Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.

Doubt is the brother of shame.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

If life is to be sustained, hope must remain.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.