Our brain comes hard-wired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability. A child's play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers, but always come through whole. Play offers a child a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonment, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery.

Our brain comes hard-wired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability. A child's play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers, but always come through whole. Play offers a child a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonment, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery.

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily, it is soon forgotten.

Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.

It is difficult to spread the contagion of excitement without having a sense of purpose and direction.