Default Parent Quotes

There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition.

If you don't make a conscious effort to visualize, who you are and what you want to become in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape your journey by default. Your silence makes you reactive vs. proactive. God will bring people in your life that can take you on many different journeys that will bring about different outcomes to your life mission. However, if you are not proactive and define your dreams you will never know where “you” need to be and who needs to be with you to fulfill what God is asking you to do. Your life is your own. You must define your dreams, not live someone else’s vision of a good life. What is it that God is asking you to do with the talents and hobbies you enjoy? What were you blessed with a desire for? A good life is one spent in the service of helping others. Find a life partner that will help you reach God’s highest potential—service to humanity, service to his Kingdom, service to building others up. Also, begin any choice with the end in mind. This means to begin each day with a clear vision of your desired direction. It is not enough to live a passive life of religious devotion. God asked you to do more than worship. He has called you to serve, not to be a servant to other people’s dreams. You and only you know where your heart must travel. God brings you storms in life to wake you up. Don’t see it as his disappointment, but as his parental love for you. Life was not meant to stay the same. If someone truly loves you they will never take you away from God’s plan, they will only magnify it.

Conspiracy thinking is all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty. When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories

The problems on campus life today are not about free speech. They are about how the students have absolutely nothing to do with their lives but sit and listen to lectures, find the best parties to attend, and otherwise discover first-world problems to stew about and protest. That's the root of the problem. This is not a commercial environment where people are incentivized to find value in each other. Campuses have become completely artificial 4-year holding tanks for infantilized kids with zero experience in actual life in which people find ways to get along. These students are not serving each other in a market exchange, and very few have worked at day in their lives, so their default is to find some offense and protest. It's all they've been taught to do and all they know how to do. Idle hands and parents' money = trouble.

I'm getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good LeChiffre. The Devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don't give the poor chap a chance. There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition.

parenting strategies and laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from “figure out how to solve this conflict on your own” to “invoke force and/ or third parties whenever conflict arises.

You know , most people wouldn’t default to ‘ I’m gay ’ as a way to stop their parents hassling them .

It’s like he’s our age telling his parents he knocked someone up. Which is totally the straight person equivalent of coming out. As a side note, don’t you think everyone should have to come out? Why is straight the default? Everyone should have to declare one way or another, and it should be this big awkward thing whether you’re straight, gay, bi, or whatever. I’m just saying.

ose if we did choose, but we don't. That's what it means to be unconscious: to be asleep within the dream. We slip into the lives that are laid out for us the way children slip into the clothes their mother lays out for them in the morning. No one decides. We don't live our lives by choice, but by default. We play the roles we are born to. We don't live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away because we don't know any better. and the reason we don't know any better is because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted. never stood up. never drew a line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual advisers or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early lives and asked one simple. honest, straightforward question. the one question that must be answered before any other question can be asked: "What the hell is going on here?

External motivators for behavior such as rewards and punishments may destroy the precious internal motivation to be good, making leverage by such artificial means necessary by default. As an investment in easy parenting, trusting in a child's desire to be good for us is one of the best.

There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition.

It is also a terrifying prospect: that the relationships we use as the cornerstones of our personalities are not given by default but are a choice; that it’s all right to feel closer to a friend than we do to a parent; that someone who’s betrayed us in the past might be the same person with whom we build a future. I

The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf - one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.

When children are rude or even downright defiant, parents have two choices: we can view the behavior through the lens of disrespect for us (“My child does not respect me!”) or through the lens of emotion dysregulation for them (“My child is having a hard time right now”). It’s tempting to default to that first lens—it’s the easier, often more ingrained route. But think about yourself—why are you rude to people sometimes? Why would you talk back to or disobey your boss? I come up with the same reason, every time: I feel misunderstood. I am looking to feel seen and don’t. I feel frustrated that someone else isn’t really hearing me, and my relationship with that person isn’t as strong as it could be in that moment. Knowing what would make me act out helps guide my approach to rudeness or defiance in kids.

We accept the fact that being a parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around your child. If every coach is assumed to be a podophile, then no parent would ever let their child leave the house. And no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth even when that decision carries terrible risks because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise.

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

The same thing happens with the human default for happiness. Parental or societal pressure, belief systems, and unwarranted expectations come along and overwrite some of the original programming. The “you” who started out happily cooing in your crib, playing with your toes, gets caught up in a flurry of misconceptions and illusions. Happiness becomes a mysterious goal you seek but can’t quite grasp, rather than something simply there for you each morning when you open your eyes.

We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t. What should we do? We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination. While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.' Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise.

Free and accessible child care has always been a fundamental demand of the women’s movement, but the legislative efforts to pass such measures have failed. “Everything that our generation asked for as feminists was getting the identical things of what boys had—access to the Ivy League or professional schools or corporate America,” said psychiatrist Anna Fels. “Women now are up against a much deeper structural problem. The workplace is designed around the male life cycle and there is no allowance for children and family. There’s a fragile new cultural ideal—that both the husband and wife work. But when these families are under the real pressure of having a baby or two, there’s a collapse back to old cultural norms and these young parents go back to the default tradition.

Caleb told me that our mother said there was evil in everyone, and the first step to loving someone else is to recognize that evil in ourselves, so we can forgive them. So how can I hold Tobias’s desperation against him, like I’m better than him, like I’ve never let my own brokenness blind me? “Hey,” I say, crushing Caleb’s directions into my back pocket. He turns, and his expression is stern, familiar. It looks the way it did the first few weeks I knew him, like a sentry guarding his innermost thoughts. “Listen,” I say. “I thought I was supposed to figure out if I could forgive you or not, but now I’m thinking you didn’t do anything to me that I need to forgive, except maybe accusing me of being jealous of Nita…” He opens his mouth to interject, but I hold up a hand to stop him. “If we stay together, I’ll have to forgive you over and over again, and if you’re still in this, you’ll have to forgive me over and over again too,” I say. “So forgiveness isn’t the point. What I really should have been trying to figure out is whether we were still good for each other or not.” All the way home I thought about what Amar said, about every relationship having its problems. I thought about my parents, who argued more often than any other Abnegation parents I knew, who nonetheless went through each day together until they died. Then I thought of how strong I have become, how secure I feel with the person I now am, and how all along the way he has told me that I am brave, I am respected, I am loved and worth loving. “And?” he says, his voice and his eyes and his hands a little unsteady. “And,” I say, “I think you’re still the only person sharp enough to sharpen someone like me.” “I am,” he says roughly. And I kiss him. His arms slip around me and hold me tight, lifting me onto the tips of my toes. I bury my face in his shoulder and close my eyes, just breathing in the clean smell of him, the smell of wind. I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter afterward. And maybe that’s true of beginnings, but it’s not true of this, now. I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

It seems to me," he said, "that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only 'Take what you want, says God'; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone's outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that's come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can't afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture--theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth." He didn't sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. "I don't consider this anything to become incensed about," he said, reading my look. "In fact, it shouldn't be remotely surprising to anyone. We've taken what we wanted and we're paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man--what's his name? the prime minister--comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television," he added, a little peevishly. "We've become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we're so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.

There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition. ‘So,’ continued Bond, warming to his argument, ‘Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.’ ‘Bravo,’ said Mathis. ‘I’m proud of you. You ought to be tortured every day. I really must remember to do something evil this evening. I must start at once. I have a few marks in my favour – only small ones, alas,’ he added ruefully – ‘but I shall work fast now that I have seen the light. What a splendid time I’m going to have. Now, let’s see, where shall I start, murder, arson, rape? But no, these are peccadilloes. I must really consult the good Marquis de Sade. I am a child, an absolute child in these matters.’ His face fell. ‘Ah, but our conscience, my dear Bond. What shall we do with him while we are committing some juicy sin? That is a problem. He is a crafty person this conscience and very old, as old as the first family of apes which gave birth to him. We must give that problem really careful thought or we shall spoil our enjoyment. Of course, we should murder him first, but he is a tough bird. It will be difficult, but if we succeed, we could be worse even than Le Chiffre.

I had spent so much of my time growing up being afraid of being either too cool or too uncool. Fear eventually took over and became my default emotion. If I tried to be cool, I was afraid of disappointing my teachers and parents. If I stuck with the nerd kids, I had a nagging fear that I was missing out on something. I learned to become exactly what whomever I was with at the time expected me to be. Mostly I was afraid that if I didn’t become what they wanted, then they would realize what I really was.

The impulsive, desire-driven child mind is tempered by the judicious, pragmatic adult mind, which says, “That’s not good for you,” or “Wait until later.” The adult mind reminds us to pause and assess the bigger picture, taking time to weigh the default reaction, decide if it’s appropriate, and propose other options. The intelligent parent knows what the child needs versus what it wants and can decide what is better for it in the long term.

Strategy #1: Reflective listening—simply saying back to the child whatever they just said to you—often followed by clarifying statements, like “How so?” or “I don’t quite understand” or “I’m confused” or “Can you say more about that?” or “What do you mean?” This is your default drilling strategy, and the one you’ll be using most often.

You don’t become a praying parent by default. You do it by design, by desire, by discipline.

Sometimes we forget that parenting, like love, is a verb. It takes effort and work to yield positive returns. There is an incredible amount of self-awareness involved in being a good parent. It requires us to look at what we do when we are tired and stressed and stretched to our limits. These actions are called our default settings. Our default settings are the actions and reactions we have when we are too tired to choose a better way.

Most of our default settings are inherited from our own parents. They are ingrained and programmed into us like a motherboard on a computer. They are the factory settings we return to when we are at our wit’s end and not thinking and they have been installed into us from our upbringing.

There's a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience. As a teenager, I busied myself with the school newspaper or debate club because, unlike with math or science, I thought I could actually get better at these things. You flip through your father's old physics notebooks, and you know in your bones that these formulas and graphs will never make sense to you. But one day, you realize that your parents speak with a mild accent, and that they have no idea what passive voice is. The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf -- one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.

Use process praise Remember that the most meaningful and useful praise is based on quality, not quantity. Keep the praise focused on the process or effort children put in rather than on innate abilities: “You studied hard for your test, and your improvement shows it. You went over the material many times, made cue cards, and quizzed yourself. That really worked!”     Try to come up with some more examples of process praise. Practice makes perfect—the more you try to use process praise, the better you will get at it. See if you can avoid saying, “You are so smart.” By focusing on the effort involved, you will give your children the tools to understand that it is the perseverance, not the innate ability, that matters most. In the long run, they will have stronger self-esteem because of it. Don’t use praise as a default response Don’t overuse praise for things that are too easy. This can teach your child that he is only praiseworthy when he completes a task quickly, easily, and perfectly, and that does not help him embrace challenges. If, for example, a child gets an A easily without much effort, try saying, “Well that was

But it’s more than an absence of spouses that complicates caregiving and companionship later in life. People are having fewer children, if they have children at all. This, in combination with marriage trends, has increased the number of older adults with no close family ties—a group of people whom sociologists call “elder orphans,” “solo agers,” or “kinless.” Researchers estimate that one in five older adults is an “elder orphan” or at risk of becoming one, a figure that is likely to grow in coming years. Like marriage, having children isn’t a surefire insurance policy for caregiving. Adult children might not live close to their parents, or their kids might not have the capacity to help. Daughters, historically the country’s default caregivers of aging parents, can’t be taken for granted as a source of uncompensated caregiving these days. Far more women are in the paid labor force and would jeopardize their economic security or their family’s if they quit their jobs to take care of their parents. (Nevertheless, on average, daughters spend far more time caring for their aging parents than sons do.) Because Americans are having kids later in life, it’s common for children with aging parents to be raising children of their own at the same time; these are members of the so-called sandwich generation. Unable to manage both forms of care, these adults may focus on their kids and outsource care for their parents.

Brent and I are striving to create an environment where Zoomer learns that all sexualities and relationships between consenting people should be celebrated. There are no default assumptions. Brent and I simply hope Zoomer will feel comfortable bringing anyone they like, lust, or love into our home.

And because those rules become internalized, we stop consciously thinking about them, considering them and reviewing them. Or even being aware that they exist. We stop being aware of the fact that they are rules that we’ve given ourselves. And so most people live on auto pilot, not considering if those rules are right for them or if they work against them. They become ‘just what you do’. The problem is that most of these rules aren’t rules you’ve thought about, considered, and carefully chosen. They’re just a default setting that you were given by your parents, your siblings, your teachers, your friends and your society. By a whole group of people who are equally unconscious of those rules. They form part of their group identity, of the culture of your society, of your family, of your group of friends. It’s the set of rules and norms that bind you together.

There is a fear of catching AIDS , but a fear also of simply catching sex. There is a fear of catching anything whatever which might seem like a passion, a seduction, a responsibility. And, in this sense, it is once again the male who has most deeply fallen victim to the negative obsession with sex. To the point of withdrawing from the sexual game, exhausted by having to bear such a risk, and no doubt also wearied by having historically assumed the role of sexual power for so long. Of which feminism and female liberation have divested him, at least dejure (and, to a large extent, de facto). But things are more complicated than this, because th e male who has been emasculated in this way and stripped of his power, has taken advantage of this situation to fade from the scene, to disappear — doffing th e phallic mask of a power which has, in any event, become increasingly dangerous. This is the paradoxical victory of the movement for feminine emancipation. That movement has succeeded too well and now leaves the female faced with the (more or less tactical and defensive) defaulting of the male. A strange situation ensues, in which women no longer protest against male power, but are resentful of the 'powerlessness' of the male . The defaulting of the male now fuels a deep dissatisfaction generated by disappointment with a sexual liberation which is going wrong for everyone. And this dissatisfaction finds expression, contradictorily, in the phantasm of sexual harassment. This is, then, a very different scenario from traditional feminism. Women are no longer alienated by men, but dispossessed of the masculine, dispossessed of the vital illusion of the other and hence also of their own illusion, their desire and privilege as women. It is this same effect which causes children secretly to hate their parents, who no longer wish to assume the role of parent and seize the opportunity of children's emancipation to liberate themselves as parents and relinquish their role. What we have, then, is no longer violence on the part of children in rebellion against the parental order, but hatred on the part of children dispossessed of their status and illusion as children. The person who liberates himself is never who you though the was. This defaulting o f the male has knock-on effects which extend into the biological order. Recent studies have found a fall in the rate of sperm in the seminal fluid, but, most importantly, a decline of their will to power: they no longer compete to go and fertilize the ovum. There is no competition any more. Are they, too , afraid of responsibility? Should we see this as a phenomenon analogous to what is going on in the visible sexual world, where a reticence to fulfil roles and a dissuasive terror exerted by the female sex currently prevail? Is this an unintended side-effect of the battle against harassment - the assault of sperm being the most elementary form of sexual harassment?

It’s not easy to recognize, in real time, when you’re throwing good money after bad—which is why I think analyzing progress should be a “team sport.” You have to be willing to solicit input from people who have different perspectives on the project. To overcome the “sunk costs” fallacy, this helps to change the default incentive (to keep going) so people can feel good about saying it’s time to stop. Astro Teller, head of the radical innovation company called X at Alphabet (Google’s parent company), gives failure bonuses to employees who admit a project isn’t working.

To counter the effects of too-early learning, here are some things you can do: Where possible, choose schools that are developmentally sensitive in their curriculum and appropriate for your child. Some kids will do really well as big fish in small ponds. It gives them the confidence to tackle the currents without being afraid of being swept away. They get to grow strong and feel strong. So what if there are bigger fish in bigger ponds? Help your children find the right curricular environments for them. Relax and take a long view, even if no one else around you is. Most kids who learn to read at five aren’t better readers at nine than those who learn to read at six or seven. Bill remembers vividly the mild panicky feeling he and Starr had when their daughter was five years old and some of her friends were starting to read. Even though they knew that kids learn to read much easier at age seven than at age five, and that pushing academics too early was harmful and produced no lasting benefit, Bill and Starr wondered if they were jeopardizing their child’s future by letting her fall behind her peers. They briefly considered pulling her out of her nonacademic kindergarten. But they stuck to their guns and left her in a school that did not push and did not give her any homework until the fourth grade. Despite an unrushed start, she received her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty-six and is a successful economist. Bill loves telling that story, not to brag (okay, just a little), but to emphasize that it is difficult to buck the tide even when you know the current is carrying you the wrong way. Remember that any gains from rushing development will wash out. Parents often tell Bill that their third grader is doing fourth- or fifth-grade math—but he never hears twenty-six-year-olds brag that they’re more successful than most twenty-eight-year-olds. Don’t go overboard on AP classes. You are doing your child no favors if you let her take more APs at the cost of her mental health and sleep. There’s a reason why kids get more out of Moby-Dick in college than in high school. When we consider the enormous differences in the maturation of their prefrontal cortex—and the associated development in their capacity for abstraction and emotional maturity—it should come as no surprise that the majority of students will understand and appreciate novels written for adults better when they’re older. The same is true for complex scientific theories and data, quantitative concepts, and historical themes, which are easier for most kids to grasp when they are college aged. This isn’t to say that some students aren’t ready for college-level courses when they’re fifteen. The problem is that when this becomes the default for most students (I’ll never get into college if I don’t have five AP classes) it’s destructive.

You don’t become a praying parent by default. You do it by design, by desire, by discipline. Spiritual disciplines take sheer determination, but if you determine to circle your children in prayer, you will shape their destinies, just like Susanna Wesley shaped the destinies of her children. Your prayers will live on in their lives long after you die. Your prayers for your children are the greatest legacy you can leave.

Just like your parents influenced your defaults when you were growing up, you set your kids’ defaults during the time you live with them and when you make decisions for your family. And just like your parents’ defaults may not have been the optimal match for you, your children’s settings will likely need to be different than yours. Be sensitive to your kids’ unique personalities. Let them learn to explore without your protection, without your resources, without your solutions. This is the paradox of parent-child love: sometimes, we need to distance ourselves from what we love the most. Our offspring develops stability when they’re given the right roots, and they thrive proportionately to the time they’re left alone to figure things out for themselves (with the security of knowing you are there for assistance if needed).

Veronica had always thought of her mom as the boring one. The constant. The default parent who cooked and cleaned and laid down ground rules. But had she wanted more? Had she ever taken more?

Love must become a parent’s default response to all circumstances. It is the bonding agent that sustains and strengthens relationships under stress. When the ‘righteous’ world and our own human nature dictate a response involving anger, demands, and rejection, a parent must choose love.