Jessica Alexander > Quotes

“Being aware of yourself and choosing your behavior is the first step towards powerful life change. This is how we become better people. This is how we become better parents.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“What if we told you that free play teaches children to be less anxious. It teaches them resilience. And resilience has been proven to be one of the biggest factors in predicting success as an adult! The ability to “bounce back”, to regulate emotions and cope with stress are key factors in a healthy, functioning adult.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“All the clichés turned out to be true: what once had seemed important no longer mattered at all.”
― Jessica Alexander, Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

“Happy kids grow up to make happy adults who make happy kids and so on.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“America, we believe that praising kids for how smart they are builds their confidence and motivation to learn. We are rather obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and innate abilities. We freely praise our children and others because we think it is helpful. But three decades of research done by Stanford psychologist Carol S. Dweck has proven otherwise.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“Most of our default settings are inherited from our own parents. They are ingrained and programmed into us like a motherboard on a computer. They are the factory settings we return to when we are at our wit’s end and not thinking and they have been installed into us from our upbringing.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“First and foremost, I think we must remain calm as parents and try not to lose control of ourselves. For how can we expect our kids to control themselves if we can’t do it? That seems unfair.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“Geert Hofstede, a world-renowned cultural psychologist, concluded in a very famous study about cultural differences that America had the highest level of individualism in the world. That is pretty incredible. We are so programmed to think about “I” that we probably don’t even realize it.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and its correlation to social relationships. They gathered every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world. They found that people with poor social connections had on average 50 percent higher odds of dying earlier (about 7.5 years earlier) than people with robust social ties. That difference in longevity is about as large as the mortality difference between smokers and non-smokers. And it is larger than any health risks associated with many other well-known lifestyle factors such as lack of exercise and obesity.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“Sometimes we forget that parenting, like love, is a verb. It takes effort and work to yield positive returns. There is an incredible amount of self-awareness involved in being a good parent. It requires us to look at what we do when we are tired and stressed and stretched to our limits. These actions are called our default settings. Our default settings are the actions and reactions we have when we are too tired to choose a better way.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning, but for children play is serious learning.” Mr. Rogers”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“In the English translations of Andersen’s fairy tales, adults have paid close attention to what they think children should be spared. In Denmark and in older versions, it is more up to the readers to come up with their own conclusions and judgments. Danes believe that tragedies and upsetting events are things we should talk about too. We learn more about character from our sufferings than our successes and therefore it’s important to examine all parts of life. This is more authentic and it creates empathy and a deeper respect for humanity. It also helps us feel gratitude for the simple things in our life we sometimes take for granted by focusing too much on the fairy-tale life.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“Is there a greater gift you can give to your children and your children’s children than to grow up to be happier, more secure and resilient adults? We don’t think so.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“7. Be real If you want to play with your kids, you must be 100 percent real in what you do. Don’t be afraid to look silly. Let them guide. Stop worrying about what others think of you or what you think of yourself. Get down on their level and try to let go for even 20 minutes a day if it is difficult for you. Even a little playtime on their level is worth more than any toy you could buy.”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World

“When you substitute the “I” for the “we” even illness becomes wellness”
― Jessica Alexander, The Danish Way of Parenting: A Guide To Raising The Happiest Kids in the World