“...if a parent does not know how to love and nurture a child while he is young, especially black boys, that child will grow up out of balance mentally, therefore feeling inferior.”

“Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up.”

“Children do not grow up all of a piece; look for the child of seven, especially to take many backward glances at the way he has come, while bounds and leaps unevenly ahead in his growth.”

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

“Conversation is how values get ordered, how passion is made contagious. If a parent talks about it, it's important. If a child is allowed to join the conversation, then that child becomes more than a table decoration, he has a part to play in the drama that is growing up. If his ideas count, then he counts. Children gain essential access to adulthood by being given a safe place to speak, and by rehearsing their thoughts out loud before the most patient and supportive audience they will ever know.”

“The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.”