Quotes from Richard Weissbourd

Not infrequently, parents fail to help children grasp their responsibility for a community. Often we as parents don't convey to our children that they have obligations to small communities like a sports team or a school choir or a dance troupe. How many of us ever simply mention to our children that a school is not just a place to learn but a community, or that a neighborhood is a community that carries obligations?

Rather than focusing narrowly on the dangers of peer pressure, adults should ask themselves whether they are helping children find causes and commitments that are larger than the self that are worth sacrificing for.

A high school English teacher who has been teaching for thirty years recently said to me, "My students today are nice and they're smart, but they can't engage suffering in any way. I try to teach them King Lear, or 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' and they just don't want to think about real pain.

It came to me pretty suddenly one day that parenting is a moral task," a Chicago parent starkly put it, "that the principle of being a mother of a child who is a good person is more important than how much my kids like me or how happy they are in the moment. If my kids were going to be good people, I realized that I couldn't go to them all the time if they cried or always be a fixer or problem solver, that I had to make real demands on them.

Similarly, when we as parents get in the habit of doing small things to make our children's lives easier—when we clean up after them, drive them places that they could walk to, fill out applications for our teenagers, pay teenagers' parking tickets, or regularly jump in to solve children's problems with peers, teachers, or coaches—we run the risk of making our children more fragile, entitled, and self-occupied.

all this work to buttress self-esteem and happiness not only makes children less capable of moral action—more self-occupied, less able to invest in others, more fragile, and less able to stand up for important values—but more likely to fret about their attractiveness, competence, or importance to others, more prone to worry and unhappiness.

Psychologist and author Wendy Mogel urges parents to stick to a twenty-minute rule—spend no more than twenty minutes a day "thinking about your child's education or worrying about your child, period." Except in those cases when a child is having a significant academic or emotional problem, that's a good rule.