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.

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

Instead of just saying, "I love my baby and I pick him up because he's adorable and it's so nice to cuddle with him," we practice attachment parenting. We let our children play outside and have age-appropriate freedoms and are labeled free-range parents.

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.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.

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.