Quotes About Growth

clear that she and her daughter were two separate people with very different life experiences, decide how much of her history to share with her daughter, and, finally, commit to changing her own behavior.

Kids who learn early in life that they're capable of mastering activities that at first feel a little stressful grow up better able to handle stress of all kinds.

All of us have days when all our emotional resources are at our disposal and days when we feel depleted; we are all people in addition to being parents. Perfect is not something parents are, nor something they should strive to be. Striving for perfection is bound to end in disappointment and often in depression. We do, however, want to be the best parent we can be and we don't want to have our histories necessarily dictate our parenting skills or choices.

Children need work experiences to develop a sense that success is a function of their own efforts.

We are never free of our past, but we can be free of its unwanted intrusion into our relationship with our children and the ways in which we choose to parent. Being a parent gives us the extraordinary opportunity for a "do-over." Once again we are in a parent-child relationship, but this time we hold the cards. We can use the best of what we learned from our own parents and change the things that were out of synch or hurtful. This time around, we get to choose.

the basis of all true learning.

Kids start out meeting the world with wonder. It is our job to make sure that they don't lose their inborn curiosity, imagination, and creativity.

Our job is to produce and guide our children; not to reproduce ourselves. Nor should we want to. One of the absolute miracles of life is the profound uniqueness of each person.

I also know two steps forward and one step back is the rule, not the exception, as people work on change.

Temperament has been shown to be extremely stable over the course of our lives. 10 This can be hard to appreciate when our kids are in the middle of this period of intense exploration and when change and heightened self-consciousness seem to be their perpetual companions.

We should be encouraging our children to push themselves, to develop their talents and passions, but we should also be aware that the bromide "You can do anything" is wishful thinking.

When you allow your child to palm off responsibility you encourage the idea that someone else is responsible both for the problem and for fixing it. This attitude is bound to make your child less competent and therefore lower his self-esteem. Even when others have a hand in your child's distress, which will happen, teach your child to take responsibility for his own life.

If thirty years of being a psychologist has taught me anything, it is that it is much easier to talk about things than to change them.

Being human means being vulnerable but it also means having the capacity to modify our responses and to make different choices.

Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

I stepped into those woods and my life began.

Little by little I began to listen better: to the sap moving in the plants, to the blood in my veins. I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.

Transformation touched only bodies, not minds.

With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

I found a new thought in myself. I am embarrassed to tell it, so rudimentary it seems, like an infant's discovery that her hand is her own. But that is what I was then, an infant. The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

Too late, I thought. Too late for all the things I should have known. I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one.

I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself.

It was so simple. If you want it, I will do it. If it would make you happy, I will go with you. Is there a moment that a heart cracks? But a cracked heart was not enough, and I had grown wise enough to know it.