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.

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.

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.

Given the choice, children who don't want for anything will not save... We have an obligation as parents to give our children what they need. What they want we can give them as a special gift, or they can save their money for it.

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.

There is no problem so great it cannot be solved.

There's no problem so great it can't be solved. If it can't be solved, it's not a problem, it's reality.