Learning to read and write makes little sense if you don't understand what you're reading and writing about. While we may have forgotten, most of our early learning came not from being explicitly taught but from experiencing. Kids aren't born knowing hard and soft, sweet and sour, red and green. When the child experiences those things, s/he transforms them into psychological understandings. When kids play with other kids, they learn about others and about themselves. Learning the basics of our physical and social reality is what early childhood is all about.

The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at anearly age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.

Taking the child's point of view demands good will, time, and effort on the part of parents. The child is the clear beneficiary. Parents who make the effort to understand their children's point of view are likely to treat children fairly and in an age-appropriate manner.

It makes little sense to spend a month teaching decimal fractions to fourth-grade pupils when they can be taught in a week, and better understood and retained, by sixth-grade students. Child-centeredness does not mean lack of rigor or standards; it does mean finding the best match between curricula and children's developing interests and abilities.

The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.

Honesty remains the best policy. If parents use alcohol in moderation in front of young children, that provides the right model. Drug use is more complex because even moderate use can have unforeseen consequences.

If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one's own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.