Your Father's Day speech was, to me, as important as any you've given. You outlined the duties of a parent: Responsibility-starting with yourself and extending to your family, your community, and your country. Aspiration-doing your best and teaching your children to do their best. And perhaps most important, empathy-caring about and for your spouse, children, neighbors, and countrymen. If we don't teach our children empathy, we will have a generation of people who don't care about anybody else.

That message seemed to be at the heart of your campaign: empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and aspiration. Those were the values, spoken or implicit, behind every speech, and I assume they will be the values that inspire your administration, because they are the values on which American democracy rests.

From my knowledge of child development, I think you got it just right. But that is not what is presently taught about parenting in America. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now spent on parenting movements of the opposite sort. The James Dobsons and Dr. Lauras and right-wing fatherhood movements teach a very different, and ultimately harmful, approach to parenting: one based on absolute authority and obedience, painful physical punishment, individual (not social) responsibility, and a lack of empathy for those unlike you. Studies have shown that such parenting has harmful effects in many arenas, starting with spousal and child abuse, and various other forms of violence, as well as the association of masculinity with the use of force.

It would cost hardly anything at all to set up a Presidential Commission on Parenting and its Effects, charged with reviewing the research on forms of parenting, their effects on children and others, bringing together parenting groups that are beneficial to children, planning a White House conference, and producing educational materials. An additional possibility would be to have a parenting section in Health and Human Services, with a relatively small but high-quality staff, coordinating with the commission and implementing its recommendations.

It would seem that these would fall under what you have called "no-brainers"-very inexpensive initiatives in the public interest with broad effects that can be done with a stroke of the pen, with as little or as much fanfare as you think is prudent.

Ultimately, there could be major political and economic effects. My own research suggests that the ideas behind strict, authoritarian parenting map directly onto the ideology that governed the Bush administration-religious fundamentalism, market fundamentalism, militarism, and authoritarianism in government (the unitary executive), just as your parenting vision of responsibility, aspiration, and empathy govern your own view of what American democracy should, and can, be.

You have the opportunity to achieve a lot at very little expense.

George Lakoff is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.