Relationships with Children

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Lilian Katz has spent many years conducting workshops for teachers, parents, and students all over the world. During those workshops, she often refers to her son Stephen, and what she has termed the "intellectual emergencies" she experienced during the years he was growing up. Her responses to these "emergencies," the moments when he analyzed her actions and challenged her decisions as a parent and a teacher, are presented in this insightful, witty book.

With music and words from Stephen incorporated into the book, Katz presents an inspirational work for parents and teachers, or anyone who has ever looked into the face of a child and wondered if she/he was making the right choices.

In her book, "Intellectual Emergencies: Some Reflections on Mothering and Teaching," Lilian Katz makes these two observations about teachers' relationships with children:

"Relationships cannot be developed in a vacuum; we have to relate to each other about something — something that matters to the participants in the relationship. The content of our relationship with children should not be mainly about rules, regulations, and conduct, but about their increasing knowledge and developing understandings of those things within and around them worth knowing more about and understanding more deeply, more fully, and more accurately."

"Cultivate the habit of speaking to children as people — people with minds — usually lively ones. Appeal to their good sense. It is not necessary to be sweet, silly, or sentimental at one extreme, or somber, grim, or harsh at the other end. Let us be genuine, direct, honest, serious, and warm with them, and about them — and sometimes humorous too."