Post Description

Barbara Coloroso is a bestselling author and, for the past 30 years, an internationally recognized speaker and consultant on parenting, teaching, positive school climate, nonviolent conflict resolution, and grieving. She has appeared on Oprah, CBS's The Early Show, and more, and she has been featured in The New York Times, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and elsewhere.

Her uniquely effective parenting strategies were developed through her years of training in sociology, special education, philosophy, and theology (she is a former Franciscan nun), as well as field-tested through her experiences as a classroom teacher, university instructor, seminar leader, and mother of three grown children. Her classic books include Parent’s Guide Award winners kids are worth it! and Parenting Through Crisis.

Quotations From Barbara Coloroso:

"Our goal as a parent is to give life to our children's learning—to instruct, to teach, to help them develop self-discipline—an ordering of the self from the inside, not imposition from the outside. Any technique that does not give life to a child's learning and leave a child's dignity intact cannot be called discipline—it is punishment, no matter what language it is clothed in."
 
"The greatest part of each day, each year, each lifetime is made up of small, seemingly insignificant moments. Those moments may be cooking dinner...relaxing on the porch with your own thoughts after the kids are in bed, playing catch with a child before dinner, speaking out against a distasteful joke, driving to the recycling center with a week's newspapers. But they are not insignificant, especially when these moments are models for kids."

"There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that's control our children's will—that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind."

"Every time a child organizes and completes a chore, spends some time alone without feeling lonely, loses herself in play for an hour, or refuses to go along with her peers in some activity she feels is wrong, she will be building meaning and a sense of worth for herself and harmony in her family."

"Ecouraging a child means that one or more of the following critical life messages are coming through, either by word or by action: I believe in you, I trust you, I know you can handle this, You are listened to, You are cared for, You are very important to me."


"Our children are counting on us to provide two things: consistency and structure. Children need parents who say what they mean, mean what they say, and do what they say they are going to do."

"If we parents accept that problems are an essential part of life's challenges, rather than reacting to every problem as if something has gone wrong with universe that's supposed to be perfect, we can demonstrate serenity and confidence in problem solving for our kids....By telling them that we know they have a problem and we know they can solve it, we can pass on a realistic attitude as well as empower our children with self-confidence and a sense of their own worth."