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Summary with Excerpts from
Greater Expectations (Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in America's Homes and Schools)
by William Damon

"In this provocative and challenging book, William Damon, now widely recognized as the nation's leading thinker on the moral development of children, persuasively demonstrates that as a culture we have come to accept some very dangerous beliefs about raising children--beliefs that have given us a generation of poorly educated, apathetic, and amoral children. The cult of self-esteem, the bonding myth, the myth of the hurried child, the denigration of spirituality, and the misconceived child-centered approach to education have all contributed, says Damon, to the undermining of our children's moral and intellectual development.

Drawing on his seminal research and years of work in schools, the author presents a program that reintroduces intellectual rigor in education, capitalizes on children's native moral virtues, and stems the tide of moral relativism that now dominates our schools. Damon shows through his pathbreaking studies that children are highly resilient, innately empathic, and that they thrive on the opportunity to serve others. They also crave difficult challenges, want responsibility, and seek consistent programs of discipline--qualities that stand in stark opposition to the many popular beliefs about children's needs.

Drawing on this new knowledge of children, the author then discusses how parents can communicate values and how they can encourage children to take on personal and social responsibility. He shows how teachers can present rigorous work that challenges children but that also capitalizes on their spontaneous, natural interests. His innovative educational program differs from both the rote traditionalist's emphasis on deadly structure for its own sake and the progressive "child-centered" approach that avoids the rigor that children require."

William Damon is a professor in the Department of Education at Brown University and director of its Center for the study of Human Development. He is also author of The Moral Child and co-author of Some Do Care. (preceding taken directly from front and back covers of book)

Damon states that there is a battle for the future of our society. On the one side, there are many dedicated people working to help youth but on the other side, the problems are getting worse--violence, criminality, discouragement and self-destructiveness to name a few. Poor and rich kids are drifting through childhood without finding the skills and virtues they need to sustain a fruitful life. Commonly accepted standards have fallen tremendously and so have children's skills and behaviors. "But I am convinced that, at its core, the predicament that has beset today's youth is one problem and not several. Or, a bit more precisely, it is one interconnected web of problems that define a common pattern. A term that I use to capture the interconnected web is 'demoralization'…a loss of moral standards and a debilitating lack of spirit." There are many misconceptions about the nature of children and their developmental needs which may lead parents to shield their children from the formative challenges of responsibility and reality. His thoughts are a combination of new ideas and ageless intuitions (i.e. common sense).

Youth violence is increasing. More teenage boys in U.S. die of gunshot wounds than of all natural causes combined. (p7). He gives numerous examples and cases.

Suicide rates are increasing. "A 1993 survey found that 20 percent of high school students had made a plan to commit suicide and that half of these students had made an actual attempt." He goes on to say, "After accidents, suicide is now the leading cause of youthful death in our society." (p10)

Increase in teenage pregnancies--one root cause of societal disintegration. Drug use has stabilized but is at a dangerously high level.

Quieter indicators--behavioral problems such as gambling, petty theft, habitual deceitfulness, irregular sleeping hours, less mathematically competent than a generation ago are all up.

The average US child watches 4-5 hours of TV a day with 7-9 hours/day on the weekends (p12)

"In 1989, according to parents and teachers, children were far more likely to 'destroy things belonging to others,' to 'hang around with others who get into trouble, ' to do poorly on their schoolwork, to be 'underactive,' 'whining,' 'sullen,' 'stubborn,' and 'irritable.'

He introduces some of the misconceptions of modern times (see 1^st paragraph) "In a literal sense, the most dispiriting result of our myths about children is that we withhold spiritual messages from them. Our reticence springs from the myth of childhood incompetence. Many assume that it is an empty exercise to teach religious and moral principles to children, since they won't be able to understand them. In many educational settings today, spiritual instruction for children has become watered down to the point where it is hard to discern any meaningful core. …In fact, children are fascinated by the timeless enigmas of life and death, are not at all threatened by them, and are eager to be drawn into discussion about them." p25

"Today's children, like children throughout the ages, do best when they grow up within a cultural climate of purpose." (p25)

The home has become less a place of work and drudgery and more a place where one is fed, sheltered and entertained. In the past, the mutual well-being and even survival of all family members depended on children's contributions. "No longer viewed as an essential means to their family's well-being, children now are seen as an end in themselves, the target of their family's care anc concern. Parents strive first and foremost to enhance their children's well-being. Childrearing has become the family's primary stated goal. The modern family exists to provide for the children and not the other way around. Rather than expecting economic contributions from their children, families are ready and willing to dedicate an enormous share of their own resources towards childrearing expenses." (p28)

"Some of these resources are financial: for the decade of the 1990s, the projected average cost of raising a middle-class American child prior to college totals $186,000. College will ad another sum at least that large for children born today. The other valuable resource that many of today's children enjoy, despite popular beliefs to the contrary, is a large amount of leisure adult time. Today's middle-class children have greater access to adults during times of leisure than children at almost any time history, simply because their elders have been relieved of so much excess work and drudgery" (p28)

"We spend freely for children's consumer goods ,including designer clothes and sneakers, fine furniture, special fun foods, and fancy bikes. It is estimated that U.S. families spend over fifty billion dollars yearly on their children's food, clothing, entertainment and vacations." (p30)

Three broad themes emerge from those who have observed school life today.

1. Students are passive and disengaged.
2. They are not learning anything close to what they will need to know if they are to thrive in the world of the 21^st century
3. The critics note that many teachers have become cynical after years of disappointment with their apathetic students, their disjointed instructional requirements, and with the insensitive and invalid tests that they must use to evaluate their students and own teaching performances.

Example of Susan. He knows her parents well. She is bright and gifted and from a family where intellectual achievement is valued. She does well in one of the top schools. Recently she was on a family vacation in a French-speaking sunspot. Susan studied French for years and had great grades. The parents thought that she would be happy to practice her French in the real world, to improve and display her expertise. During the trip, her parents went out of their way to contact local people who could only speak French. They were surprised that whenever they met someone who spoke French, Susan clammed up. She avoided speaking French, even when it would have helped the family. She acted as though listening or mouthing the vowels were painful acts. They never thought of their personal daughter as shy. What was going on? They asked her and she clearly said that she was on vacation and had no intention of doing anything that vaguely reminded her of school. Furthermore, she told them she always hated French. Wasn't it enough the she worked so hard for the grades? What did they expect anyway?

Her parent hoped that she would get some pleasure and pride from all her work. That she would show some inclination to use the fruits of her labor for a genuine purpose. Susan is among the top of the high-achieving students.

"In general, our schools are not providing students with environments that stimulate intellectual and moral growth." Schools aren't the only problem. "For children from today's middle-class families, there is one fact of life that stands out. Almost all the activities that occupy most children's nonschool time are directed towards their own pleasure-oriented diversions. There is a vast amount of time watching TV shows filled with silly humor and gratuitous violence. This is time that is ill-spent, because it wastes away precious hours that could be invested in exploring the world and in building skills and character." (p35)

Throughout history children have been expected to help out in the family. It helps the family and the child. "Performing serious service confers a sense of personal competence and a sense of social responsibility. These virtues are central to the child's character development. The earlier that children begin acquiring them, the more surely they will flourish." (p 36)

3 Common reasons middle-class parents refrain from requesting service of their children:

1. It's more trouble to get children to do something right than simply to do it oneself.
2. They worry their children are already overwhelmed with activities and "stressed out" from the demands of modern life. They need more time to cool down.
3. Believe that their children have a "right" to their own time.

"The notion of effort as a virtue in itself--the so-called "work ethic" -- is rapidly going out of fashion, even in the US, where it once was considered almost definitional of the national character. Recent student surveys have found that barely more than a quarter of American youngsters place top priority on working hard, as opposed to almost three-quarters of Japanese youth. High school teachers from well-off school districts routinely quote today's brightest students as saying: "It's cool to wing it; to do the least work possible and get away with it;" or, It's the American way--to get the best results with the least amount of energy expended." (p37)

Test scores are going down, waist sizes are going up.

"Yet the heart of the matter still remains the loss of all obligations to serve anyone beyond oneself. Even if our children were being raised to become the best informed, most artistic, and healthiest children that the world has ever seen, it would all come to nothing unless they found some things beyond themselves, and indeed some people other than themselves, to devote at least a part of their efforts to." (p 38)

He gives numerous examples at the end of the chapter of about youth violence in middle-class neighborhoods.

Failure to guide the development of young people in affluent conditions can lead to narcissism, depression, underachievement, and antisocial and self-destructive behaviors.

In previous generations in the inner-city neighborhoods, there were constructive mentoring relationships. Now, drug traffickers, pimps and gangs are everywhere. In the past, relationships were based on mutual trust and care. The newer ones are founded upon instrumental ends rather than interpersonal ones -- conducted with deceit and self-protectiveness rather than honesty and respect. Children are now a means for someone else's profit and pleasure.

Successful youth organizations:

• ensure physical survival of children
• safe haven
• give child identity as member of organized group
• local community credibility and stability in staffing
• include all youth who seek them out
• engage young in activities that reflect a sense of purpose
• high expectations for behavior

Failure to guide the development of young people in impoverished conditions can lead to youth gangs terrorizing neighborhoods, school prison rates increasing, teenage pregnancies increasing and youth who grow up devoid of hope or dreams.

"A common refrain in today's popular discourse about human development is the primary importance of self-esteem." The idea, baldly stated, is that it is impossible to respect, cherish, or love others without first learning to respect and love oneself." (p68) "The 'how to' childrearing books are liberally dosed with tips for bolstering children's self-esteem. Many explicitly claim that self-esteem is a prior condition--and a necessary one--for a child's optimal psychological development. They also emphasize the importance of early experience in either establishing or permanently impairing a child's self-esteem." He quotes from several books about the utter importance of instilling a healthy self-esteem in your child.

"…Self-esteem is assumed to cause many positive and important developmental outcomes, ranging from intelligence to mental health…The notion that self-esteem is a prior cause of these positive outcomes derives, illegitimately, from correlating studies that show no more than simple association between measures of self-esteem and measures of achievement, health and so on. Every statistics lesson taught anywhere begins by explaining that correlations do not establish causality. No matter how many correlations are found between self-esteem and anything else, self-esteem is just as likely to be a result of the positive development outcomes as it is to be a cause of them.

"The psychological danger of putting the child at the center of all things, of making children too conscious of themselves and their own feelings, is that it draws the child's attention away from fundamental social realities to which the child must adapt for proper character development. When children learn to place themselves first, they learn to care more about their own personal experience than about the feelings and reactions of others. They come to ignore the guidance and feedback of others, because they have never learned to value it. They fail to establish a firm basis for respecting others, including even the important adults in their lives. In the long run, they learn to act as their own sole moral self-referents, which is not a good way to develop a balanced moral sense." (p78)

"The pursuit of self-esteem is everyone's right. It is an important part of psychological adjustment to cultivate the sense of well-being that lies at the center of personal happiness. But the pursuit of self-esteem in and of itself is a misdirected quest. It is a logical and a psychological contradiction in terms. One cannot "find" self-esteem in isolation from one's relations to others because it does not exist apart form those relationships." (p80)

"Parents and teachers serve their children best when they guide their children towards the skills, knowledge, and relationships that eventually lead to genuine self-esteem. Parents serve their children poorly when they engender in them an artificial belief in their own importance. There are no shortcuts to the real thing." (pp80-1)

"When we teach children to concern themselves first and foremost with their own sense of self, we not only encourage self-centeredness but also fail to present a more inspiring and developmentally constructive alternative: that they should concern themselves about things beyond the self and above the self. We fail, that is, to convey to them a sense that there are other important things in life beyond their own individual circumstances and feelings…Even at early ages, children need something beyond themselves to believe in…Self-centered goals cannot provide a constructive foundation for a child's development. Children will not thrive psychologically until they learn to dedicate themselves to purposes that go beyond their own egoistic desires. They will not thrive unless they acquire a living sense of what some religious traditions have called transcendence: a faith in, and devotion to concerns that are considered larger than the self. In a child's world, the clearest example of this is a sense of service to others. But it also may include beliefs about profound matters such as the meaning and purpose of life." (p81)

"In just the last few years, some of our most noted authorities on childrearing have woken up to the glaring omission of spiritual messages from our children's lives." (p82) He goes on to quote Benjamin Spock from a recent statement:

I have hopes that enough people will come to recognize the social ills and tragedies stemming from our spiritual poverty, or be shocked by some economic or environmental disaster, or be inspired by a spiritual leader, so that they will dedicate themselves to the ideal of service to their fellow humans, whatever their gainful occupations, and inspire in their children a similar ideal. I literally believe that without such a conversion, our singleminded dedication to materialism will do us in. I'm not basing this on religious or moral grounds but simply on the evidence that our society is disintegrating. (p82-3)

"The surest way to breed incompetence (and low self-esteem of the real kind) in a child is to treat the child as incompetent. If a parent assumes that a child cannot be counted on to accomplish a task, the child takes that message to heart….In actuality, children are far more competent at early ages than adults in our society give them credit for. They thrive on challenges and on chances to prove themselves. Competence motivation is a natural part of every child's repertoire. If encouraged, it enables children to develop their capacities with zest and vigor." (p84)

"Sparing children from demanding challenges, and in particular from all expectations of service to others, does them a disservice; because it robs them of opportunities to establish their sense of competence and the sense of social responsibility. It imparts to children exactly the wrong pair of messages: (1) that they are incapable of accomplishing anything and (2) that they are living only for themselves. The first message belies the child's natural endowment of intelligence, hardiness, and energy. The second goes against the grain of what it means to be a fully developed human." (p85)

He gives three misconceptions about children's spiritual beliefs: (1) fallacy that young children are unable to understand or appreciate spiritual messages (2) misplaced fear that children will be damaged by exposure to other people's spiritual and religious beliefs (3) spirituality itself is somehow maladaptive--or at least quaintly irrelevant--in our modern, technological society. (p86)

"Our society discourages children's spiritual growth in countless ways. ..the fostering of self-centeredness and the withholding of expectations for service." (p92)

"Children are not so easily wounded or led astray. They are resilient, purposeful, and intellectually capable--no doubt far more so than most adults give them credit for being." (p92)

"Of all the distortions in today's public conversations about youth, the most disturbing is the unnecessary polarization of opinions about education and childrearing. Oppositional thinking rules the day." (i.e. At school, teach subject matter or thinking skills; school playful or rigorous; read through phonics or whole language; emphasize character or academics; habits or reflection. At home, freedom or duty, self-expression or discipline, etc.) p95

He goes on to talk about how all of this oppositional thinking leads to paralysis among the adults who should be working together to help children rather than fighting against each other. (in government, schools, communities and homes)

He then begins a lengthy discussion on Child-centered imbalances vs. Adult-centered imbalances.

Briefly, child-centered imbalances have led to exaggerated concerns about children's momentary feelings, discouraged attempts to inspire achievement among children and have eroded the foundations of parental discipline.

Adult-centered imbalances have led to the bonding myth—that people may be permanently impaired by a lack of physical contact with their biological mothers in the hours after birth. "The focus on bonding has stolen attention from the real essential need of all young children: regular participation in at least one secure, growth-inducing relationship." (p113)

"…Discipline in the home has become a vexing dilemma rather than an art that comes naturally to parents. It has become, in fact, a lost art. Stories about unruly, disrespectful, and unmanageable children dominate the conversations of adults everywhere. Families are torn with division over how to respond." (p115)

Then there are huge disagreements over how to discipline.

His main point here is that children are born "far stronger, far more adaptive, and far more disposed towards developing moral character than our present-day thinking and practices have given them credit for. It would aid our childrearing efforts immensely if we would see the child's natural virtues for what they are." (p126)

Years ago grandmas knew that kids are resilient. Today, we have what one book called, the "too-precious child" syndrome among many families. "A sense of preciousness in turn can lead to exaggerated concerns over children's health, safety, and emotional well-being. It is not that parents are mistaken to be concerned about such things: parents' fist responsibility is to protect their children, and every child deserves a safe and nurturing home. But such concerns must be realistically targeted at children's actual vulnerabilities. When they are not, protection turns to overprotection, and children are robbed of the chance to develop their own protective skills. This is why it is so important to start with an accurate view of children's natural strengths." (p127)

Four Natural Dispositions for Adaptation and Learning (pp128-9)

1. Children thrive on challenges. They are always in search of ways to gain skills and prove themselves
2. Children are curious about the mysteries of life and are capable of understanding serous discussion about grave matters. Children become less troubled by frank and open discussions of death than by the hushed, secretive posture that many adults believe to be protective of children's sensibilities. Children require thoughtful and honest answers.
3. Children adjust quickly to change and are not readily traumatized. Children are resilient. Rare to have genuine childhood trauma. "The medical adage that a bone is strongest at a place where it was broken has its parallel in psychological development as well."
4. Children are active interpreters of their own experience. Children make sense out of the world in their own way--incisive and stubbornly resistant to either manipulation or deception. (This means that children are not susceptible to instant molding by adverse influences such as "peer pressure," rock and roll, or unsavory TV programming.)

"While the child's moral sense is by no means dominant on every occasion, it is as much a part of the child's natural way of responding to the world as is any of the child's other inclinations, dispositions, or drives. It cannot be stamped out or subjugated for long." (p131)

"The seeds of the moral sense are sown at conception, and its roots are firmly established at birth. Every infant enters this world prepared to respond socially, and in a moral manner, to others. Every child has the capacity to acquire moral character. The necessary emotional response systems, budding cognitive awareness, and personal dispositions are there from the start. Although, unfortunately, every child does not grow into a responsible and caring person, the potential to do so is native to every member of the species." (p132)

He goes into a detailed discussion on the moral emotions, moral judgment, social cognition and self-understanding of children. I suspect this is mostly from his book on the Moral Child, so I will skip this part.

"The metaphor that will run throughout this chapter is that socialization is a bridge-building process linking the child's spontaneous experiences to the ideas and values that adults must transmit." (p 144)

"The main task of socialization is to impart the invaluable tools of a culture to its young people. The tools may include knowledge, skills, habits, attitudes, values, practices, understandings, and a host of other mental and behavioral products of learning." (pp 144-5)

Respectful engagement: (p149)

1. creating a dialogue or a project in which the adult and the child share a common interest
2. structuring the dialogue or the project in ways that introduce the adult's intellectual or moral agenda to the child
3. encouraging the child to participate actively in the dialogue or venture and allowing the child's free expression of beliefs (however wrong these beliefs may seem); and
4. expressing, in ways that the child can comprehend, the adult's own perspective. All four conditions are necessary if the adult is to have a lasting, constructive influence on the child's perspective.

This chapter is where he goes into authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting styles. (p 150)

You can't polarize the two, must focus on both.

"Young people must learn to act rightly habitually, as a matter of course. The moral life is built primarily on good habits. It is important that young people learn to resist immoral temptations in the same automatic way that most people refrain, without hesitation, from robbing a helpless beggar or hurting their loved ones. But reflection, when grounded in good values, supports rather than deflects the habitual moral response. Moreover, reflection is one way to guard against that periodic human tendency to blindly stumble into horrendous moral mistakes. Only when habit and reflection marry does sustained moral commitment become possible. It is such commitment, and no less, that we must aim for in our children. It is this goal that must drive our socialization practices." (p 158)

He talks about how difficult it is to parent today. Parents are fearful of many things including: children's emotional blackmail when they don't get their way; disappointing children; harming them by being insensitive or inattentive; living in a dangerous world; pressure to provide the best of everything; not doing enough for a gifted child; and the list goes on and on. He says that Penelope Leach is among the most widely read of today's childrearing experts (Your Baby and Child from Birth to Age Five). (p 166)

He talks about the need for a dynamic interaction between the perspectives of child and adult. "This is the reason that authoritative parenting helps children develop what researchers have identified as "instrumental competence" and "personal and social responsibility"--the virtues that I have abbreviated as competence and character. This is also the reason that authoritarian and permissive parenting both tend to leave children unprepared for such growth. These two styles fail in similar ways for opposite reasons. In the authoritarian style, children cannot find sustaining rationales for the rules that their parents impose (and sometimes they cannot even find the rules, since authoritarian commands often mutate in accord with a parent's erratic whims). In the permissive style, there are no firm external standards to begin with, so the child drifts without direction in a limitless fog of impulse. In both cases, the child ends up uninstructed and unguided. Authoritative parenting works where the others fail because it builds a communicational bridge to the child while at the same time directing the child to the standards and skills of the adult…the common theme among these methods is that they all stress both communication and control, both respect for the child's perspective and commitment to the adult's standards." (p171)

He also refers to psychologist Theodore Dix's work on three broad classes of parental goals: empathetic (make a child feel happy, comforting child in distress, assuaging child's pain or hunger, etc); socialization (oriented towards children's learning and development--they benefit children but don't necessarily please them) and self-goals (goals oriented towards a parent's own needs and wishes) getting child in bed so you can read a book; they are aimed at pleasing the parent. Parents may lean towards one class of goals or they may combine them. The child's socialization suffers when parents pursue either empathic or self-goals singlemindedly. This often leads to imbalances of Chapter 5. Children's developmental needs are often ignored when empathic or self-goals are pursued singlemindedly. "Concerns about the child's socialization still arise; but they arise suddenly, in a disruptive manner, and in contexts that are neither engaging nor instructive for the child.

He then gets into discipline and some of the views out there today. "The classic authoritarian strategy for discipline is power assertion. This method consists of coercion and threats of punishment when children refuse to conform to parental wishes. Often parents attempt to force children to adopt new attitudes and behavior through unmitigated assertions of their power, backed up by severe sanctions for disobedience. This can be highly effective in the short term, particularly when the adult is there to enforce the sanctions. But experimental evidence has shown that power assertion does not lead to long-lasting, dependable formation of habits or beliefs. For one thing, its effectiveness fades when parents are absent." (pp178-9)

"A more subtle and indirect disciplinary strategy is love withdrawal. Parents implicitly threaten to withdraw their love from a child through direct expressions of disapproval. ("I don't like you when you act like that!") Through emotional coldness, or through expressions of disappointment and disinterest, such as ignoring the child for a long period of time after a disobedient act. Observations of contemporary parenting have shown that many parents use love withdrawal in response to all types of child misdeeds, including harm to persons, harm to property, and loss of self-control. Indeed, love withdrawal is a more effective strategy of gaining immediate compliance from children than power assertion. But despite its immediate effectiveness, love withdrawal cannot accomplish the main goal of socialization: influencing children to adopt improved attitudes and behavior that children will consider to be their own. There is no evidence that love withdrawal leads to the internalization of habit or beliefs. Rather, love withdrawal only leads to limited changes in children's over behavior. It may increase the likelihood that children will 'put on a good show' and inhibit any tendencies they might have to be discourteous or disobedient. But it does not lead to the adoption of permanent new standards that children will maintain on their own, apart from any consequences having to do with their parents' approval." (pp179-80)

"A third disciplinary strategy has been identified in the work of developmental psychologist Martin Hoffman as "informational internalization" or, more plainly, induction. According to Hoffman's observations, disciplinary techniques that induce children to internalize key information about the parent's directives are the ones that are most successful at permanently changing children's attitudes and behavior. such techniques succeed because they lead children to understand, and accept, the standards that their parents are trying to communicate rather than focusing only on the sanctions through which parents enforce these standards. An effective parental influence encounter, Hoffman writes, will ensure that the aspect of the encounter most salient to the child will be the attitude or behavior that the parent is trying to instill rather than the child's punishment for refusing to comply. In the most productive of such encounters, the child may forget the sanction entirely. In fact, the child even may eventually forget the parent's role in promoting the standard: the child will come to endorse the standard so wholeheartedly that its origin becomes irrelevant. This does not mean, however, that the origin of the standard is immaterial in a developmental sense. Without the parent's introduction and inducement of the standard, the child may never have come to it. In contrast to power assertion or love withdrawal, induction fosters the permanent internalization of moral habits and standards. The way in which this works can be seen most clearly in the context of a typical disciplinary encounter between parent and child. Right before such an encounter, the child has acted in an improper way. The parent then may stop the child's actions; or the parent may punish the child after the fact. In either case, the child will not be likely to repeat the unwelcome act in the parent's immediate presence. But will the child continue to refrain from this behavior when the parent is not around? This depends upon the type of discipline that the parent administers. If a discipline method is to foster moral internalization, it must use reason and explanation to induce the child to anticipate the effect of behavior on others. Such inductions can take many forms, depending upon the situation and upon the age of the child. For example, an induction to a very young child will emphasize the direct effects of the child's actions: 'If you keep pushing him, he'll fall down and cry.' With an older child, the parent may focus upon the fairness of child's actions in terms of the others' actions and intentions" 'Don't yell at him, he was only trying to help.' Or the parent may point to the psychological, rather than the physical effect of the child's actions: 'He feels bad because he was proud of his tower and you knocked it down.' Inductions nourish the child's concern for others, and they offer the child information about how his behavior can adversely affect others. Such information helps a child better understand interpersonal causality (that is, the relation between the child's own act and the physical and psychological well-being of another); although, as I noted above, the child's maturity places some limits on the type of inductive information that the child is able to process." (pp 180-1) He also talks about the need at times, to combine mild forms of power assertion or love withdrawal with induction to get the child in an "optimal state of arousal" and influence the child.

The minimal sufficiency principle of socialization "states that the most effective methods of permanently improving a child's behavior are those that are applied with just enough coercion or reward to engage the child in the new behavior but not so much coercion or reward that the child finds this to be the most memorable part of the experience. In other words, the external incentives that the adult provides must be minimally sufficient to change the child's behavior without being more salient in themselves than the standards that the adult is trying to promote. Under these conditions, the child’s attitudes and behavior will be permanently transformed, because the child will internalize the new standards. (p 183)

"Informational internalization through induction, the minimal sufficiency principle, and authoritative parenting in general, all share an interactive approach to socialization. In each of these strategies, long-lasting influence upon a child's behavior is achieved through consistent and reasonable family controls along with clear parental communications to the child about the moral significance of the controls. The controls must be convincing, but they should only be mildly arousing in an emotional state. The communications must be adapted to the child's developing cognitive abilities, so that the parent's message of moral significance may be understood by the child." (p 184)

"Beyond socialization practices, the very nature of the parent/child relationship itself provides a communicational vehicle for the parent's standards. An honest relationship imparts the standard of truth more clearly than any disciplinary encounter. An empathic relationship demonstrates the value of empathy more powerfully than any lesson or induction. Children's relations with their parents are among the closest and longest-lasting interpersonal relations that they will ever have. Participating in a parent/child relationship that is caring, responsible, truthful, and fair offers the child a magnificent moral education in and of itself." (p 187)

"The moral quality of the parent/child relationship overrides all other communications that the parent might attempt…. When the quality of the relationship is in line with the parent's message, the message becomes convincing to the child. When a parent's socialization practices are also sound, a positive, enduring and powerful influence on the child's character is established." (p 188)

The remaining two chapters of the book deal with schools and the community. I had to return the book to the library, but if you need these summarized, let me know and I'll finish it for you!

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