Even if you find yourself in a heated exchange with your toddler, it is better for your child to feel the heat rather than for himto feel you withdraw emotionally.... Active and emotional involvement between parent and child helps the child make the limits a part of himself.

A new world of complex relationships and feelings opens up when the peer group takes its place alongside the family as the emotional focus of the child's life. Early peer relationships contribute significantly to the child's ability to participate in a group (and in that sense, society), deal with competition and disappointment, enjoy the intimacy of friendships, and intuitively understand social relationships as they play out at school, in the neighborhood, and later in the workplace and adult family.

If your child is going to develop a healthy personality with the capacity to remain intact and grow, she must learn how to test reality, regulate her impulses, stabilize her moods, integrate her feelings and actions, focus her concentration and plan.

To be motivated to sit at home and study, instead of going out and playing, children need a sense of themselves over time--they need to be able to picture themselves in the future.... If they can't, then they're simply reacting to daily events, responding to the needs of the moment--for pleasure, for affiliation, for acceptance.

If you do a little bit of looking at books with your children and inspire them to be curious about the pictures and ... what the word means, but don't get into very structured systematic teaching at too early an age, and you also interact emotionally and have fun with pretend play ... then you have the best of both worlds.

Although pretend play is important, it is still the means to an end, not the end itself. Do not make the mistake of thinking a contrived, pretend drama can substitute for real interpersonal comfort in dealing with important emotional issues.

Good discipline is more than just punishing or laying down the law. It is liking children and letting them see that they are liked. It is caring enough about them to provide good, clear rules for their protection.