I’m not saying you have to let your children plant grass on their wall-to-wall carpeting, but I do think that if you want your children to have a joyous, easy relationship with books — and with learning in general — you have to tolerate a certain amount of disorder. You have to let your kids have some control over their environment — and that will probably mean piles of magazines here, lots of sporting equipment over there . . . . Just keep saying to yourself, in eighteen years they’ll go away to college.

Mary Leonhardt in ‘Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don’t‘

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