Quotes from Ellen Galinsky

If you never allow your children to exceed what they can do, how are they ever going to manage adult life - where a lot of it is managing more than you thought you could manage?

There's a basic mechanism for learning: [when] we find something interesting to us, we try to control it, we try to make it happen again, we try to change it, or we try to manipulate it. You see very early in babies—that they're trying to reproduce interesting things; take control of interesting things. In a lot of our schools, the teacher tells us what we have to know, and then we repeat it. That's not very interesting.

Ultimately, they found that for babies younger than six months, there's a three-to-one ratio—they can differentiate between four and twelve; for six-month-olds there's a two-to-one ratio (babies can differentiate between eight and sixteen or between sixteen and thirty-two); and with nine-montholds, it's a smaller ratio—differences of eight and twelve. Spelke

Robert Siegler of Carnegie Mellon University has

When children get older, they can come up with solutions for dealing with other stresses, such as what will help them if they get upset before a test or when going to a new place. If they're asked in a calm moment, and if they know you'll take their ideas seriously, most children have creative solutions for managing their own challenges.

children, especially as they get older, should be increasingly involved in coming up with solutions for facing challenges.

Rather than praising their personalities or intelligence ("You are so smart" or "artistic" or "athletic"), criticizing them ("You are so stupid" or "uncoordinated"), or attributing their accomplishments to luck, we can praise their efforts or strategies.

mothers (mothers were more likely to be the focus of studies than fathers in that era) who helped the older child understand the baby by saying things like "The baby is crying. Why do you think he's crying? Do you think he's hungry or needs his diaper changed? Let's try to feed him and see if he stops crying" had children who were more likely to fight less and get along better as they grew up.

To promote children's curiosity, be careful not to jump in too quickly to fix things they're struggling with, since working with the "confounding" situation is where critical thinking is promoted. Instead, where possible, help them figure out how they can resolve it for themselves.

Mothers, [fathers, and other caregivers] who are attentive to their children's gestures have children who pick up words a little faster.

The way [we conduct naming experiments is] to show the child two pictures, [for example, of] a baby and a doggie. You ask, "Where's the baby?" Or "Where's the doggie?" However, if [you] change the sentence a little bit and you say, "There's a ball over there," and put [the word "ball"] in the middle instead of at the end [of the sentence], they fall apart completely. They can't get it. Fernald

social referencing,

For example, in the Marshmallow Test, a classic study conducted by Walter Mischel of Columbia University, when children were given a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, some could wait for the larger treat and some just couldn't. Those who could wait were more likely to do better in many ways as they grew up, including pursuing their academic and personal goals with less frustration and distraction.

It gives us more flexibility, so we can do more, but it also creates the expectation of the instant response. It can take away your sense of control over your time.