The "Petar Mandic" Endowment considers Nikola Tesla’s parents as a paradigm of successful parenting based on the Christian value system.

Milutin and Georgina Tesla - a model of successful parenting

Nikola Tesla's father, the Orthodox priest Milutin Tesla, was an exemplary man in his vocation. Throughout the then Military Frontier (an autonomous area within the Austrian Empire) he was known for his qualities of self-sacrifice, honesty, righteousness, diligence and charity.

Tesla’s mother Georgina (better known as Djuka) came from the priestly lineage of the Mandic family, which had inherited a Christian heritage for centuries. During her life, she showed a very high degree of motherly love, with which she managed to tear her son away even from the fatal vice of gambling.

The most beautiful personal qualities that we later see in Nikola Tesla are precisely the qualities that he inherited from his parents and thereby confirmed the basic rule of parenting: children do not learn by listening, but by watching.

Apart from a personal example of a virtuous life, Tesla's parents also influenced their son through practical methods. A striking example is the mental stimulation of his intellect performed in early childhood by father Milutin through various memory and association exercises. Tesla also wrote about this activity in his autobiography entitled My Inventions.

But far more important than mathematical and logical intelligence was emotional intelligence, which he developed in his childhood in a warm parental home where there was always mutual love and understanding. That is the basic lesson of the informal parenting school lesson that Tesla's parents can give to any parent today: children learn not by listening but by watching, and the basic thing they want from their parents is to respect and love each other.