The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

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?"

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

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

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.

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