“Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child.”

“History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.”

“The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children's natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning . . . . Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.”

“Think: who has vans, huh? Soccer moms and serial killers.”

“Working in front of your mom it is like playing soccer in front of your coach”

“Child development does not mean developing your child into the person you think they should be, but helping them develop into the best person they are meant to be.”