Our children are counting on us to provide two things: consistency and structure. Children need parents who say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they are going to do.

If kids come to us from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come to us from strong, healthy, functioning families, it makes our job more important.

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.

The beauty of empowering others is that your own power is not diminished in the process.

Our goal as a parent is to give life to our children's learning--to instruct, to teach, to help them develop self-discipline--an ordering of the self from the inside, not imposition from the outside. Any technique that does not give life to a child's learning and leave a child's dignity intact cannot be called discipline--it is punishment, no matter what language it is clothed in.

Our children are counting on us to provide two things: consistency and structure. Children need parents who say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they are going to do.