Quotes from Rahima Baldwin Dancy

Children enter the world with a great deal of love and trust. They are not yet able to perceive good and bad, but they take everything as good and appropriate to absorb and unconsciously imitate.

Imitation and repetition are the keys to discipline with the young child, not reasoning or punishment.

real difficulty comes when we are doing something that we don't want to be doing. For example, if we must work when we want to be home, or if we are staying home when it is driving us crazy, then our parenting will tend to be influenced by guilt, resentment, and a whole range of other negative emotions. We need to make our best choices at each moment. We can't always have what we feel would be ideal, but we can actively do the best with the options as we see them.

Giving a child a doll with breasts is projecting her out of her childhood into the teenage world. Barbie dolls and those with "attitude" like Bratz dolls form a multimillion-dollar enterprise that shortchanges the world of the young child.

Kindergarten, as first conceived by Friedrich Froebel in the nineteenth century, was a place where children would play, as if in a garden. However, the push to teach to the test has squeezed self-directed play out of kindergartens almost entirely, as described by the Alliance for Childhood in their report Crisis in the

The abundance of the children's room must be every parent's or child's worst nightmare. "I'm bored." "I've got nothing to play with"—even though the shelves are full to the brim. Dust-collectors, a useless mess. Where is the love for the teddy bear, the doll, the car? The present which was given in love and did not drown in abundance is hard to find. The child does not need the toys—the toy factories need the child.15

Before the age of two, children who are exposed to television don't really watch the screen for more than a few seconds at a time. The medium is totally inappropriate for the toddler, who needs to be moving and actively exploring.

You can nourish the development of your child's imagination by providing nourishing images from stories the child hears and limiting images the child receives from television, computer games, videos, and movies.

Our actions speak louder than our words with the young child, who cannot help but imitate. Through us, children learn whether or not their initial love and trust in the world were well founded.

The years from three to six provide a lifelong foundation for creativity that should not be undervalued or foreshortened

Indeed, we came to believe that the more informal education that families provide for their children makes more of an impact on a child's total education than the formal educational system. If a family does its job well, the professional can then provide effective training. If not, there may be little a professional can do to save a child from mediocrity.

Parenting is a process of mutual growth, during which parents and children grow on different levels through their interactions and through the elements they bring into one another's lives.

fantasy and imagination, which are so natural for the young child, form a better foundation for later creative thinking than early learning. Creative thinking is more needed in our highly technological world than four-year-olds who can push the buttons on the computer.