Tomorrow’s leaders are today’s children, and their character is forged around the family table.
“The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” poet William Ross Wallace
wrote. As familiar as this old saying is, it contains a truth too often neglected—it’s so familiar that we rarely stop to think about it. We rarely consider the underestimated power in the hands of mothers and fathers.
Parents are the architects of the future. In forming tomorrow’s leaders, they exert a greater influence on the future than virtually anyone else.
The Power of Parents
Imagine having the opportunity to spend 18 years educating, training, and guiding the president of the United States. Most of us would consider the president’s guardian to possess an almost undemocratic level of influence. Yet this is precisely the influence wielded by Fred and Mary Trump, Ann Dunham, and George and Barbara Bush. The state of the entire country today links back directly to what went on in those three households where the past three presidents grew up. Of course, every individual—presidents included—possesses free will and ultimately bears responsibility for their own actions, but no one would deny that our home life shapes us and our patterns of behavior and ways of thinking and acting more than virtually anything else in our lives.
