Ineffective Or Weak Brain Connections Are Pruned

If You Just Got Enough Expertise And Enough Special Techniques And Read Up Enough, Then You Could Shape A Child Into The Kind Of Adult You Wanted. There's Almost This Kind Of Competitive Enterprise. That Picture Is The Picture I Think People Often Imply When They Use The Word "parenting".

We Pass Our Values, Ideas And Moral Character On To Our Children, But We Do That Knowing That Our Children Are Going To Revise Our Knowledge And Reshape Their Values. There's Something Very Paradoxical And Profound About Being A Parent As Opposed To Parenting. We Put In All This Effort And Energy Not So That We Can Shape A Child Of A Particular Sort, But So That All Sorts Of Possibilities Can Happen In The Future.

Children Are The Most Amazing Thing In The Universe, As Far As I'm Concerned. If You're Worrying About How It's Going To Turn Out, You Aren't Experiencing That Day-to-day Satisfaction Of Being With These Incredible, Extraordinary Creatures. Every Single One Of Them Is The Most Incredible, Extraordinary Creature That You're Ever Going To Want To See. I Think The Joy Of Having That Deep Relationship - That's The Core Of What Being A Parent Is.

To Support The People We Care About Is Intrinsic, It Is Not Instrumental. It's Not Something We Do Because We're Hoping To Get Some Other Outcome.

If Parents Are The Fixed Stars In The Childs Universe, The Vaguely Understood, Distant But Constant Celestial Spheres, Siblings Are The Dazzling, Sometimes Scorching Comets Whizzing Nearby.