Adele Faber Quotes

#1. No one cares / who is better / who is worse / who has more / who has less. / Content in our connectedness / we are brothers and sisters / after all.

Adele Faber

#2. Comforters for our todays / Guardians of memories / Keeping our youth and yesterdays alive / Comrades with one history.

Adele Faber

#3. When we give children advice or instant solutions, we deprive them of the experience that comes from wrestling with their own problems.

Adele Faber

#4. The attitude behind your words is as important as the words themselves.

Adele Faber

#5. When we acknowledge a child's feelings, we do him a great service. We put him in touch with his inner reality. And once he's clear about that reality, he gathers the strength to begin to cope.

Adele Faber

#6. To be loved equally," I continued, "is somehow to be loved less. To be loved uniquely - for one's own special self - is to be loved as much as we need to be loved.

Adele Faber

#7. Every time a parent says to himself, "I wish I hadn't said that. Why didn't I think to say . . . ," he automatically gets another chance. Life with children is open-ended.

Adele Faber

#8. One father said that what helped him become more sensitive to his son's emotional needs was when he began to equate the boy's bruised, unhappy feelings with physical bruises.

Adele Faber

#9. Give information. What we like about giving information is that, in a sense, you're giving the child a gift he can use forever. For the rest of his life he'll need to know that "milk turns sour when it's not refrigerated,

Adele Faber

#10. There are youngsters who prefer no talk at all when they're upset. For them, Mom or Dad's presence is comfort enough.

Adele Faber

#11. The challenge for us is to find some response that actually inspires change rather than clinging to the old ways that cause resentment, and more importantly, distract from the real problem.

Adele Faber

#12. Can I give her a choice about when to do something, rather than insisting upon "right now." ("Do you want to take your bath before your TV show or right after?")

Adele Faber

#13. We too worried about being permissive. But gradually we began to realize that this approach was permissive only in the sense that all feelings were permitted.

Adele Faber

#14. a solution that was fair to all. (I said it, but I didn't

Adele Faber

#15. Sometimes just having someone understand how much you want something makes reality easier to bear. So

Adele Faber

#16. Does my request make sense in terms of my child's age and ability? (Am I expecting an eight-year-old to have perfect table manners?)

Adele Faber

#17. Deep inside you know / when trouble comes / and there's no one else to turn to / you can call on each other / and count on each other ... / because each other / is all you have.

Adele Faber

#18. by listening with full attention, by acknowledging his feelings with a word, by giving a name to his feelings, and by granting him his wishes in fantasy.

Adele Faber

#19. I was a wonderful parent before I had children. I was an expert on why everyone else was having problems with theirs. Then I had three of my own.

Adele Faber

#20. Compassion is always appreciated, whether it comes sooner or later.

Adele Faber

#21. the question "Why?" only adds to their problem. In addition to their original distress, they must now analyze the cause and come up with a reasonable explanation.

Adele Faber

#22. INSTEAD OF DISMISSING NEGATIVE FEELINGS ABOUT A SIBLING, ACKNOWLEDGE THE FEELINGS.

Adele Faber

#23. If someone really listens, acknowledges my emotional pain, and gives me the opportunity to talk more about it, I then "begin to feel less upset.

Adele Faber

#24. Does he feel my request is unreasonable? ("Why does my mother bug me to wash behind my ears? Nobody looks there.")

Adele Faber

#25. We found that when we accepted our children's feelings they were more able to accept the limits we set for them.

Adele Faber

#26. Can I offer a choice about how something is done? ("Do you want to take your bath with your doll or your boat?")

Adele Faber

#27. Refrain from giving the child information she already knows.

Adele Faber

#28. When children want something they can't have, adults usually respond with logical explanations of why they can't have it. Often, the harder we explain, the harder they protest.

Adele Faber