Parenting and Education Articles by Jay Litvin

While he does not know this, he feels it. The excitement that surges through his blood, his heart, his every organ and vessel, his every thought and impulse, carries the assuredness of his rightness, of his necessity, of his essentiality, of his indispensability, of his inevitability, of his potential and his destiny

You will discover a world as authentic as your own, yet heretofore completely unknown to you. It is as fresh as Rembrandt’s, as far-reaching as Einstein’s, as unusual as Van Gogh’s, as terrifying and macabre as Edgar Allen Poe’s. It has its own harmony and logic, if only you suspend yourself long enough to hear and understand it...

What does it mean to be indispensable? For most of my life I’ve asked myself that question.

I see in his eyes the desire to give up. Around his lips I see the sadness and creeping despair. Have you looked into his eyes? My son's, I mean. The one who is having so much trouble in your math class

In the Litvin family, “quality time” doesn’t always happen the way it happens in parenting books. In fact, we’ve discovered that it often has more to do with quantity than with quality.

There were 30 boys, 30 dads, and an even greater number of photo and video cameras

I met them in my car. There were maybe 10,000 or so of them hovering about. Some looked like Walt Disney cartoon angels, others were straight out of store window displays or greeting cards. Some looked like the plaster angels I used to buy in a Mexican market.

Seven words—kindness, discipline, compassion, endurance, humility, connection and dignity—which enable us to explain to our children the nuances of our drives, motives and actions.

Before we can shape our children's character -- or know if such a thing is possible -- we need to know what they're made of. The Kabbalistic doctrine of the "seven qualities" offers a clue

Okay, so I yelled a little too loudly when I yelled at my daughter. Okay, so maybe she didn’t deserve as much of my anger as I let out. But, she did deserve some of it, didn’t she? I mean, could I just let it pass? Not say anything? Who would she become, then?

Our children are communicating to us all the time, in a thousand ways. If only we had ears to hear and eyes to see

The expectation for disappointment is bred, not born. And once enmeshed in a child’s personality, it’s like gasoline poorly stored in a cluttered garage—it takes little to ignite it. And just like fire can be prevented with a few simple, practical steps, so too can volatile scenes of frustration and blame.