Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

"It would be something fine if we could learn how to bless the lives of children. They are the people of new life. Children are the only people nobody can blame. They are the only ones always willing to make a start; they have no choice. Children are the ways the world begin again and again.

"But in general, our children have no voice — that we will listen to. We force, we blank them into the bugle/bell regulated lineup of the Army/school, and we insist on silence.

"But even if we cannot learn to bless their lives (our future times), at least we can try to find out how we already curse and burden their experience: how we limit the wheeling of their inner eyes, how we terrify their trust, and how we condemn the raucous laughter of their natural love. What's more, if we will hear them, they will teach us what they need; they will bluntly formulate the tenderness of their deserving."

Parenting our children peacefully is a gift of peace to the world. Children learn what they live and live what they learn.

Children should not have treacherous diseases or be afraid. This should be one rule we all agree on.

No child is born filled with hate. No child is born crippled by fear. No child is born inflamed by rage. Each life is a chance to make things better. Each generation has a chance to do things better. This is our time, our turn, our chance. Let's do better.

Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love.

If we are to reach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with the children.

If we could raise one generation with unconditional love, there would be no Hitlers. We need to teach the next generation of children from Day One that they are responsible for their lives.

Mankind’s greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

Are we not all called on to yield our children back to the world, in the end?

a child is born free

Our children change us . . . whether they live or not.

When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights - that we respect and uphold their rights.

Respecting a child teaches them that even the smallest, most powerless, most vulnerable person is worthy of respect. And that is a lesson our world desperately needs to learn.

Protecting our children from the cruelty of the world doesn't mean shielding them from the realities of the world. Tell them the truth. Teach them to care. Give them a voice. Prepare them not to withstand the world, but to change the world.