Odors from decaying food wafting through the air when the door is opened, colorful mold growing between a wet gym uniform and thedamp carpet underneath, and the complete supply of bath towels scattered throughout the bedroom can become wonderful opportunities to help your teenager learn once again that the art of living in a community requires compromise, negotiation, and consensus.

The best time to start giving your children money is when they will no longer eat it. Basically, when they don't put it in their mouths, they can start putting it in their bank.

The greatest part of each day, each year, each lifetime is made up of small, seemingly insignificant moments. Those moments may becooking dinner...relaxing on the porch with your own thoughts after the kids are in bed, playing catch with a child before dinner, speaking out against a distasteful joke, driving to the recycling center with a week's newspapers. But they are not insignificant, especially when these moments are models for kids.

If we parents accept that problems are an essential part of life's challenges, rather than reacting to every problem as if something has gone wrong with the universe that's supposed to be perfect, we can demonstrate serenity and confidence in problem solving for our kids.By telling them that we know they have a problem and we know they can solve it, we can pass on a realistic attitude as well as empower our children with self-confidence and a sense of their own worth.

We need to encourage members of this next generation to become all that they can become, not try to force them to become what we want them to become. . . . You and I can't even begin to dream the dreams this next generation is going to dream, or answer the questions that will be put to them.

There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that's control our children's will--that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind.

Because they are children and for no other reason they have dignity and worth simply because they are.