My fictional character Sarah lived in Pennsylvania in the early 1700's, when families living on farms had to raise, grow and make almost everything they needed to survive. Most colonial homes were a single room, often with a sleeping loft for older children. Parents and younger children slept on the ground floor in front of the fireplace, and almost everyone slept on mats of rush or feathers, which were rolled up during the day.

Chairs were expensive and were usually used only by the father of the family — everyone else sat on benches or stools. But during meals, children were not allowed to sit, and they were NEVER allowed to speak while eating — for any reason at all.

The women of the house did the cooking, and in those days, many young women died from their clothing catching on fire. Spoons and knives were the only eating utensils, and often just one mug was passed around from person to person. Water was considered unsafe to drink, so everyone drank beer, including babies and children. (It was brewed to be barely alcoholic.)

New clothing was almost all handmade, and it was a very time-consuming process. A girl would wear her only dress every day for as long as it fit, even it is was a year or more. It was an exciting day when a girl got a new outfit to wear!

No set of discipline techniques will give you a good relationship with your children.

Discipline techniques are only fine-tuning mechanisms. As on a television set, the fine-tuning knob will only work when the signal is strong enough. The feeling is the signal.

The feeling is what we feel in our hearts, and the relationships we build ... If the right feeling is not present, our discipline will not work. At best we will get temporary, begrudging compliance.

In essence, two understandings lie at the heart of parenting:

1. Our children always carry within them all the mental health and well-being, wisdom and common sense they will ever need. It only needs to be drawn out and nurtured in the kind of loving environment that will help it flourish.
2. Our children can access this innate health and wisdom by understanding that they have it, by seeing how they think in ways that keep them from realizing it, and by quieting or clearing their minds of such thinking so their health and wisdom are unveiled and available to guide their lives.

The same is true for parents. We can access our health, well-being and wisdom at any time to guide our parenting.

As trees in a forest naturally gravitate towards the light, when we create the kind of environment that draws out this natural health and wisdom, we naturally guide our children in healthy ways and away from unproductive feelings and disruptive behaviors.

First, let no one rule your mind or body. Take special care that your thoughts remain unfettered. One may be a free man and yet be bound tighter than a slave. Give men your ear, but not your heart. Show respect for those in power, but don't follow them blindly. Judge with logic and reason ...

If there is a recurring theme in (President James) Garfield's diaries it's this: I'd rather be reading. That might sound dull and perfunctory, but Garfield's book fever was a sickness. Take, for example, the commencement address he delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880. Traditionally, these pep talks to college graduates are supposed to shove young people into the future with a briefcase bulging with infinitive verbs: to make, to produce, to do. Mr. Loner McBookworm, on the other hand, stands up and breaks it to his audience, the future achievers of America, that the price of the supposedly fulfilling attainment of one's personal and professional dream is the irritating way it cuts into one's free time. He tells them,

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure - the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.

the only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word "dude." Keep in mind that at that moment Garfield was a presidential candidate. The guy who theoretically wants the country's most demanding, hectic, brain-dive-denying job stands before these potential gross national product producers advising them to treat leisure "as your gold, as your wealth, as your treasure." As Garfield left the podium, every scared kid in the room could probably hear the sound of the stock market crashing him back to his old room at his parents' house where he'd have plenty of free time to contemplate hanging himself with his boyhood bedsheets.

yeah, so this guy's kicking around, you know, back in the day, and runs into this chic in like an open air market or something. well she's super hot and he's super into her from the start. and she's jonsin' for him too and before you know it they hook up and they're shacking which way back then was a bit of a thing but this is just how into one another they are. but then for some reason god looks in on the dude and totally freaks out. something about the girl being the guy's sister or his brother's wife or the like and god tells him to shag his ass out of her crib or he's going to open up some real biblical whoop-ass on him. so the dude bolts but the locals catch wind of it all and everyone starts calling the girl a hoe-bag and threatening to stone her ass because she gave it up to some dude who was passing through town and turned out to be a relation. but damn, everyone was related back then so i don't know how you could avoid tapping anything less than a first cousin.

Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me -
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has specials needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Special Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and i won't go to prison.

Considerable evidence suggest that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods - such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job - then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer - and happier - lives.

During pretrial hearings, Ron's behavior in the courtroom served to underscore his lawyers' contention that he was mentally incompetent. He appeared with a cloth sign attached to the seat of his prison jumpsuit that read, EXIT ONLY; his attorneys explained that he wore the sign to ward off the Mormon angel Moroni, who Ron believed was an evil homosexual spirit trying to invade his body through his anus. He believed that this same sodomizing spirit had already taken possession of Judge Hansen's body, which is why Ron made a point of shouting profanities at the judge and addressing him with such epithets as "Punky Brewster" and "f*cking punk."

Under the new rules, Matilda was no longer allowed to drive, handle money, or talk to anyone outside the family when Dan wasn't present, and she had to wear a dress at all times. The children were pulled out of school and forbidden to play with their friends. Dan decreed that the family was to receive no outside medical care; he began treating them himself by means of prayer, fasting, and herbal remedies. In July 1983, when their fifth child was born, a son, Dan delivered the baby at home and circumcised the boy himself.

They began raising much of their own food, scavenging the rest from dumpsters behind grocery stores, where stale, unsold bread and overripe produce were regularly discarded. Dan turned off the gas and electricity. No publications of any kind were allowed in the home, except Latter Day Saints books and magazines. Dan even got rid of all their watches and clocks, believing the should "keep time by the spirit." When Matilda disobeyed Dan, he spanked her.

Spank was the verb Dan used. According to Matilda, the blows he delivered felt more like "thumps". And when he thumped her, he often did it in front of Dan's mother, his brothers, and all their children. Afterward, he warned Matilda that if she continued to disobey, she would be forced out of the marriage without her children - who, according to the principles elucidated in The Peace Maker, were the father's property.

Dan also announced that he intended to engage in spiritual wifery at the earliest opportunity. And the first woman he proposed taking as a plural wife was Matilda's oldest daughter - his own stepdaughter.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse; to keep you you.

...

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.

How the agent explained his plan to me was, we weren't targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.

Like anyone else, I maintained a healthy interest in farts, all ten varieties - the silent but deadly, the slow leaks, the hissers, fizzers, poppers, croakers, bangers, cheek-flappers, tail-gunners, and cargo farts, the ones that deliver a load - and this one was in a class all its own. A small dark cloud of a fart such as an alien from outer space might deliver to Earth, necessitating the evacuation of cities.

He was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from Black Beauty or The Chronicles of Narnia. How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak uncertainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

And, in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector's armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.