Education Quote by Andrew Shue

Shue’s line lands with the weary clarity of someone who’s watched the “be a good example” lecture bounce off a locked teenage door. He starts by paying the expected respect to parents and teachers - the official mascots of role-model talk - then pivots to the uncomfortable truth most adults would rather soften: by adolescence, the modeling window is narrowing fast. The bluntness (“you’ve probably gotten as much... as you’re going to”) isn’t anti-parent; it’s a reality check on timing, attention, and influence.

The subtext is about competition. Adults like to imagine they’re the primary authors of a teen’s values, but teenagers are already living in a crowded marketplace of identity: friends, older kids, coaches, celebrity culture, music, whatever the algorithm serves next. Shue’s phrasing quietly shifts responsibility from “keep lecturing” to “start earlier - and accept limits.” It implies that parenting is less a late-game persuasion campaign than years of accumulated tone-setting: how conflict is handled, what respect looks like, whether kindness is performative or practiced.

Coming from an actor - a profession that often gets drafted into “role model” debates whether it wants the job or not - the remark also reads as self-defense. It suggests that when public figures are blamed for teen behavior, we’re ignoring the more mundane but decisive forces that shaped a kid long before a movie or show did. It’s not nihilism; it’s triage. If you want to matter to a teenager, you don’t just tell them what’s right. You become, earlier than you think, the kind of adult they’ll still be willing to hear.