All we know is that the school achievement, IQ test score, and emotional and social development of working mothers' children are every bit as good as that of children whose mothers do not work.

Children thrive in a variety of family forms; they develop normally with single parents, with unmarried parents, with multiple caretakers in a communal setting, and with traditional two-parent families. What children require is loving and attentive adults, not a particular family type.

Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish).

Mothers and fathers act in mostly similar ways toward their young children. Psychologists are still highlighting small differencesrather than the overwhelming similarities in parents' behaviors. I think this is a hangover from the 1950s re-emergence of father as a parent. He has to be special. The best summary of the evidence on mothers and fathers with their babies is that young children of both sexes, in most circumstances, like both parents equally well. Fathers, like mothers, are good parents first and gender representatives second.

Children are just different from one another, especially in temperament. Some are shy, others bold; some active, others quiet; some confident, others less so. Respect for individual differences is in my view the cornerstone of good parent-child relationships.

Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider

Some television programs are made very attractive to young children by presenting short, rapidly moving sequences and ever-changing episodes.... Some experts now argue that slower- paced television fare that allows children time to think about the material is more valuable than the faster-paced programs that merely capture their attention.