Who nu? The Talmud provides good parenting advice. This from the New York Times:

In the third century, the rabbis who put together the Talmud
instructed fathers to teach their sons to swim. It’s safe to say that
most American Jews aren’t familiar with this directive, whether or not
they take their kids to the lake or the pool. But one morning this past
summer, a group of mostly non-Jewish parents puzzled over its meaning
in a classroom at the Carolina Day School, a nonsectarian private
school in Asheville, N.C.

These mothers and fathers were
accidental students of Judaism. They had come together because they
often felt flattened by achieving the modern ideal of successful
children. They were seeking relief in a weeklong course based on the
book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise
Self-Reliant Children,” by a

Los Angeles

clinical psychologist named Wendy Mogel.

Genevieve Fortuna, a 58-year-old former preschool teacher who
has been teaching classes on raising children for 30 years, wrote the
Talmudic quote about swimming in blue marker on the classroom’s white
board. The half-dozen or so parents, dressed in summer-casual shorts
and sandals, looked up at her from their seats around two
child’s-height tables. Fortuna opened her copy of Mogel’s book. “Jewish
wisdom holds that our children don’t belong to us,” she read. “They are
both a loan and a gift from God, and the gift has strings attached. Our
job is to raise our children to leave us. The children’s job is to find
their own path in life. If they stay carefully protected in the nest of
the family, children will become weak and fearful or feel too
comfortable to want to leave.”

Photo from Flickr: flickr.com/photos/35074897@N00/257203165/