All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
Interpretation
Children need love and freedom to explore and learn through their own experiences.
The quote by Nancy Gibbs emphasizes that while parents and guardians often strive to protect and guide their children, it is crucial to allow them the necessary space to grow independently. By providing unconditional love rather than constant oversight, children can explore their identities, learn from their mistakes, and develop new skills without the pressure of judgment, ultimately fostering resilience and self-confidence.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a parenting workshop to highlight the importance of trust in children's growth.
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.
The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.
Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.
The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know.
There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.
You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.
Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.
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