Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.

A young apprentice applied to a master carpenter for a job. The older man asked him, "Do you know your trade?" "Yes, sir!" the young man replied proudly. "Have you ever made a mistake?" the older man inquired. "No, sir!" the young man answered, feeling certain he would get the job. "Then there's no way I'm going to hire you," said the master carpenter, "because when you make one, you won't know how to fix it.

All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

[I]f we can bring our children understanding, comfort, and hopefulness when they need this kind of support, then they are more likely to grow into adults who can find these resources within themselves later on. (from the introduction)

We all have only one life to live on Earth, and through television we have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways.

Parents don't come full bloom at the birth of the first baby. In fact parenting is about growing. It's about our own growing as much as it is about our children's growing and that kind of growing happens little by little.

Children long to know that they are lovable. And there are ways that technology can help with that. But ultimately it's their relationships with their parents, their grandparents, their peers, and their teachers that help them to know that for sure. A child can learn the word "hug" and the letters h-u-g through a computer, but a computer can never give the child a hug.