The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center - the central actor - in his own activity.

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded.

The father receives his power from God (and from his own father). The teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.

Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.

The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.

The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center - the central actor - in his own activity.

someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.