The middle years are ones in which children increasingly face conflicts on their own,... One of the truths to be faced by parentsduring this period is that they cannot do the work of living and relating for their children. They can be sounding boards and they can probe with the children the consequences of alternative actions.

The middle years are ones in which children increasingly face conflicts on their own,... One of the truths to be faced by parentsduring this period is that they cannot do the work of living and relating for their children. They can be sounding boards and they can probe with the children the consequences of alternative actions.

Children of the middle years do not do their learning unaffected by attendant feelings of interest, boredom, success, failure, chagrin, joy, humiliation, pleasure, distress and delight. They are whole children responding in a total way, and what they feel is a constant factor that can be constructive or destructive in any learning situation.

Children of eight and nine who love their mothers dearly will cross to the other side of the street when they see her coming, if they happen to be with friends, because to greet or be greeted by their mothers in the presence of peers is to acknowledge having been (and perhaps still being) a baby.

Parents can offer their help by suggesting and locating resources likely to be unfamiliar to children, such as people, books, andmaterials that can be useful.

The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-childrelationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.

Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.