The best communication advice I’ve received

Some of these lessons are expressed in a now-out-of-print book Thomas Murray wrote about parenting, called A Child to Change Your Life.

“If I teach any children of mine nothing else,” he wrote, “I want them to know and understand the absolute, profound and positive relationship between happiness and love.

“But I plan to give them no long lectures on love. In the first place, I know of no way to tell them why I love their mother. And how much I love her is not something I can say, but something they must see.

“I will not even try to tell them that they must search for a love that looks and sounds and seems as great and as good as ours. I think only that I must show them that loves like ours exist.”

More: “I know the importance of saying to a child in the middle of a family discussion, however important or unimportant, ‘What do you think?’”