I was brought up in a house where there was a great deal of silence.

When you're leaving your teenage kids alone, probably a good idea to let them know you're going to be checking in on them occasionally. I suspect Greenspan missed that part.

We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.

The ideal home: big enough for you to hear the children, but not very well.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

Children of that age often fall downstairs, you did. Twice. You only worry if there's silence when they reach the bottom.

What is adolescence without trash?

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on.

YELLING silences your message. Speak quietly so your children can hear your words instead of just your voice.

I do not believe that unless you can persuade parents that the family should still remain the unit in which discipline is applied, you will never get a conquest of the crime wave. ... We have created a better and happier state from the material point of view, but, at the same time, there is no doubt that the younger generation, especially just before leaving school, and between the ages of 17 and 19, are much more unruly than is right in a modern, civilized society.

A mother needs to be in the home even when the kids aren’t. A messy house sends a coded message to children: “I’m not loveable. Otherwise Mother would dust.

The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.

But there are no adults. We own this mess.

We got the report from a child which was really sad — that there is no peace in their home. That is why to me this is very unique because mothers and fathers fight but, when it bothers the children, it’s more than what people should take. And then with the curfew, most conflicts are happening in the night or late in the evening so the kids cannot even run out.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.