Play is not only our creative drive; it's a fundamental mode of learning.

Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do math. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.

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.

Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children academics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

Children in the 21st (century) have been transformed from net producers of their own toy and play culture, to net consumers of play culture imposed by adults.

Sigmund Freud was once asked to describe the characteristics of maturity, and he replied: lieben un arbeiten ("loving and working"). The mature adult is one who can love and allow himself or herself to be loved and who can work productively, meaningfully, and with satisfaction.