"Do I always HAVE to do what I want?"

-- child in a progressive school, quoted by Fulton Sheen in Way to Happiness.

I'm quoting that because sometimes I think I make things harder for my kids by making things too easy for them ;-). Reminds me a bit of Charlotte Mason:

That the effort of decision is the most exhausting effort of life, has been well said from the pulpit; and if that remain true about ourselves, even when the decision is about trifling matters of going or coming, buying or not buying, it surely is not just to leave the children all the labour of an effort of will whenever they have to choose between the right and the wrong.