Stories We Tell Ourselves
"He said he had been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music, and at the very end... there was a dreadful screeching sound... He added, really quite emotionally, 'It ruined the whole experience.' But it hadn't. What it had ruined was the memory of the experience... He had had twenty minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing..." -- Daniel Kahneman, TED2010
Read MoreRespecting My Kids: Feelings
"Parents… fear that by giving a name to the feeling, they’ll make it worse. Just the opposite is true. The child who hears the words for what he [or she] is experiencing is deeply comforted. Someone has acknowledged his [or her] inner experience.” Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
Read MoreRespecting My Kids: The Case Against Spanking Children
“A person's a person, no matter how small.” Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!
"Elizabeth Gershoff... has been studying corporal punishment for 15 years, and is known as the leading researcher on spanking in the United States today... 'There's no study that I've ever done that's found a positive consequence of spanking,' Gershoff said." Sarah Kovac, CNN
To Risk or Not to Risk
"What did I know of life? I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? …Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival?" Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
I’m sitting at the computer, wondering how to get into this topic. The room is quiet. I glance at my phone, half hoping for a distracting text...
Respecting My Kids: Privacy
"She didn't have to go and tell that, thought Ramona, feeling that her mother had betrayed her by telling, as if it were funny... She still thought Chevrolet was a beautiful name, even though she was old enough to know that dolls were not usually named after cars." Beverly Cleary, Ramona and Her Mother