Parenting & Family Quote by Plato

Plato isn’t offering a sentimental paean to parenthood; he’s issuing a civic warning dressed as moral counsel. The line treats having children less like a private lifestyle choice and more like entering a binding contract with the future. “Persevere to the end” carries the chill of obligation: don’t reproduce unless you’re prepared to be outlasted by the work of shaping a person. In Plato’s world, that work is never merely logistical. It’s ethical formation, training desire, judgment, and self-command - the raw material of the polis.

The phrasing “in their nature and education” matters because it links what a child is with what a child becomes, collapsing the modern comfort that temperament is “just who they are” and schooling is someone else’s job. Plato’s philosophy is obsessed with the uneasy seam between innate disposition and cultivated virtue. He’s insisting that good societies don’t happen by accident; they are manufactured through sustained, sometimes coercive, attention to character. Parenting, here, is an extension of statesmanship.

Context sharpens the edge. In the Republic and related dialogues, Plato imagines a city where education isn’t decorative; it’s the infrastructure of justice, designed to prevent the chaos of appetites from running the show. The subtext is almost anti-romantic: children are not ornaments or legacy projects. They are future citizens whose miseducation becomes everyone’s problem. The quote polices responsibility, but it also reveals Plato’s larger anxiety: biology without pedagogy is a recipe for political disorder.