Other people--grandparents, sisters and brothers, the mother's best friend, the next-door neighbor--get to be familiar to the baby. If the mother communicates her trust in these people, the baby will regard them as delicious novelties. Anybody the mother trusts whom the baby sees often enough partakes a bit of the presence of the mother.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

The toddler must say no in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says no to assert who she is not.

Other people--grandparents, sisters and brothers, the mother's best friend, the next-door neighbor--get to be familiar to the baby. If the mother communicates her trust in these people, the baby will regard them as delicious novelties. Anybody the mother trusts whom the baby sees often enough partakes a bit of the presence of the mother.

The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.

As he walks away on his own two feet--the toddler's body-mind has reached its moment of perfection. The world is his and he the mighty conqueror of all he beholds.... As long as mother sticks around in the wings, the mighty acrobat confidently performs his trick of twirling in circles, walking on tiptoe, jumping, climbing, staring, naming. He is joyous, filled with his grandeur and wondrous omnipotence.

When a child becomes an adult . . . the elders are fearful. And for good reason . . . not we but they are the germinators of future generations. Will they leave us behind as we did our parents? Consign us to neatly paved retirement villages? Trample us in the dust as they go flying out to their new galaxies? We had better tie them down, flagellate them, isolate them in the family cocoon, . . . indoctrinate them into the tribal laws and make sure they kneel before the power of the elders.