The power we have lost is the power to command our children’s attention, to solicit their good intentions, to evoke their deference and secure their cooperation. Without these four abilities, all we have left is coercion or bribery.

For a child to be open to being parented by an adult, he must be actively attaching to that adult, be wanting contact and closeness with him.

Even with one’s own children the natural parenting authority can become lost if the context for it becomes eroded.

Quite innocently but with devastating effects, children are involved in attachment affairs with each other.

The reassuring, consistent presence of grandparents and aunts and uncles, the protective embrace of the multigenerational family, is something few children nowadays are able to enjoy.

It would be obvious to everyone that, in the context of adult interaction, you’re dealing not with a behavior problem but a relationship problem. And probably the first suspicion to arise would be that your partner was having an affair.

secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child.

The two ways of knowing—to know about and to experience intimately—must come together.

reclaim our proper role as their nurturers and mentors. In Part 4 of this book we present a detailed program for keeping our kids close to us until they mature, and for reestablishing the relationship if it has been weakened or lost.