What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone’s being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade.

How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose – and fearing that they will make us lose?

How we feel about our kids isn’t as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.

Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the “real world” is to experience success and joy. People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young.

The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable,” says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.

John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do ’resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.

You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don’t want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.

After all, if we want a child to grow into a genuinely compassionate person, then it’s not enough to know whether he just did something helpful. We’d want to know why.

Maximum difficulty isn’t the same as optimal difficulty.

The dominant problem with parenting in our society isn’t permissiveness, but the fear of permissiveness. We’re so worried about spoiling kids that we often end up over controlling them.