The light in children’s eyes — There’s a spirit inside every child and every day it seems to change because they’re interested in new things and in different things and it has kept me so fully alive.

Being productive — Being productive

The first place to be – nature — One of the things that I know about children is that the first place they need to be is in nature. It’s in the outside. It’s in the sand, the dirt and the water and the leaves and spinning and running, and running full bore. And that’s what I don’t see any more. What I see is they’re programmed.

A sense of humor — 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 — 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 — 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.