Teach This to Your Kids

TRUST: We are in a crisis of trust the world over. Parents are afraid, and that makes our children afraid — to be who they are, to take risks, to stand up against injustice. Trust has to start with us. When we’re confident in the choices we make as parents, we can then trust our children to take important and necessary steps toward empowerment and

Children won’t take in what you tell them until it makes sense to them. Other people don’t simply shape what children do; parents aren’t the programmers. Instead, they seem designed to provide just the right sort of information at just the right time to help the children reprogram themselves.

I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking.

Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them. Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they're a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake.

A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.