If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.

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.

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

As parents who make every effort we can to raise our children in loving security, we do not need to feel more guilt than we already do. We need less guilt and more awareness of how the quality of the parent-child relationship can be used to promote our children’s emotional and cognitive development.

Want to raise kind children? Be kind to your children.

The most effective way to raise a nice child is to be a nice adult.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

Raising children, I realized, is more than just fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.

Not coincidentally, the best way to parent a child is the same as the best way to treat other humans... with kindness, respect, compassion, honesty, acceptance, and peace.

Kids who know they’re cared for and cared about have fewer behavioral problems and stronger relationships.

There’s mystery in raising children: As our children grow and develop their unique talents, we can’t control every aspect of their lives. For example, we can offer children music lessons and do all we can to encourage them to appreciate music, but if making music isn’t their way of expressing themselves, we have to trust they’ll find their own ways.

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.

Strong-willed children often grow into strong-willed adults who become world leaders, world shapers, and world changers. Parenting them peacefully is not only possible, it’s imperative because sowing peace in their hearts now while they’re in our care will grow a future of peace later when the world is in their care.