Quotes from Jennifer Traig

Every time a girl refuses to eat, she one-ups Eve.

There's a fine line between piety and wack-ass obsession, and people have been landing on the wrong side for thousands of years.

the greatest thing about having so many laws was that you could pick and choose, and move on to the next when the last lost its magic.

We are legion, an army of millions. Though most of us will go to any length to hide our compulsions, we recognize one another. The guy using a paper towel to turn the restroom doorknob, the child counting his eyelashes, the old man wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes - these are my brothers. We are a secret tribe. We're like Freemasons, except that our secret handshake is followed by a vigorous washing session.

Teenagers who experience moderate conflict with their parents tend to be the best adjusted, more even-keeled than those who have little conflict with their parents, or, obviously, a lot.

With or without the books, most children eventually learn, and remember, to control their volume, but not everyone does; it can be an especially difficult skill for autistic children to master.

putting beginning walkers in a "falling cap" or "pudding." So named for its resemblance to black pudding, this was a sausage-shaped padded roll that went around the head and was kept in place with a chin strap. Having seen the pictures, I have to wonder if parents used them because they kept children safe or because they looked hysterical. They eventually disappeared, but left a linguistic remnant in the term of endearment puddinhead.

that about two-thirds of parents do. In one small but astounding survey, 80 percent of mothers acknowledged favoring one child over the others. This was no secret to their children, 80 percent of whom agreed. Interestingly, however, when they were asked which child their mother loved most, they almost always got it wrong. Similar results are borne out in larger studies—two-thirds of children accurately perceive their parents' favoritism, but less than half get the favorite right.

other children's stories were certainly unabashedly racist, too. Among the worst were the popular if unfortunately named series of Dumpy Books for Children, whose titles include the notorious Story of Little Black Sambo

Gesell's group was even weirder than WEIRD. Instead of being fairly representative of most Western babies, they were representative of only a very specific subset of them. Gesell did a lot of his research on the sixty children attending Yale's on-campus preschool.*

By sixteen months, they know what bothers their siblings and will annoy them on purpose.

In the United States teen rebellion is considered standard, putting the American adolescent in the awkward position of having to rebel in order to conform to societal expectations. For an obedient rule-following teen like I was, this is utterly flummoxing.

For now, after a couple of centuries of believing that children were born either bad or blank, children were presumed to be born good. It was the mother's job to protect them from any corrupting forces, to preserve them in a suffocating innocence for as long as possible.

If the mother can't afford to hire a nurse, she should pretend she is one herself: "she must look upon herself while performing the functions of a nurse as a professional woman and not as a sentimentalist masquerading under the name of 'Mother.

Not for nothing did H. L. Mencken define Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

They ushered in what became known as the golden age of children's literature, and remain classics today. As a child myself I felt like I should like them, because they were classics and I was pretentious, but something about them put me off.

Interestingly, the Llewelyn Davies boys were first cousins of gothic novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose own rather gothic childhood is a story in itself, and the reason du Maurier would not permit the publication of her childhood diaries until fifty years after her death.

Bruno Bettelheim, who might have had more influence if he weren't, as Dr. Spock himself noted, a "[v]ery frightening" figure who "scared the hell out of people." A Holocaust survivor with a heavy accent, a stern manner, and some outlandish ideas, Bettelheim gave people the creeps, and after his suicide in 1990, we'd learn there was good reason: his credentials were faked

The Cat in the Hat became a massive bestseller, allowing Geisel to quit his day job and start building the Seuss empire. This included not just books but words: a master neologian, he invented the terms oobleck, grinch, and nerd.

Green Eggs and Ham. The book was not actually written to encourage fussy eaters to eat, but to make Seuss's editor Bennett Cerf eat his words. (Cerf had bet Seuss he couldn't write a book using fifty words or less.) Green Eggs and Ham hit it on the nail, and Geisel won fifty dollars, or would have, but Cerf never paid.

Then there's Russell and Lillian Hoban's Frances series, which is almost unbearably wistful, and no wonder: written just before the Hobans' marriage ended, the books seem to document a happy family that was dissolving as they wrote.

When Thomas Hobbes called life "nasty, brutish, and short," he was describing life during war, but it applies equally well to life with small children (as well as to the children themselves). Like war, it manages to be both boring and exhausting. Day after day, there's nothing to do and so much to get done.

We expect them to acquire a full mouth of teeth and learn where to deploy them (apples: yes; siblings: no).

As Cotton Mather would write some time later, "Better whip't than damned."*