Thomas Gordon

You acquire more influence with young people when you give up using your power to control them...and the more you use your power to try to control people the less influence you'll have on their lives.

It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how we wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.