“Given the choice, children who don’t want for anything will not save… We have an obligation as parents to give our children what they need. What they want we can give them as a special gift, or they can save their money for it.”

Encouraging a child means that one or more of the following critical life messages are coming through, either by word or by action: I believe in you, I trust you, I know you can handle this, You are listened to, You are cared for, You are very important to me

The best time to start giving your children money is when they will no longer eat it. Basically, when they don’t put it in their mouths, they can start putting it in their bank.

If kids come to us from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come to us from strong, healthy, functioning families, it makes our job more important.

What is important for kids to learn is that no matter how much money they have, earn, win, or inherit, they need to know how to spend it, how to save it, and how to give it to others in need. This is what handling money is about, and this is why we give kids an allowance.

If you can’t solve it, it’s not a problem – it’s reality.

The beauty of empowering others is that your own power is not diminished in the process.

There is something profoundly satisfying about sharing a meal. Eating together, breaking bread together, is one of the oldest and most fundamentally unifying of human experiences.

We need to encourage members of this next generation to become all that they can become, not try to force them to become what we want them to become. . . . You and I can’t even begin to dream the dreams this next generation is going to dream, or answer the questions that will be put to them.

There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that’s control our children’s will–that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind.

Because they are children and for no other reason they have dignity and worth simply because they are.

Our children need to be able to see us take a stand for a value and against injustices, be those values and injustices in the family room, the boardroom, the classroom, or on the city streets.

When we use punishment, our children are robbed of the opportunity to develop their own inner discipline-the ability to act with integrity, wisdom, compassion, and mercy when there is no external force holding them accountable for what they do.

Our children are counting on us to provide two things: consistency and structure. Children need parents who say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they are going to do.

There’s no problem so great it can’t be solved. If it can’t be solved, it’s not a problem, it’s reality.

There is no problem so great it cannot be solved.

In California, I guess you belong to the state; you don’t even belong to your parents. It’s an old Spanish law. It doesn’t require your parents to swear out a complaint; anybody can.

My parents used to take me to the pet department and tell me it was a zoo.

Where are all the sour patch parents?

I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.

We all need that extra friend outside of our immediate family to talk about that extra stuff you wouldn’t normally talk to your parents about.

It was a mixed blessing to have famous parents. It was tough to go to auditions and be bad, since I couldn’t be anonymous.

I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.

Parental trust is extremely important in the guidance of adolescent children as they get further and further away from the direct supervision of their parents and teachers. I don’t mean that trust without clear guidance is enough, but guidance without trust is worthless.