When children feel understood, their loneliness and hurt diminish. When children are understood, their love for their parent is deepened. A parent's sympathy serves as emotional first aid for bruised feelings. When we genuinely acknowledge a child's plight and voice her disappointment, she often gathers the strength to face reality.

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.

Treat a child as though he already is the person he's capable of becoming.

To be himself, one neeeds to be free from the pressure of evaluative praise

While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.