Okay, so there's that pesky economy to fix, the educational system to support, wars to be ended, a national reputation to be restored ... Barack Obama has a lot on his agenda now that he has officially been sworn in as President. There's one task he had already taken on, however, even before yesterday's inauguration -- role model for millions of parents.

Parents have been enlisting the President's aid in their everyday dealings with their kids for weeks now. He certainly makes an effective "third party," according to one mom. "With kids," says Jill Miller Zimon, a mother of three, "lots of times when a child won't do something for you, you will ... pretend a third party said it was a good thing to do." It seems obvious to me that there's no way Barack Obama could have ever become president if he didn't eat his broccoli.

Obama also serves as an inspiration to kids who might not want to work as hard as they should. "I tell them all the time," says Avis Jones-DeWeever, a mother of two, "'You are brilliant, but brilliance necessitates hard work to get to the level he reached." I'm not sure how much that will help when your kids' goals are to be a train engineer or a princess, though.

Still, it never hurts to have an example of where hard work can get a kid.