The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.
When a child hits a child, we call it aggression. When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility. When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault. When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.
If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.
While parents possess the original key to their offspring’s experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.
Treat a child as though he already is the person he’s capable of becoming.
Parenthood is an endless series of small events, periodic conflicts, and sudden crises which call for a response. The response is not without consequence: it affects personality for better or for worse.
Responsibility is fostered by allowing children a voice and wherever indicated a choice in matters that affect them.
Only if a child feels right can he think right.
A modern teacher educates children to value their emotions.
Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn’t have anything to do with it.
Adolescence can be a time of turmoil and turbulence, of stress and storm. Rebellion against authority and against convention is to be expected and tolerated for the sake of learning and growth.
To be himself, one neeeds to be free from the pressure of evaluative praise.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.
Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other – on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other.
Many teenagers are tormented by terrors they deem private and personal. They do not know that their anxieties and doubts are universal.
Wise parents know that fighting a teenager, like fighting a riptide, is inviting doom.
Teenagers crave independence. The more self-suf-ficient we make them feel, the less hostile they are toward us.
Each of us carries within himself a collection of instant insults.