Children need both latitude of expression and firmly enforced limits on their behaviors, in a blend that results in calm, patientmanagement. The key to success is to tailor the rearing environment to the developmental level of the child--what she or he can handle--and to individual differences among children.

Fortunately for common sense, psychological research has shown that babies with more than one attachment are less distressed whenmother leaves to go to work. They are more content and playful in the presence of other adults, meaning that they feel secure with people other than Mother.

Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own right are a socially defined malaise, notan individual problem.... The conflict is not between being a mother and having a career; it is between nineteenth-century ideas about children and today's ideas about women.

Parents sometimes think of newborns as helpless creatures, but in fact parents' behavior is much more under the infant's control than the reverse. Does he come running when you cry?

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.

Given Freudian assumptions about the nature of children and the biological predestination of mothers, it is unthinkable for mothers voluntarily to leave their babies in others' care, without guilt about the baby's well-being and a sense of self-deprivation. Mothers need their babies for their own mental health, and babies need their mothers for their mental health--a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship.