The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.

We know that kids who grow up in an environment of warmth and support will thrive and function in whatever environment they find themselves. What we need to do is to do more to help poor kids have such an environment.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

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

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.

All of us gardeners know that nothing comes out the way you planned. It's a different garden every year, and it's always sort of different from what you were thinking when you began. What it really means to be a good gardener is to work hard to produce an ecosystem that will have enough diversity, enough possibilities, so it's robust, and it's resilient, and it can change when the seasons change. And that kind of robust, unexpected, variable, messy system - that's what you want to create when you're having children, too.