January

"Children need at least one person in their life who thinks the sun rises and sets on them, someone who delights in their existence and loves them unconditionally."

- Pam Leo,
Connecting Through Filling the Love Cup

February

"Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff."

- Catherine M. Wallace

March

"Organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. That is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false."

- John Holt

April

"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each."

 - Plato (424 - 348 BCE)

May

"Children raised with love and compassion will be free to use their time as adults in meaningful and creative ways, rather than expressing their childhood hurts in ways that harm themselves or others. If adults have no need to deal with the past, they can live fully in the present."

- Jan Hunt,
The Natural Child

June

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy - these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."

- John Gatto

July

"According to Ferber, the trouble with letting a child who fears sleeping alone into your bed is that 'you are not really solving the problem. There must be a reason why he is so fearful.' Yes, there must. Here's one candidate. Maybe your child's brain was designed by natural selection over millions of years during which mothers slept with their babies. Maybe back then if babies found themselves completely alone at night it often meant something horrific had happened - the mother had been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is designed to respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left alone sound terrified is that kids left alone naturally get terrified. Just a theory."

- Robert Wright,
Slate Magazine

August

"When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself."

- Jean Piaget

September

"Of all the virtues required in the art of child-rearing, none is more important - and none rarer - than patience, in parents, in family, in friends; patience to allow the miracle of human development to unfold according to its own internal laws."

- Daniel Greenberg,
Child Rearing

October

"We learn because we want to learn, because it's important to us, because it's natural, and because it's impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing."

- Peggy Pirro,
101 Reasons Why I'm an Unschooler

November

"What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all."

- John Holt

December

"Put the relationship first and then figure out how to fit everything else around that."

- Joyce Fetteroll

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