A sense of humor
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The ability for human beings to just guffaw. And when you think about the last time you ever heard anybody do that, people don’t just guffaw. Kids do. They just laugh. I remember laughing as a kid and my mother saying for us to stop it because it was way out of hand and you’re crying, you’re laughing, you’re trying not to laugh. It’s that kind of wonderful humor that has to exist in our world. The ability to laugh at ourselves. The ability to just guffaw.

Never being afraid to learn
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As we’ve learned more about the brain, how it grows and how it develops, we have proven how important the early years are. In that we’ve talked about literacy and we talk about ABC’s, we talk about numbers, and if we don’t understand it really deeply, then we get caught up in the trap that earlier is better and it’s not.

Children need solitude
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If I could do anything with the list that I have of conditions that have to exist I would move solitude up to almost the top and mostly because of the world we live in. We never have time alone. We don’t respect that in children.

Keeping the light alive
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Edison was one of the ones that they talked about and how it was always the mother in the family who said you know what, this child has no business in school. I’m going to take him out of school and then they can do things on their own.

We all need support
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There’s a particular kind of people that you need in your lives and one of the people that we need as a part of our support group would be somebody who can hold you through the night.

The fear that society creates
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Fear comes from not being grounded in what we believe about children and allowing the scary things that you read in the newspaper, that you see on television, and the things that people talk about every day, I got the kid down the street, oh my goodness, what happened?