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I haven't met one parent or one teacher in Missouri who thinks we should balance the budget by taking money from kids' classrooms.

The government gets it right on Head Start. We are providing opportunities for children in underserved areas where parents may not be able to afford preschool so they can begin their schooling with a running or Head Start.

In a time of tight budgets, difficult choices have to be made. We must make sure our very limited resources are spent on priorities. I believe we should have no higher priority than investing in our children's classrooms and in their future.

I have young kids. The fiscal burden that will be imposed on them is going to depend primarily on whether we tackle this looming problem in our health care system - with rising costs that don't seem, by the way, to be necessarily associated with higher quality. That is the key burden that they will face.

We've got to protect the nursery schools. I'm chair of governors in a nursery school in my area. If we lost the provision, I'd be worried about the socialising skills of children.

Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.

I'm not advocating spending less on the elderly, but I am strongly advocating spending more on kids while also putting the country on a sound, long-term fiscal trajectory. To do that, we have to reduce the rate of growth of entitlement-related expenditures and add more revenues.

We need to increase education budgets.

We build schools and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised.

This is the other thing: we make the cost of raising kids higher than it has to be just because we feel they need all this stuff, like gadgets, certain schools, and activities that are nice but aren't really necessary.