Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
—Albert Schweitzer
Socrates’s students said of their teacher that for all the genius he possessed, Plato and Aristotle and all the other sages who learned from him “derived more benefit from [his] character than [his] words.” So it was for Zeno and Cleanthes, the two earliest Stoic philosophers. “Cleanthes could not have been the express image of Zeno,” Seneca wrote, “if he had merely heard his lectures; he shared in his life, saw into his hidden purposes, and watched him to see whether he lived according to his own rules.”
Is there a better description—a better bar to set—for a parent than this? If you want to teach your kids, it’s not going to be with words. It’s not going to be with lectures. It’s going to be through showing them that you live according to the rules you set and the values you are trying to tell them are important.