Quotes from Gary Ezzo

Prepare Your Child for the Road, Not the Road for Your Child

Common observation confirms that a mobile, exploring toddler learns faster and more efficiently than the child whose feet never leave the couch and whose eyes never leave the T.V. screen.

Obedience is required conformity. Responsibility is voluntary conformity. Obedience is submission to a person. Responsibility is submission to a principle.

From the earliest age, children sense your attitude. If you approach their care as a burden or drudgery, your children will respond in a burdensome way, and you will experience drudgery. Instead, see each day as an adventure and know that each stage of your children's development is precious.

While the difference here might appear minor, over the life of your child, negative and positive words have a cumulative effect, because such words shape a child's outlook about self, others, and about life. Learn to speak life to your pretoddler by instructing in what you want him to do instead of what you do not want him to do.

This can be accomplished by observing

We have counseled many couples that started their journey in parenting with high hopes and the best intentions to love and nurture their newborns, only to see their dreams reduced to a nightmare of survival.

healthy, full-term babies are born with the capacity to achieve 7-8 hours of continuous nighttime sleep between seven and ten weeks of age and 10 to 12 hours of sleep by twelve weeks of age.

As a parent, you can't completely avoid making mistakes. Accept it.

hour in a twenty-four hour period. If you find your child is

When Mom consistently works with her baby to take a full feeding, it eventually leads to productive waketimes. A good waketime impacts nap time and a good napper is a better feeder. As the quality of each activity deepens, it facilitates healthy nighttime sleep.

Society depends on parents to instill in their children a healthy sense of self-restriction, and that is not as hard as some people make it out to be.

child's life has greater and more lasting significance than

While facts can provide a plan, only understanding can provide the purpose. What is understanding, and why is it important?

At birth, a child has no functioning conscience, nor does a baby or pretoddler have the reasoning capacity to grasp right and wrong, good and evil. That does not mean parents should delay introducing required and acceptable behavior. For example, the fact that a child has no moral understanding of why food should not be intentionally dropped from his highchair does not mean parents should hold back instruction or fail to discourage the behavior.