The most highlighted quote from The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting

1. Parenting at its core — or at least at its best — is a process of caring, supporting, listening, guiding, reconsidering, teaching, and negotiating.
2. Imposing our will on kids just teaches them to do the same with others when they find it possible and expedient to do so.
3. The appropriate response is not to do less for kids but to actively support their desire for having some say over their own lives (and also to meet their needs for empathy, guidance, and unconditional love).
4. The sensible alternative to overparenting is not less parenting but better parenting. The alternative to permissiveness is not to be more controlling but more responsive. And the alternative to narcissism is not conformity but reflective rebelliousness.
5. Loved, empowered kids are in the best position to deal constructively with unloving, disempowering circumstances.
6. What’s most reliably associated with success are prior experiences with success, not with failure.
7. Even though these assumptions prove false, each of them is driven by an ideological conviction that cannot be unseated by evidence — namely, that anything desirable should have to be earned (conditionality), that excellence can be attained only by some (scarcity), and that children ought to have to struggle (deprivation).
8. People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. On the contrary, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy, to feel supported and respected, to receive loving guidance and unconditional care and the chance to have some say about what happens to them.
9. An award is just a reward that has been made artificially scarce: If you get one, then I can’t.
10. “Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around,” said the poet Adrienne Rich.

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