The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.

Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!

To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.

People talked about being a parent, or being a mother or a father. We don't talk about "wiving" our husbands or "friending" our friends, or "childing" our parents. We just talk about being in a relationship with those people. You don't measure whether your marriage was good based on whether or not your husband is better now than he was 10 years ago, or whether your friend is richer than when they first became your friend. The relationships between parents and children is a kind of love, rather than a kind of work.

Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it is hard to keep a healthy attitude toward it in our competitive, outcome-oriented society.