…there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence.  Another is to see the situation as a “teachable moment”, an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not, “You’ve misbehaved; now here’s what I’m going […]

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real – George Bernard Shaw

Wondering how your child will learn if you don’t raise your voice? When kids are scared, they go into fight-or-flight. The learning centers of the brain shut down. Your child can’t learn when you yell. It’s always more effective to intervene calmly and compassionately. Besides, when you yell, you lose credibility with your child. Kids […]

By definition, it would seem, if one person controls another, the two individuals have unequal status. -Alfie Kohn, from Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes

Children do not appear with printed calendars, as on packets of seeds, to advise us when a given concept will germinate for them and burst into flower. -Vivian Gussin Paley, from The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: the Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom