American essayist Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith observed, "The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood." We don't want to date ourselves through some premature denunciation of the young, so we'll move along—without comment—to another aspect of the relationship between the young and the not-so-young: the idea that children learn what they live.

French essayist and moralist Joseph Joubert reminded us, "Children need models more than they need critics"; while American writer James Baldwin pointed out, "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."

We'll let British poet William Wordsworth speak to the power of childhood. He believed, "The child is father of the man. But childhood does not last forever." As Wordsworth's compatriot, novelist Graham Greene noted more than a century later, "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."