You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

A child... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion.

The question for the child is not Do I want to be good? but Whom do I want to be like?

What children learn from punishment is that might makes right. When they are old and strong enough, they will try to get their ownback; thus many children punish their parents by acting in ways distressing to them.

As the creative adult needs to toy with ideas, the child, to form his ideas, needs toys--and plenty of leisure and scope to play with them as he likes, and not just the way adults think proper. This is why he must be given this freedom for his play to be successful and truly serve him well.

Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.

From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world--what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.