Sublime

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell ch

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.

Children need a balance of nurture and structure, and so do adults. In the process of learning to provide for our children, we need to learn better nurture and structure skills for ourselves as well.

Since children are less developed intellectually, we sometimes give them only a portion of our attention, believing that will satisfy their needs. We read a few paragraphs about the Middle East in a news magazine and then look up to say, “Oh, you’re building a castle. That’s nice.” Then we jump back around the globe. The divided mind becomes a mode

What is required of parents is not perfection but attention, a willingness to learn and relearn, repeatedly—what each child individually needs, and needs from us, in order to blossom and thrive.