Parenting & Family Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Nothing punctures parental vanity like the suggestion that your finest teaching tool might be your own failure. Shaw’s line is a scalpel aimed at the sentimental self-image of the moral parent: the adult who believes their life is a tidy syllabus their children should memorize. If you insist on turning yourself into a lesson, he says, at least be honest about which kind you are.

The intent is corrective, but the subtext is nastier and funnier. Shaw assumes a familiar human impulse: we narrate our choices as wisdom after the fact, polishing compromises into principles. Parents, in particular, can weaponize that narration, asking for gratitude in advance. Shaw flips the script. A “warning” concedes the messiness of adulthood and treats children as full moral agents, not as blank slates meant to replicate you. It’s also a backhanded critique of inherited respectability: the idea that being older automatically makes you exemplary.

Context matters: Shaw built a career staging hypocrisy, especially the bourgeois kind that confuses comfort with virtue. His plays relish exposing how social roles (parent, respectable professional, patriot) become costumes that let people dodge self-knowledge. This aphorism carries that theatrical instinct: it’s not advice about childrearing so much as a demand for moral candor. The punch is that being a “warning” can be the more responsible form of love, because it gives your children permission to outgrow your limitations rather than sanctify them.