Another insightful saying from the book Everyday Psychology, by Dr Steve Edwards.
‘Children should be seen and not heard.’
This entry tries to improve on this older saying, which no doubt arose from the natural noisy expressiveness of childen, and changing parental roles from rights and powers over children to duties and responsibilities towards them.
Further everyday advice to parents, who initially teach children everything they know, is given in an excellent poem by Dorothy Law Nolte titled ‘If children learn what they live’. The first and last two lines read:
If a child lives with criticism , he learns to condemn,
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world.
Other relevant advice is given by Shakespeare’s Polonius: ‘This above all my son, unto thine own self be true.’
And then, of course, there is Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, IF:
If you can keep your head when all about you
  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
  But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
  If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
  And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
  And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
  To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
  Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
  Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
  If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
 [ Editor’s note: We’ve added the whole poem to Dr Edwards’s original entry.]