Quotes About Understanding

it's common for adults to be incorrect in their assumptions about what's making it hard for a child to meet an expectation. If you enter the Empathy step quite certain that you already know his concern, you're at risk for perfunctory drilling and/or for steering the ship toward a predetermined destination. But

But whether a child's concerning behavior is lucky or unlucky, it's communicating the exact same thing: I'm stuck . . . there's an expectation I'm having difficulty meeting.

Some educators believe that the expertise necessary for understanding and helping behaviorally challenging students is well beyond their grasp. Not true.

Other parents feel that lagging skills are too negative. Those lagging skills don't diminish your child's many positive attributes, but they do explain why your child has been responding to problems and frustrations so maladaptively. And, compared to many of the other things that have been said about your child, perhaps accurate is more apt.

Your child is lacking skills, not motivation.

Moreover, there are many kids who can't think of any solutions at all. So, the problem remains unsolved. And the concerning behaviors being caused by that problem persist. Difficulty expressing concerns, needs, or thoughts in words

if her concerning behavior is instead communicating that she's having difficulty meeting a particular expectation, then simply ignoring the behavior will cause us to miss the boat on what's really getting in the way.

kids do well if they can.

He's not motivated. If it's true that kids do well if they can, then the kid is already motivated and needs something else from us besides rewards and punishments. Remember, if the kid could do well he would do well, so poor motivation is unlikely to be what is truly keeping him from doing well. Rewards and punishments don't teach lagging thinking skills and don't solve the problems that precipitate challenging episodes.

The vast majority of kids I've worked with over the years had already endured more than their fair share of consequences. If all those consequences were going to work, they would have worked a long time ago.

We are like an only child who in growing up realizes that the world does not revolve only around himself, as he thought when little," Rovelli writes. "Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.

It seems to me that you can't decide to like a person based on their personal circumstances. It seems to me that sometimes you can like a person because of who they are, despite their personal circumstances.

Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.

If a cat spoke, it would say things like 'Hey, I don't see the problem here.

People don't necessarily want or need to be done unto as you would have them do unto you. They want to be done unto as they want to be done unto

The greatest motivational act one person can do for another is to listen.

There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom: knowledge is information; wisdom is knowing how to use it.

We've seen parents successfully use a variant of this approach when an infant cries to be fed. Instead of immediately feeding the crying child, the mother lets the child know that the signal has been received but then waits for her or him to quiet down before offering the breast or the bottle. Again, it's hard to ignore the cries at first, and we realize that to some parents it sounds too cruel to even try. But

The challenge of this book is to understand how perpetrators come to do things that others see as evil.

Just as Saint Augustine recognized that sin begins as an intention, we profilers saw that violent sexual crimes originate in fantasy. Our next challenge was to understand why certain individuals allowed their fantasies to lead them to cross the normal bounds of acceptable behavior. To do that, we had to examine their motivations.

I believe that what we call intuition is simply stored and forgotten experiences that the conscious mind somehow can instantaneously retrieve, combine, and process in a way that, superficially at least, seems miraculous or preternatural.

We teach what we need to learn.

Please excuse this slow-witted talabeh, who will have to read the text and the margins several times to make sure he gets today's lesson right.

Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight.