Quotes About Children

And yet the sternness sometimes displayed in your letters to your children bespeaks an appalling sense of doom, as if they, as the product of your sin, had no chance for salvation except as partners in your renunciation.

After a democratic interlude the "monarchy" returns with a vengeance, returns by the back door, camouflaged, masked and diabolically perverted—a blood-curdling metamorphosis we know only from nightmares or surrealist films. The reassertion of the natural father-urge does not result in the restitution of the paternal kingdom but in the rise of the Terrifying Father, a Krónos devouring his own children, who are paralyzed by his magnetic glare like rabbits facing a boa constrictor.

Sexual abuse of children now presents society with the ultimate crisis of patriarchy, when children refuse to protect their fathers by keeping secrets.

If I have done anything, even a little, to help small children enjoy honest, simple pleasures, I have done a bit of good.

It is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food; and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.

When children are exposed through 'sensory education' to a wider range of flavours they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity.

The problem with lunchboxes is the problem with the way we feed children in general. Parents trust that anything they place in this magical box will be good for the child, because it comes with their love.

When fairy-tale children seek their fortune, food is the main thing they're after.

Prolonged chronic malnutrition affects children for the rest of their lives because it affects both brain development and growth.

It is possible for children to learn and improve their eating skills in ways that will automatically lead them to a healthier diet.

If we want to relearn how to eat, we need to become children again. Bad food habits can only change by making 'healthy food' something pleasure-giving. If we experience healthy food as a coercion - something requiring willpower - it can never taste delicious.

We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

Up until the age of three, children have a remarkable ability to stop eating when they are full.

If you want your children to eat better, don't tell them what to do; eat better yourself.

Modern meals marketed at children send the message that if you are a kid, you cannot be expected to find enjoyment in anything so boring as real, whole food.

With good cooking and a patient but persistent approach at mealtimes, it could be food that was both good for the children and enjoyable.

Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.

In most places, for most of history, children's food has not existed as a separate category after the age of weaning.

The main reason to be suspicious of fruit as a food for children was that it was just so delicious.

We know that letting our children eat too many sweets makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don't want their child to get cavities. Yes despite their anxiety about sweets, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks and cereals which are sweets in all but name.

While the form of 'kid food' is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar and fat.

How can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions, calculated to appeal to a child's sense of novelty?

Feeding children too often can make them forget what their own hunger feels like. Large portions lead to overeating. And giving food to calm a distressed child teaches them that unhappiness is a reason to eat.

It's a truism that we know what we like and we like what we know. If you ask young children which foods they most detest, they tend to be the ones they have never actually tasted, often vegetables.