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).

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.

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.

Babies need social interactions with loving adults who talk with them, listen to their babblings, name objects for them, and give them opportunities to explore their worlds.

Parents ought to feel more comfortable about the care of their children than some experts would seem to permit. If children were so fragile and parenting so difficult to learn, where would we all be as adults?

Mothers have not always had the most important role in their children's upbringing, when they had other economic roles to play. Inpast centuries, fathers were the key parent in the upbringing of the next generation, because moral training, not emotional sensitivity, was thought to be central to successful child-rearing. Mothers were thought to corrupt their little ones with too much affection and not enough stern training.

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.