Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape.

I think, at the end of the century we'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have had the deep satisfactions of being parents and being children in the way that they might have and are going to spend a lot of time fretting and worrying and being hovered over for nothing. The question isn't so much "What will happen in the long run?" but "What's happening to people's lives right now?"

Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

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.

You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.