Madeline Levine Quotes

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

There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.

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

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.

Those who see errors as opportunities to learn and try again are the people who will most quickly find new solutions. (This is how our children become resilient.) Those who freeze and panic when they make mistakes will find it much harder to adapt.

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.

Remember, our very first job is to appropriately monitor our teen’s safety. After all, if we’re not successful at that, then any discussion of cognitive skills is irrelevant.

Learning in an interactive setting as opposed to a passive one is conducive to the mix of soft and academic skills we're looking to develop in our kids.

if our children are to thrive in a world that is rapidly evolving and full of uncertainty, they need less structure and more play.

Parents who have more than one child are very aware that, while we certainly have an impact on our child's development, it has as much to do with them as with us. "I can't believe how different my kids are" should inform us that child development is an uneven process only partly tied to parenting (and no one knows exactly how much that "partly" is).

Three psychosocial achievements - a sense of self, the belief that we can have an impact on our circumstances, and the ability to regulate our emotions - allow us to handle challenges, setbacks, and disappointments. These attributes are the scaffolding upon which intimacy, meaning, and mental health are built. Ultimately, autonomy - being capable of both healthy separation and healthy connection - signals the successful completion of adolescent tasks. In almost all cultures, adolescence begins with a bold psychological move away from parents and ends with a mature return to the family relationship and an expanded repertoire of friendships and intimate relationships.

Powersnoop,” as one of my wry young patients calls it,

Perhaps the single most important ritual a family can observe is having dinner together.

When a subculture is heading in the wrong direction, it is up to the adults of the larger culture to steer it back in the right direction.

Children need work experiences to develop a sense that success is a function of their own efforts.

It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems.

there is an inverse relationship between income and closeness to parents.

the basis of all true learning.

It is now clear, however, that children of privilege are exhibiting unexpectedly high rates of emotional problems beginning in junior high school and accelerating throughout adolescence.

The fact that the stakes are higher is all the more reason to provide teenagers with as many opportunities as possible to make their own decisions and learn from the consequences. Just as it was critical for the toddler to fumble with her shoelaces before mastering the art of shoelace tying, so is it critical for the adolescent to fumble with difficult tasks and choices in order to master the art of making independent, healthy, moral decisions that can be called upon in the absence of parents’ directives. We all want our children to put their best foot forward. But in childhood and adolescence, sometimes the best foot is the one that is stumbled on, providing an opportunity for the child to learn how to regain balance, and right himself.

When we protect our children from excessive control, outsized competition, and persistent academic pressure, and choose instead to commit to nurturing them with warmth, clear limits, firm consequences, and a delight in their potential and uniqueness, then our children are free to return to their essential task—the development of a sense of self, sufficiently robust to weather the inevitable ups and downs of a lifetime.

Empathy is the accurate understanding of another person's 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.

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.

Experts recommend two hours of unstructured play for every hour of structured play. While your child is playing take half that time for your own play—a craft project, a good novel (or a bad one), looking at catalogs, sitting outside, dancing. If the very idea of “playing” as an adult confuses you, think back to your own childhood and the things that you spent time on and enjoyed doing. Try them again. As with everything else about children’s behavior, there’s nothing like a good role model. If you value play, your child will, too.

The relatively new field of “adolescent medicine” focuses not only on the traditional medical model of diagnosis and treatment, but, perhaps more than any other subspecialty of medicine, on education and prevention.

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.

And it is unstructured play that provides the greatest opportunities for kids to be curious, creative, spontaneous, and collaborative.

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

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.

outgrowth of materialism is the notion that there are “winners” and “losers,” the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Parents need to check in with themselves regularly and avoid endorsing values that pit children against each other or suggest that resources are so scarce that children must be in constant competition.

we must be certain that our children can face these challenges armed with a well-developed moral compass.

Parents tend to think there are two ways to be: autocratic or permissive. Autocratic parenting places a premium on obedience, and permissive parents emphasize the importance of their child’s happiness and attempt to fulfill their child’s desires to make them happy. But virtually all child development experts, including influential psychologists and authors like Madeline Levine and Laurence Steinberg, have advocated a third option: authoritative parenting. This entails being supportive, but not controlling. Authoritative parents want their kids to cooperate because they like and respect them, and want kids to learn from their own experiences

Influenced by the ABA, RDI, and other sources, Stacey pulled together the following strategy for building skills in her children. • first we do it for you, • then we do it with you, • then we watch you do it, • then you do it completely independently. This philosophy and strategy neatly sums up not only the intrinsic purpose of parenting but the practical path toward independence for all kids. It also aligns with psychologist Madeline Levine’s warning: Don’t do for your kid what your kid can already do, or can almost do.

Without a solid ethical grounding, children risk growing into adults who, however outwardly accomplished, lack emotional depth, have impaired social and family relationships, and are vulnerable to depression and despair. But the danger goes further and broader: in the many interviews I conducted, the recurring theme was ethical accountability. Issues that are critical today will be urgent tomorrow. Who will regulate AI? Who will have access to the extraordinary medical breakthroughs that are surely coming? How will technological research be controlled? What reasoning will shape our decisions about energy production and fossil fuels? How do we prevent democracy from deteriorating under authoritarian encroachment? “Winner takes all” isn’t a moral philosophy that can successfully carry us through this century. Our children need to understand how to make complex decisions with moral implications and ramifications. More than any other area of concern I have after researching this book, I’ve concluded that it is exactly in this area of moral reasoning that the stakes are so high and our attention so lacking

When you allow your child to palm off responsibility you encourage the idea that someone else is responsible both for the problem and for fixing it. This attitude is bound to make your child less competent and therefore lower his self-esteem. Even when others have a hand in your child’s distress, which will happen, teach your child to take responsibility for his own life.

We should never separate our values from the ways in which we encourage our children to become effective family members, friends, collaborators, and citizens.

Money buys many things, but typically not a sense of either authenticity or meaning.

clear that she and her daughter were two separate people with very different life experiences, decide how much of her history to share with her daughter, and, finally, commit to changing her own behavior.

Enthusiastic kids who feel loved and valued for their particular skills and interests, who are both self-aware and aware of the needs of others, who can work hard, delay gratification when necessary, and reward themselves when appropriate, who find life both fun and meaningful, are kids who are most likely to be both happy and successful. Deeply happy and authentically successful.

Temperament has been shown to be extremely stable over the course of our lives. 10 This can be hard to appreciate when our kids are in the middle of this period of intense exploration and when change and heightened self-consciousness seem to be their perpetual companions.

Rebecca is asserting her independence. Her thinking is simple and egocentric: “I can” or “I can’t”; “I will” or “I won’t.” Independence is about managing one’s self. Autonomy is a much broader, tougher, and more complex task than independence. It weaves together advanced thinking, self-reliance, self-regulation, intimacy, and connection. Autonomy is the capacity to be both independent and connected to others.

Working primarily to please others and to gain their approval takes time and energy away from children’s real job of figuring out their authentic talents, skills, and interests.

Intrusion and support are two fundamentally different processes: support is about the needs of the child, intrusion is about the needs of the parent. This

the development of a sense of self.

But while our children learn from watching how we react to challenge and recover from crisis, they are not us. Genetics and temperament play a role in determining which coping skills come most easily to us. We naturally lean in to our strengths. An extroverted parent may reach for enthusiasm first, while an introverted child may opt for creativity. Both can be equally effective in solving problems.

Ken Ginsburg, one of the country’s leading experts on resilience, points out, “Resilience is not a character trait.

Too many of the teenagers I encounter in my practice and across the country are late in developing what it will take to function as an adult and create adult relationships: agency, independence, intimacy, fortitude, and self-reliance. Often it's because their community (not just parents but also peers, teachers, and extended family) is focused exclusively on the high-school paper chase and fails to encourage these qualities. I try desperately to convince these teens and their parents that delaying the emotional work of adolescence is dangerous. "We're discovering that the brain during adolescence is very malleable, very plastic," Steinberg says. "It has a heightened capacity to change in response to experience. That cuts both ways: On the one hand it means that the brain is especially susceptible to toxic experiences that can harm it, but it also means that the brain is susceptible to positive influences that can promote growth. That's an opportunity we're squandering.

Kids who learn early in life that they're capable of mastering activities that at first feel a little stressful grow up better able to handle stress of all kinds.

...many of my young patients are genuinely incapable of managing their own lives. Their parents have taken the reins...They have reached the conclusion that not only are they poorly equipped to deal with life, there's nothing they can do about it. They have no options or sense of agency. The term for that is learned helplessness: the belief that nothing you do can impact your environment. Accumulated disability is "I don't have the skills to do this." Learned helplessness is "It doesn't matter what I do. I'm powerless." These two conditions are intertwined - the teenagers' accumulated disabilities give credence to their belief that they don't have the skills or courage to change their situation.

Projection ranges from the devastating to the trivial, but all acts of projection reduce our anxiety and help us keep our image of ourselves intact. Remember that projection is an unconscious way we have of handling distress and anxiety, so we need to be gentle with ourselves when we start investigating the ways in which we protect ourselves from uncomfortable feelings.

Flexibility is a frame of mind. It is what allows us to choose the best response from a raft of different possibilities. Flexibility in parenting does not mean you should become a pushover. There is a delicate tightrope to be walked between your child’s need for structure and the importance of considering content and context when you make decisions. But without flexibility, you are unlikely to be a successful parent and will certainly not be an empathic or introspective one.

We are never free of our past, but we can be free of its unwanted intrusion into our relationship with our children and the ways in which we choose to parent. Being a parent gives us the extraordinary opportunity for a “do-over.” Once again we are in a parent-child relationship, but this time we hold the cards. We can use the best of what we learned from our own parents and change the things that were out of synch or hurtful. This time around, we get to choose.

However, the needs of children were, are, and will be irreducible. They need to be unconditionally loved, allowed to have an active and curious childhood, encouraged to challenge themselves, disciplined when necessary, and valued for the unique set of skills, interests, and capacities they bring to this world. If we can return to these essentials of healthy child development, then more than any tutor, prep class, or prestige college can do, we will have prepared our children to lead satisfying, meaningful, and authentically successful lives.

All of us have days when all our emotional resources are at our disposal and days when we feel depleted; we are all people in addition to being parents. Perfect is not something parents are, nor something they should strive to be. Striving for perfection is bound to end in disappointment and often in depression. We do, however, want to be the best parent we can be and we don’t want to have our histories necessarily dictate our parenting skills or choices.

Our job is to produce and guide our children; not to reproduce ourselves. Nor should we want to. One of the absolute miracles of life is the profound uniqueness of each person.

We should be encouraging our children to push themselves, to develop their talents and passions, but we should also be aware that the bromide “You can do anything” is wishful thinking.

While most research has focused on the value of maternal warmth, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that the warmth and acceptance shown by fathers, who are generally less involved in daily childcare, make a significant contribution to their children’s (especially their teenagers’) well-being. Feeling accepted by Dad appears to be particularly important when it comes to grades and conduct.7 This may be because a child has fewer interactions with Dad, so that each one takes on a heightened meaning, or because father’s approval tends to be more conditional, depending on how well the adolescent has performed. In any event, a father’s warmth and acceptance are strong predictors of academic success, social competence, and a low incidence of conduct problems in adolescence.8

Researchers, led by Dr. Suniya Luthar of Columbia University’s Teachers College, have found that America has a new group of “at-risk” kids, or, more accurately, a previously unrecognized and unstudied group of at-risk kids. They defy the stereotypes commonly associated with the term “at-risk.” They are not inner-city kids growing up in harsh and unforgiving circumstances. They do not have empty refrigerators in their kitchens, roaches in their homes, metal detectors in their schools, or killings in their neighborhoods. America’s newly identified at-risk group is preteens and teens from affluent, well-educated families. In spite of their economic and social

advantages, they experience among the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, and unhappiness of any group of children in this country.2

Adolescence is an inside job. In the 1990s, Suniya S. Luthar, Ph.D., studied adolescents and found that ninth-graders with an internal locus of control - those who felt they had some command over the forces shaping their lives - handled stress better than kids with an external orientation - those who felt others had control over forces shaping their lives...Locus of control is not an all-or-nothing concept. None of us are entirely reliant on one or the other...But more and more often, the teenagers I observe aren't even partially internally motivated. They persistently turn outward toward coaches, teachers, and parents...A startlingly large number of these teens are behaving like younger children. They're stuck performing the chief psychosocial tasks of childhood - being good and doing things right to please adults - instead of taking on the developmental work of separation and independence that is appropriate for their age. When faced with teenage-sized problems, they often have nothing more than the skills of a child.

...research points to a particularly female aspect of human interaction called "emotional labor"...They found that the women "expressed optimism, calmness, and empathy even when these were not the emotions they were feeling" - a repressive facade familiar to many a mom. This is emotional labor and it is debilitating...And it contributes to an enduring stress gap between men and women, as observed by Kristin Wong...emotional labor is not circumstantial. It's an enduring responsibility based on the socialized gender role of women.

When we pay for tutors and turn a blind eye to irresponsible behavior, whether it’s cheating or not getting adequate sleep, are we fooling ourselves? When we tell our children we want them to have “options,” is that really another way of saying that we want them to get the best possible grades, so they can go to the best possible college and graduate school, to prepare them for the best possible jobs, which disproportionately seem to be in the field of finance?

Being human means being vulnerable but it also means having the capacity to modify our responses and to make different choices.

One of the quickest ways to discourage a child’s budding interest is to take it out of the realm of play and turn it into one more organized activity.

emotions don’t dictate choices.

Kids start out meeting the world with wonder. It is our job to make sure that they don’t lose their inborn curiosity, imagination, and creativity.

If thirty years of being a psychologist has taught me anything, it is that it is much easier to talk about things than to change them.

In this respect, I think I was an effective parent—one who understood that family time was precious, and unrecoverable—and so in my own family a lot of time was spent in family rituals and encouraging each other’s particular skills and interests.

A major study conducted by IBM found that the single most sought after trait in CEOs is creativity.

Having an involved father is a strong predictor of a child’s eventual level of empathy. Optimally this involvement should begin when children are starting elementary school. Moving from preschool to elementary school is a big transition for kids. Dads, who often take the lead on making the outside world enticing, appear to grease the wheels and make this transition easier. This effect is equally marked for young girls and boys alike.

If thirty years of being a psychologist has taught me anything, it is that it is much easier to talk about things than to change them. But the potential for change is always present. We are at that moment of change now—with our children, our education system, and our willingness to alter some of our parenting habits in order to protect our children from the worst excesses of our culture.

It is hardly surprising that I have devoted a great deal of time and energy in my professional career to encouraging parents to be present with the child right in front of them rather than being overly focused on the future.

When we turn away from evidence that seems relatively straightforward to others we are using denial.

In the real world, success has all kinds of different faces in all kinds of different fields of endeavor. It would be nice if we could acknowledge as much to our kids.

Probably the greatest intellectual accomplishment in adolescence is the ability to think hypothetically, to engage in “if/ then” thinking. “If I blow off my math test, then I may fail the course and have to go to summer school.” All of a sudden, blowing off the math test is about a whole set of consequences.

Educational projects like Odyssey of the Mind are a terrific example of how to encourage creative problem solving in kids. Do talk to your child’s school about bringing this type of program into the classroom.

While A Nation at Risk recommended significantly more homework, it is doubtful that the three to four hours of often mindless homework that many high school students put in on a daily basis is what its authors had in mind. Many countries that score higher than the United States on international tests of achievement give less, not more, homework than we do.

Creativity is the language of childhood and we don’t want to miss a word.

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

Foundational skills are attitudes and beliefs that drive the way we approach the world. These traits will be as crucial to our children’s success as academic and technical skills. They are curiosity, creativity, flexibility, educated risk-taking, collaboration, perseverance, and self-regulation.