Quotes About Children

This has to be what we teach our children: how to evaluate the hordes of information that are out there, to discern what is true and what is not, to identify biases and half-truths, and to know how to be critical, independent thinkers.

Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people's feelings more fully.

It's also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child's feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It's vital that we treat them as such in our response.

As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children. Another

Effective discipline means that we're not only stopping a bad behavior or promoting a good one, but also teaching skills and nurturing the connections in our children's brains that will help them make better decisions and handle themselves well in the future.

As children develop, their brains "mirror" their parent's brain. In other words, the parent's own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child's brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children.

Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children's pain or make things worse. Actually, telling the story is often exactly what children need, both to make sense of the event and to move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened.

There's no question about it: consistency is crucial when it comes to raising and disciplining our children.

Part of truly loving our kids, and giving them what they need, means offering them clear and consistent boundaries, creating predictable structure in their lives, as well as having high expectations for them.

When your children are feeling upset, a loving touch can calm things down and help you connect, even during moments of high stress.

We want our kids to expect that their needs can be understood and consistently met. But we don't want our kids to expect that their desires and whims will always be met.

Remember, there are plenty of ways to spoil children—by giving them too many things, by rescuing them from every challenge, by never allowing them to deal with defeat and disappointment—but we can never spoil them by giving them too much of our love and attention. That's what the connection

The absence of limits and boundaries is actually quite stressful, and stressed kids are more reactive.

connection calms the nervous system, soothing children's reactivity in the moment and moving them toward a place where they can hear us, learn, and even make their own Whole-Brain decisions. When the emotional gauge gets turned up, connection is the modulator that keeps the feelings from getting too high. Without connection, emotions can continue to spiral out of control.

Connection is about walking through the hard times with our children and being there for them when they're emotionally suffering, just like we would if they scraped their knee and were physically suffering.

children whose parents talk with them about their experiences tend to have better access to the memories of those experiences. Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people's feelings more fully. Shy children whose parents nurture a sense of courage by offering supportive explorations of the world tend to lose their behavioral inhibition,

Fear and punishment can be effective in the moment, but they don't work over the long term. And are fear, punishment, and drama really what we want to use as primary motivators of our children? If so, we teach that power and control are the best tools to get others to do what we want them to do.

So the more we give our kids practice at considering how someone else feels or experiences a situation, the more empathic and caring they will become.

And our disciplinary decisions go a long way toward determining how strong those connections are. The way we interact with our kids when they're upset significantly affects how their brains develop, and therefore what kind of people they are, both today and in the years to come.

One reason big feelings can be so uncomfortable for small children is that they don't view those emotions as temporary.

When we set limits, we help develop the parts of the upstairs brain that allow children to control themselves and regulate their behaviors and their body.

How we treat our children changes who they are and how they will develop. Their brains need our parental involvement. Nature needs nurture.

That's a direct lesson every parent should consider quite deeply: do we want to teach our kids that the way to resolve a conflict is to inflict physical pain, particularly on someone who is defenseless and cannot fight back?

we can use these opportunities to realize that at these moments, logic isn't our primary vehicle for bringing some sort of sanity to the conversation. (Seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?) It's also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child's feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It's vital that we treat them as such in our response.