The Parents We Mean To Be Quotes

“Too much global praise—when kids are frequently told that they are “great” or “terrific”—creates particular dangers. Such praise can train children to think that their essential value, their entire worth, is the issue in many contexts. Their selves always at stake, these children are prone to inflate their importance, both positively and negatively. The self acquires false credit and false dues, and these children can develop, as the psychologist Robert Karen notes, both a distorted, narcissistic picture of their value and a high vulnerability to shame.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“Not infrequently, parents fail to help children grasp their responsibility for a community. Often we as parents don’t convey to our children that they have obligations to small communities like a sports team or a school choir or a dance troupe. How many of us ever simply mention to our children that a school is not just a place to learn but a community, or that a neighborhood is a community that carries obligations?”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“all this work to buttress self-esteem and happiness not only makes children less capable of moral action—more self-occupied, less able to invest in others, more fragile, and less able to stand up for important values—but more likely to fret about their attractiveness, competence, or importance to others, more prone to worry and unhappiness.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“Psychologist and author Wendy Mogel urges parents to stick to a twenty-minute rule—spend no more than twenty minutes a day “thinking about your child’s education or worrying about your child, period.” Except in those cases when a child is having a significant academic or emotional problem, that’s a good rule.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“Similarly, when we as parents get in the habit of doing small things to make our children’s lives easier—when we clean up after them, drive them places that they could walk to, fill out applications for our teenagers, pay teenagers’ parking tickets, or regularly jump in to solve children’s problems with peers, teachers, or coaches—we run the risk of making our children more fragile, entitled, and self-occupied.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“It came to me pretty suddenly one day that parenting is a moral task,” a Chicago parent starkly put it, “that the principle of being a mother of a child who is a good person is more important than how much my kids like me or how happy they are in the moment. If my kids were going to be good people, I realized that I couldn’t go to them all the time if they cried or always be a fixer or problem solver, that I had to make real demands on them.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“A high school English teacher who has been teaching for thirty years recently said to me, “My students today are nice and they’re smart, but they can’t engage suffering in any way. I try to teach them King Lear, or ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ and they just don’t want to think about real pain.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“Rather than focusing narrowly on the dangers of peer pressure, adults should ask themselves whether they are helping children find causes and commitments that are larger than the self that are worth sacrificing for.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

“And there is a single capacity, as I have argued, at the heart of almost every quality we think of as moral. That is appreciation, the ability to know and value other people, including those different from ourselves in background and perspective. Appreciation not only breaks destructive impulses, this quality is a foundation of the social and emotional skills that comprise the art of treating people well every day, the shadings of decency and respect—the instinct to know how and when to praise and criticize, when to assert oneself and when to listen, how to help without patronizing. Deep knowing and valuing also motivates, even at times compels, moral action. In Huck’s refusal to hand over the slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn, in flouting the entrenched standards of his time and surrendering to what he sees as a moral weakness in himself, we witness the moral strength of appreciation.”
― Richard Weissbourd, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development