St. John Chrysostom’s Address on Bringing Up Children.

Raise up an athlete for Christ and teach him to be reverent from his earliest youth. If good precepts are impressed on the soul while it is yet tender, no man will be able to destroy them when they have set firm, even as a waxen seal…We need laws to banish evildoers and admit the good and prevent the evildoers from rising up against the good. And, just as in a city, if laws are passed which premit thieves great license, the general welfare is undermined, and if the soldiers do not devote their ardor to its proper use, they ruin the body politic, and if each citizen abandons his own household and busies himself with another’s, he destroys good order by his greed and ambition. So it is also in the case of the child. The child’s souls then is a city, a city but lately found and built, a city containing citizens, who are strangers with no experience as yet… they are quite without experience and would readily accept the laws thou givest them…Make use of the beginning of his life as thou shouldst. If thou hast a son, thou wilt be the first to benefit, and then God. St John Chrysostom, Ora Pro Nobis.