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.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.

We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going to revise our knowledge and reshape their values. There's something very paradoxical and profound about being a parent as opposed to parenting. We put in all this effort and energy not so that we can shape a child of a particular sort, but so that all sorts of possibilities can happen in the future.

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.

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?"