Compass, a handbook on parents leadership by James Stenson. Quotes II

-A couple of ideas crucial to your job as a parent:
1. Children do not come into the world imbued with these virtues. They do not start out in life with sound judgment, responsibility, courageous perseverance, or self-mastery. These powers must be built from scratch as children grow up, formed as it were from the outside in, or else the children will grow up without them.
2. Your job as a parent is to make sure your children do not grow up this way: as thoughtless, self-centered, impulsive, irresponsible hedonists and manipulators. Your job is to teach your children habitual lifelong powers of sound judgment, responsibility, courageous perseverance, self-control, and heart. This is the core responsibility of parenthood.
-Your children will not grow up when the can take care of themselves. They will really and truly grow up only when they can take care of others, and want to.
-Characteristics of character: excellent judgment, wisdom, a refined sense of right and wrong, ethical uprightness, courage, thoughtful concern for others' needs and feelings, putting people ahead of things.
-Children seem to acquire character in three ways and in this order:
1. By example. What children witness, and then imitate, in the lives of their parents and other adults whom they respect (teachers, coaches)
2. By directed practice. What children are led to do, or are made to do repeatedly by parents and other respected adults.
3. By word. What children hear from parents and others as explanation of what they witness and are led to do.