“I sound just like my mother!” I’ve said that. Have you? Our words come out in a quirky saying, an idle threat, or a certain tone of voice, and images of our mother saying those same words flash through our minds. Let me tell you: It’s scarier to hear an adult daughter speak and to think, “My daughter sounds like me!”

b y Kathy Van Benthuysen After 30 years in the classroom, I learned something that changed the way I see both teaching and parenting: Children don’t learn the most from what we say. They learn from what we repeat. I could have the best lesson planned and the clearest expectations, but what stuck with them was always what I modeled consistently. And the same is true at home. Whether we mean to or not, we are all teaching an invisible curriculum… every single day. For a long ti