"We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet."

-Margaret Mead

"No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship."

-Dr. James Comer

"The quality of students' relationships with teachers have the most direct and significant effect on students' involvement in learning. Peer relationships, however, have a very significant impact on students' emotional health."

-Dr. Karen Osterman

"A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove, but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."

-Anonymous

"What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do."

-Stephen R. Covey

"I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de- humanized."

-Haim Ginott

"The last of the human freedoms is to determine one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way. It is not what is done to us that matters, but how we take what is done to us. You are in charge of your own attitude."

-Victor Frankl

"Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out into the ocean."

-Christopher Reeve

"A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark."

-Chinese Proverb

We pray for children...
...who put chocolate fingers everywhere,
...who like to be tickled,
...who stomp in puddles and ruin their new pants,
...who sneak Popsicles before supper,
...who erase holes in math workbooks,
...who can never find their shoes.

And we pray for those...
...who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
...who can't bound down the street in new sneakers,
...who never "counted potatoes,"
...who are born in places we wouldn't be caught dead in,
...who never go to the circus,
...who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children...
...who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
...who sleep with the cat and bury goldfish,
...who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money,
...who squeeze toothpaste all over the sink,
...who slurp their soup.

And we pray for those...
...who never get dessert,
...who have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
...who can't find any bread to steal,
...who don't have any rooms to clean up,
...whose pictures aren't on anybody's dresser,
...whose monsters are real.

We pray for children...
...who spend all their allowance before Tuesday,
...who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,
...who like ghost stories,
...who shove dirty clothes under the bed,
...who get visits from the tooth fairy,
...who don't like to be kissed in front of the car pool,
...who squirm in church and scream on the phone,
...whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.

And we pray for those...
...whose nightmares come in the daytime,
...who will eat anything,
...who have never seen a dentist,
...who are never spoiled by anyone,
...who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,
...who live and move, but have no being.

We pray for children...
...who want to be carried
...and for those who must,
...for those we never give up on
...and for those who never get a second chance,
...for those we smother.
...and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind
enough to offer it.

We pray for children. Amen.

-Ina Hughes

(Prayer of Responsibility for Children ©1995 William Morrow publishers)