Children do not simply grow up; they have to be educated in order to become decent adults. This belief inspired sermons, manuals on marriage and the family, belles-lettres, and, last but not least, genre painting in seventeenth-century Holland. This article examines this belief in the necessity of education by focusing on this last genre. Attention is directed at the power of images containing idealized educational messages for parents, and not at the reality of families and child-rearing. Significantly these paintings show that the Dutch portrayal of children was less a celebration of childhood as a unique stage of life than an attempt to show adults how children could be molded and shaped through a variety of educative processes.