention; then she could go on for a while in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem. Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, “Gentlemen, let’s proceed,” and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, “Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys.” The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female. She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word. More than many others, she had been encumbered with parental proscriptions. Her newfound freedoms—intellectual, social, sexual—were exhilarating. At a time when many of her contemporaries were moving toward shapeless clothing that minimized the distinctions between the sexes, she aspired to an elegance and simplicity in dress and makeup that strained her limited budget. There were more effective ways to make political statements, she thought. She cultivated a few close friends and made a number of casual enemies, who disliked her for her dress, for her political and religious views, or for the vigor with which she defended her opinions. Her competence and delight in science were taken as rebukes by many otherwise capable young women. But a few looked on her as what mathematicians call an existence theorem—a demonstration that a woman could, sure enough, excel in science—or even as a role model.

Any parent would be dismayed to think that this was their child’s experience of learning, of socializing, and of herself. Maya is an introvert; she is out of her element in a noisy and overstimulating classroom where lessons are taught in large groups. Her teacher told me that she’d do much better in a school with a calm atmosphere where she could work with other kids who are “equally hardworking and attentive to detail,” and where a larger portion of the day would involve independent work. Maya needs to learn to assert herself in groups, of course, but will experiences like the one I witnessed teach her this skill? The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts. Introverts need different kinds of instruction from extroverts, write College of William and Mary education scholars Jill Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. And too often, “very little is made available to that learner except constant advice on becoming more social and gregarious.” We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself. The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass. Academic classes are dominated by group discussions in which a teacher prods him to speak up. He eats lunch in the cacophonous din of the cafeteria, where he has to jockey for a place at a crowded table. Worst of all, there’s little time to think or create. The structure of the day is almost guaranteed to sap his energy rather than stimulate it. Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we know perfectly well that adults don’t organize themselves this way? We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids “blossom” into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it’s not the children who change but their environments. As adults, they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don’t have to live in whatever culture they’re plunked into. Research from a field known as “person-environment fit” shows that people flourish when, in the words of psychologist Brian Little, they’re “engaged in occupations, roles or settings that are concordant with their personalities.” The inverse is also true: kids stop learning when they feel emotionally threatened.

Read Ephesians 4:31-32 and underline these verses in your Bible. Does your child easily forgive others? In light of your answer, write out these verses as a prayer over your child. 8. Who are the people your child looks up to in his (her) life? Are they godly role models? Write out a prayer asking God to either strengthen those relationships or bring new ones into his (her) life. 9. Read Matthew 5:44 and underline it in your Bible. Write it out as a prayer over your child. For example, “I pray that (name of child) will love his (her) enemies…

We can best help our children not by sacrificing ourselves for them, but by trying to fulfill our own lives. When we are involved in an honest pursuit of our own goals, we serve as positive role models for our children.

She built a close-knit team of talented people who bonded with one another and felt passion for the mission. Soon her group became one of the parent bank’s most desirable places to work. She developed strong relationships with senior executives who helped her deal with tensions in the middle, and she communicated well and often about why her unit needed to be different. Her creativity, vision, teamwork, and persistence helped this group succeed and become a national role model, while other banks’ efforts faltered.

Toddlers who resist attaching to their parents may look to their older siblings or peers for cues to “acceptable” behavior. Stressing the importance and responsibility of being a role model is often an effective way to help an older sibling feel important during the adoption transition.

Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn't want to become them, but we had no other role models--or "maps," Alex kept saying. "My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn't ever lead me anywhere." And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn't want to go--and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. It almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.

Appendix 1 Our Family's Core Values and Mission YOUR CORE VALUES What are the most important values in your family? Do your kids know these are critical? Do both parents agree on the ranking of values? This worksheet will help you develop and communicate your top values. A "value" is an ideal that is desirable. It is a quality that we want to model in our own lives and see developed in the lives of our kids. For instance, honesty is a very important value, for without it you can't have trust in your relationships. Take time in writing your answers to the following questions. 1. When time and energy are in short supply, what should we make sure we cover in parenting our children? List a few ideas. Then circle the nonnegotiables. 2. What are the "we'd like to get around to these" values? These are the semi-negotiables. 3. What were the top three values of each of your families of origin (the family you grew up in)? Father Mother 1. 1. 2. 2. 3. 3. 4. Think about a healthy, positive family-one that serves as a role model for you. What would you say are their top three values? 1. 2. 3. 5. What are three or four favorite Scripture verses that communicate elements of a healthy family? 1. 2. 3. 4. Based on these verses, what are the three or four principles from Scripture that you'd like to see evidenced in your family? 1. 2. 3. 4. 6. What values are your "pound the table with passion" values? What are the ones that you feel very strongly about? (You may already have them listed.) To help you with this, complete the following sentences: More families need to ... The problem with today's families is ... DEVELOPING YOUR FAMILY'S MISSION STATEMENT Besides writing out your core values, you will do well to develop a family mission statement (or covenant). These important documents will shape your family. The founders of the United States knew that guiding documents would keep us on course as a fledgling democracy; so too will these documents guide your family as you seek to be purposeful. Sample mission statement: We exist to love each other and advance Gods timeless principles and his kingdom on earth. Complete the following: 1. Our family exists to ... 2. What are some activities or behaviors that you imagine your family carrying out? 3. Describe some qualities of character that you can envision your family being known for. 4. What is unique about your family? What makes you different? What are you known for? What sets you apart? 5. What do you hope to do with and through your family that will outlive you? What noble cause greater than yourselves do you want your family to pursue? 6. With these five questions completed, look for a Scripture that supports the basic ideas of your rough-draft concepts for your family mission statement. If there are several candidates, talk about them thoughtfully and choose one, writing it out here: 7. Using the sample as a template, your five questions and your family Scripture, write a rough draft of your family mission statement: 8. Rewrite the mission statement, keeping the same concepts but changing the order of the mission statement. This is simply to give you two options. 9. Discuss this mission statement as a family if the kids are old enough. Discuss it with a few other friends or extended family members. Any feedback? 10. Pray about your family mission statement for a couple of weeks, asking God to affirm it or help you edit it. Then write up the final version. Consider making a permanent version of your family mission statement to hang on a wall in your home.

FAMILY SYSTEM ROLES All families have roles. The father and mother play their roles of modeling what it is to be a man or woman, father or mother. Parents also model how to be intimate, have boundaries, cope with problems, fight fair, problem-solve, etc. The role of children is to be curious and to be learners. Members of a healthy family have flexible roles. Mom may be the heroine because she baked a special cake. Daughter may take over that role when she volunteers to do the dishes. Son becomes the hero when he notices smoke coming out the stove and prevents a fire. Dad’s the hero when he takes the family on a vacation.

Lord, help my children to make godly friends. I know that You brought us here and You will not leave my children forsaken. I’m concerned that in their need for acceptance they’ll end up with friends whose moral standards are not as high as Yours. Bring godly role models into their lives.

Our children hunger to see the reality of who God is in the natural flow of our lives—when we’re getting up, when we’re sitting down, when we’re on a journey, when we’re putting them to bed. It’s not that the formalized methodology is bad, because it definitely has a place. It’s just that it’s not best apart from a role model. Our children need to see that faith matters, that it’s relevant to our daily situations, that it’s real. We need to model how our lives are spiritual in every decision, erasing the divide between sacred and secular.

This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous and exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher, is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated, parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that society and enhance the individual's prospects of success. Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present. Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that to parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachers mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all the difference in the world to that child's future- and to the world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home and a bad neighborhood. It is just here, however--in our search for what we might call the able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it so necessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing, sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the next generation.

Almost twenty years ago I was invited to moderate a panel of adoptive parents who were sharing their experiences with interracial adoption with an audience of prospective parents considering the same option. The White panelists spoke of ways they had tried to affirm the identities of their adopted children of color. One parent, the mother of a Central American adoptee, spoke of how she had become involved in a support group of parents who had adopted Latinx children as a way of providing her son with playmates who had a shared experience. She also described her efforts to find Latinx adults who might serve as role models for her child. There were very few Latinx families in her mostly White community, but she located a Latinx organization in a nearby town and began to do volunteer work for it as a way of building a Latinx friendship network. During the question-and-answer period that followed, a White woman stood up and explained that she was considering adopting a Latinx child but lived in a small rural community that was entirely White. She was impressed by the mother’s efforts to create a Latinx network for her child but expressed doubts that she herself could do so. She said she would feel too uncomfortable placing herself in a situation where she would be one of few Whites. She didn’t think she could do it. I thought this was an amazing statement. How could this White adult seriously consider placing a small child in a situation where the child would be in the minority all the time, while the idea of spending a few hours as a “minority” was too daunting for her?

Beth, my old dance teacher, confronted Nick about it. “Oh my gosh, why are you drinking a beer?” she said it just like that: “A beer,” because surely this was an isolated sin, and who would dare have more than one? She let him have it, going on about how I was around, and didn’t he know he was supposed to be a role model for young people? Poor Nick went to my parents’ hotel room with this hangdog face. “I apologize if I disrespected you or the family,” he said. “For me, drinking a beer isn’t wrong, but I really love Jessica, and, again, I’m sorry if I disrespected the family.” My mother told me the story and I cringed. We must have seemed so country. Still, I had to ask, “He told you he loved me?

Psychiatrists talk about criminals as people with stunted psychological development, people who have had pathological relationships with their parents, who lack adequate role models.

When people don’t acknowledge their anger, it often starts bottling up and ultimately bursts leading to expression in the wrong manners. When anger remains unexpressed for a long time, it turns into resentment. When people have unhealthy role models in their childhood years with both or either of the parents being aggressive, the child grows up to have serious anger issues. You need to channel your rage into something good in order to get out of the cycle.

Grace doesn’t fit well with stricter models of parenting. Grace often contradicts parenting plans that want to distill roles down into checklists. Grace-based parenting is a heart-activated plan that takes its cues from a daily walk with Jesus Christ. Because of this, grace and strict parenting textbooks will never find themselves in agreement.

An underlying question for many people is "what kind of person do you want to be" in their new expression of gender. There is a need for more diverse expressions of "manhood" and "womanhood," "girlhood" and "boyhood" for everyone in culture. Right now there is a story that to become a man or a woman you must act, talk, walk, and dress a certain way. The belief that people of certain genders have to behave in specific ways invalidates people as a whole, trans and non-trans alike. This becomes a call for healthy gender expressions to be modeled for all children. Parents as well as other adults need to model and encourage everyone to be their best, healthiest, self. We get to move beyond our current culture that belittles girls for pursuing intellectual passions, or boys for expressing emotions; a culture that conflates masculinity with abusive behavior, and femininity with victimhood. Examining these issues creates an opportunity to craft a world where people of any gender expression to explore everything they are passionate about, engage with their emotions, and express themselves fully; a world transformed for our children to live without abuse, regardless of our path in life.

Children Learn What They Live” presents a clear and simple message: Children are continuously learning from their parents. Your children are paying attention to you. Perhaps not to what you tell them to do, but certainly to what they actually see you do. You are their first and most powerful role models. Parents can strive to teach certain values, but children will inevitably absorb whatever values are transmitted through their parents’ behavior, feelings, and attitudes in everyday living. How you express and manage your own feelings becomes a model that will be remembered by your children throughout their lifetimes.

Endless talk about enriched curricula, Head Start, empowerment, Afrocentrism, victimization, special education, dysfunctionality, self-esteem, social justice, role models, etc., fails to recognize the most important fact of all: All too often, the children of indigent, unmarried fifteen-year-olds start life with problems we cannot fix. Government programs cannot take the place of loving, responsible parents.

Dear Black Fathers and Black Mothers… Let's give our children gifts that TRULY matter. The gift of being a positive role model. The gift of showing them what genuine love looks and feels like. The gift of spending quality time with them. The gift of making them feel wanted and loved. The gift of open and honest communication. The gift of hearing and listening to them. The gift of guidance, support, and friendship. Let’s set them up for greatness by investing in them early on in life by preparing, teaching, educating, and empowering them!

Whether you like it or not, you are your child's role model. Your choice is to decide what kind of role model you want to be - one that they can look up to or one that they have to look down on. Children listen with their eyes. They don't care what you say until they see what you do.

Overall, laterborns were twice as likely as firstborns to champion major scientific upheavals. “The likelihood of this difference arising by chance is substantially less than one in a billion,” Sulloway observes. “Laterborns have typically been half a century ahead of firstborns in their willingness to endorse radical innovations.” Similar results emerged when he studied thirty-one political revolutions: laterborns were twice as likely as firstborns to support radical changes. As a card-carrying firstborn, I was initially dismayed by these results. But as I learned about birth-order research, I realized that none of these patterns are set in stone. We don’t need to cede originality to laterborn children. By adopting the parenting practices that are typically applied primarily to younger children, we can raise any child to become more original. This chapter examines the family roots of originality. What’s unique about being a younger child, how does family size figure in, and what are the implications for nurture? And how can we account for the cases that don’t fit these patterns—the three only children on the base-stealing list, the firstborns who rebel, and the latterborn who conform? I’ll use birth order as a launching pad for examining the impact of siblings, parents, and role models on our tendencies to take risks. To see why siblings aren’t as alike as we expect them to be, I’ll look at the upbringing of Jackie Robinson and the families of the most original comedians in America. You’ll find out what determines whether children rebel in a constructive or destructive direction, why it’s a mistake to tell children not to cheat, how we praise them ineffectively and read them the wrong books, and what we can learn from the parents of individuals who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.

The great achievement of a Parent is to be a role model to her/his Child by living a positive life! Because a Parent is a flame of fate to a Child.

The relationship between nurturance and moral self-interest can be seen most clearly in nurturant forms of business practice. It involves the humane treatment of employees, the creation of a safe and humane workplace, social and ecological responsibility, fairness in hiring and promotion, the building of a work community, the development of excellent communication between employees and management and between the company and its customers, opportunities for employee self-development, a positive role in the larger community, scrupulous honesty, a regard for one’s customers and for the public, and excellent customer service. Policies such as these have increased the productivity and success of many businesses. They are models of how Nurturant Parent morality can function to help businesses be successful and to allow owners, investors, and employees to seek their self-interest within this moral system. Moral