No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.

Development, it turns out, occurs through this process of progressively more complex exchange between a child and somebody else- especially somebody who’s crazy about that child

No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.

In today's world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither timenor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.

Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.

One of the most significant effects of age-segregation in our society has been the isolation of children from the world of work. Whereas in the past children not only saw what their parents did for a living but even shared substantially in the task, many children nowadays have only a vague notion of the nature of the parent's job, and have had little or no opportunity to observe the parent, or for that matter any other adult, when he is fully engaged in his work.

Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people... It is primarily through observing, playing, and working with others older and younger than himself that a child discovers both what he can do and who he can become — that he develops both his ability and his identity.