I remember reading that a child learns most everything they will ever learn by the time they are 3 or 4 years old. My personal experience with my kids and other peoples kids is that this is true, what kids learn after that time frame is mainly organization of concepts into functional plans and actions. They expand their knowledge, but without that foundation, little is really "learned". It is during this time frame that you can have a great positive/negative effect on your children. But (there is always a but, right?) when they begin to decide for themselves what they want or want to do, all the best effort in the world does not guarantee they will make the perfect right decision every time. Or for that matter that they will make the bad decision every time. What little influence we have, we as parents should apply it to the good. That is just my opinion. BTW, for a moment I thought I was in a time warp, to the past. No flaming pages, no four letter invectives. Congrats to all, keep it up.