“It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.”

“They say: it's a cruel world but I say: it's just a world, we define it with our actions and reactions..”

“There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.”

“It's written in our DNA somewhere: our children first, the rest of the world second.”

“Cruel', O'Kelly laughed, 'it's cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of God's mercy, then it's his gift of making us unable to lie.”

“In thousands of little ways, we pull and push our children to grow up, hurrying them along instead of inviting them to rest. We could never court each other as adults by resisting dependance...Perhaps we feel free to invite the dependance of adults becuase we are not responsible for their growth and maturity. We don't bear the burden of getting them to be independant. Here is the core of the problem: we are assuming too much responsiblity for the maturation of our children. We have forgotten that we are not alone - we have nature as our ally. Independance is the fruit of maturation; our job in raising children is to look after their dependance needs. When we do our job of meeting genuine dependance needs, nature is free to do its job of promoting maturity. In the same way, we don't have to make our children grow taller; we just need to give them food. By forgetting that growth, development and maturation are natural processes, we lose perspective. We become afraid our children will get stuck and never grow up. Perhaps we think that if we don't push a little, they will never leave the nest. Human beings are not like birds in this respect. The more children are pushed, the tighter they cling - or, failing that, they nest with someone else.”