Brain Food: Maximum Flexibility

The truth about children is that they are here to meet their needs, not ours. Some parents don’t realize this and think that children should be willing to act against their self-interest, give up what they want most, and do whatever a parent asks.

"If you could just change one thing in your child’s life, it would be to give them autonomy. Humans spent 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers. That’s where our brains evolved. That’s where we evolved in this context. If you look on lots of different continents, children have enormous amounts of autonomy in these communities, which implies that t

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pre

They are free to develop interests in activities that will expand their selves. In less well-ordered families a great deal of energy is expended in constant negotiations and strife, and in the children’s attempts to protect their fragile selves from being overwhelmed by other people’s goals.