Mencius's mother moves house.
She lived near a cemetery and the boy played at funerals; near a market and he played at trading; she moved next to a school and he played at ritual, and there she stayed. Later, when he came home from lessons early, she cut her half-finished weaving off the loom and asked him how this was different.
The story of Mencius's mother comes from Liu Xiang's Biographies of Exemplary Women in the first century BCE, some two centuries after Mencius, and it is one of the most widely known didactic stories in East Asia. In the first part she moves house three times: living near a cemetery, the boy imitates funerals; near a market, he imitates traders; beside a school, he imitates ritual and study, and she settles. The four-character phrase for it is ordinary Chinese for the importance of environment on a child. In the second part, when he returns from his lessons before finishing, she takes a knife and cuts the half-woven cloth from her loom, asking how abandoning his studies differs from what she has just done to a month's work. The stories function as the canonical statement of maternal responsibility for a son's education, and they are quoted approvingly in East Asian discussion of education to this day, including in arguments about the intensity of the parenting they encourage.
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