I once read a beautiful teaching attributed simply to “a modern educator.” It read: “Try to see your child as a seed that came in a packet without a label. Your job is to provide the right environment and nutrients and to pull the weeds. You can’t decide what kind of flower you’ll get or in which season it will bloom.”

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell ch

If a child asks you, “How did the dinosaurs die?” resist the impulse to launch into a lesson about an asteroid hitting the earth. Instead ask, “What do you think could have killed them? How would you figure it out?” When they give you an answer, ask them for more answers. Let them see that there’s often more than one way of framing the question and