Empathy comes from being empathized with.

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.

Empathy comes from being empathized with.

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.

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.

Attention, learning, and problem solving depend in part on the ability to plan and sequence actions and ideas. The Interactive Metronome(R) helps individuals systematically exercise and often improve basic motor planning and sequencing capacities.

We need to take a less narrow look at our children’s problems and, instead, see them as windows of opportunity—a way of exploring and understanding all facets of our children’s development. If we can understand the underlying developmental process, we can see a child’s struggles as signs of striving toward growth instead of chronic problems or attempts to aggravate adults.