Madeline Levine Quotes

There's probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom," she writes in Teach Your Children Well. "Take a room full of five-year-olds and you will see creativity in all its forms positively flowing around the room. A decade later you will see these same children passively sitting at their desks, half asleep or trying to decipher what will be on the next test.

The best way we can help our children welcome challenges is to encourage them to work just outside their comfort zone, stand by to lend a hand when needed, and model enthusiasm for challenging tasks.

Until they enter elementary school most youngsters are motivated by the challenge itself, not by stars or grades or rewards. This is called mastery motivation and is the form of learning most likely to lead to both engagement and persistence, and ultimately to expertise.

We need to always deal with the child in front of us, not the child of our fantasies.

Many leading educators and psychologists believe that it is the ability to ask good questions that characterizes both intelligence and creativity.

Empathy is the accurate understanding of another person'ts internal experience. It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with that experience. Unlike sympathy, it makes no assumptions about how the other person is feeling.

Adolescents need tremendous support as they go about the task of figuring out their identities, their future selves. Too often what they get is intrusion. Intrusion and support are two fundamentally different processes: support is about the needs of the child, intrusion is about the needs of the parent.

Our children cannot be assumed to follow in our footsteps, assuage our losses, or compensate for our inadequacies.

I also know two steps forward and one step back is the rule, not the exception, as people work on change.