Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own … - Sandra Scarr

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If you cut funding to libraries, you cut the lifeblood of our communities.

Sandra Scarr

Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own right are a socially defined malaise, notan individual problem. . . . The conflict is not between being a mother and having a career; it is between nineteenth-century ideas about children and today's ideas about women.

Career, Children, Mother, Right, Socially, Work

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Babies need social interactions with loving adults who talk with them, listen to their babblings, name objects for them, and give them opportunities to explore their worlds.

Babblings, Baby, Names, Objects, Opportunity, Social

Children thrive in a variety of family forms; they develop normally with single parents, with unmarried parents, with multiple caretakers in a communal setting, and with traditional two-parent families. What children require is loving and attentive adults, not a particular family type.

Children, Family, Parent, Parents, Require, Two

Children are just different from one another, especially in temperament. Some are shy, others bold; some active, others quiet; some confident, others less so. Respect for individual differences is in my view the cornerstone of good parent-child relationships.

Children, Confident, Individual, Individual Differences, Relationships, Views

Ideas about mothers have swung historically with the roles of women. When women were needed to work the fields or shops, experts claimed that children didn't need them much. Mothers, who might be too soft and sentimental, could even be bad for children's character development. But when men left home during the Industrial Revolution to work elsewhere, women were "needed" at home. The cult of domesticity and motherhood became a virtue that kept women in their place.

Children, Historically, Mother, Motherhood, Mothers, Work

Parents who are cowed by temper tantrums and screaming defiance are only inviting more of the same. Young children become more cooperative with parents who confidently assert the reasons for their demands and enforce reasonable rules. Even if there are a few rough spots, relationships between parents and young children run more smoothly when the parent, rather than the child, is in control.

Children, Discipline, Enforce, Running, Spots, Temper