Sublime

If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, seek new strategies, and keep on learning.

I once read a beautiful teaching attributed simply to “a modern educator.” It read: “Try to see your child as a seed that came in a packet without a label. Your job is to provide the right environment and nutrients and to pull the weeds. You can’t decide what kind of flower you’ll get or in which season it will bloom.”

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

She teaches her child how to get along with others, how to make good decisions, and how to manage time, meet responsibilities, and pursue goals.

your main focus should be on short-circuiting arguments, letting go of your wish to reach consensus, and taking advantage of opportunities to let your child practice honoring you.

the prohibition against startling another person.

Growing up – and the lesson of the ‘good-enough’ parent – is in part a process of learning that our own desires are not the centre of anyone else’s world. We can be needy and manipulative, bullying or seducing others into pandering to us, but we should expect to be resented for it. Where our behaviour is positive and less self-centred, though, some