Teach Your Children

Nash wrote it in 1968 while he was in the Hollies, who never recorded it in the studio. Stills reshaped it for Deja Vu, replacing the Henry VIII style of Nash's demo with a country swing. Nash tied its message to Diane Arbus's 1962 photograph of a child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park. Jerry Garcia played the pedal steel, spliced together from separate pieces he recorded in the studio, and in return CSNY agreed to help the Grateful Dead with their vocal harmonies for Workingman's Dead and American Beauty.

The single reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970 and number eight in Canada. Billboard called it a smooth country-flavored ballad. In 1994 the trio re-recorded it with Suzy Bogguss, Alison Krauss and Kathy Mattea as The Red Hots for the benefit album Red Hot + Country, which spent a week on the country chart at number 75. On 30 July 2008 they sang it on The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert filling in for Young, and in 2025 Nash performed it with Dawes and Stills at a FireAid concert in Inglewood, California. CBS News listed it among 250 essential American songs in June 2026.