We cannot spare our children the influence of harmful values by turning off the television any more than we can keep them home forever or revamp the world before they get there. Merely keeping them in the dark is no protection and, in fact, can make them vulnerable and immature.

The gain is not the having of children; it is the discovery of love and how to be loving.

Especially with our first child, we tend to take too much responsibility--both credit and blame--for everything. The more we wantto be good parents, the more we tend to see ourselves as making or breaking our children.

Parenthood always comes as a shock. Postpartum blues? Postpartum panic is more like it. We set out to have a baby; what we get is a total take-over of our lives.

A sense of worthiness is a child's most important need.

More than what we say or do, the way we are expresses what we think it means to be alive. So the articulate parent is less a telling than a listening individual.

Suddenly we have a baby who poops and cries, and we are trying to calm, clean up, and pin things together all at once. Then as fast as we learn to cope--so soon--it is hard to recall why diapers ever seemed so important. The frontiers change, and now perhaps we have a teenager we can't reach.