I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.

A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.

Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon--the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.