Parenting & Family Quote by David Allan Coe

It lands like a dark joke disguised as parenting advice: you have to teach love because hate is the default setting. Coming from David Allan Coe, a country musician whose career has long flirted with outlaw posturing and provocation, the line reads less like a Hallmark commandment and more like a weary field report from American life. Coe isn’t polishing morality; he’s admitting how efficiently culture manufactures resentment.

The genius is in the imbalance. “Teach” suggests effort, patience, repetition, the slow work of building a person. “They’ll learn” implies passive absorption. Hate, in this framing, doesn’t require a curriculum; it seeps in through schoolyard hierarchies, partisan media, family feuds, economic anxiety, and the everyday incentives to blame somebody else. The line’s punch comes from its parental intimacy, too: the speaker isn’t preaching to society, he’s bargaining with the future at the most vulnerable scale imaginable.

There’s also a self-indictment tucked inside it. If hate arrives “on their own,” then adults are both less powerful and more culpable than they’d like to admit: you can’t fully protect kids from the world you’ve built, only counter-program it at home. In a genre that often mythologizes toughness, Coe smuggles in a radical claim: tenderness is learned behavior, and it’s labor. The cynicism isn’t that love is impossible; it’s that hate is lazy, ambient, and always recruiting.