Quotes About Children

Mutual defensiveness moves parents and children away from intersubjective experience and joint influence and into a desire to gain control of the situation. To

all the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort." [Paraphrasing Carol Dweck, a psychologist who studies motivation]

Watching too much TV can be harmful for your brain and body. Excessive TV watching has been associated with ADD in children and Alzheimer's disease in adults. Watching more than two hours of TV a day also significantly increases your risk for obesity.

relationship. The mothers of autistic children in their studies started out warm, but actually became more reserved when they did not get positive feedback from their children. The kind of love that is critical to making the parent-infant bond work is reciprocal.

The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.

Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.

More often than not, it's disrespectful to them (our children) - and disrespectful to their struggle with their tasks in life- if our own anxiety as parents makes us cling to our children. It's disrespectful is we demand more intimacy than they are willing or able to give. Too much involvement with our children is not an act of love- it's an act of selfishness.

I think we owe it to our children to share our wisdom. If we share our wisdom for the purpose of changing our children, then that's hitting them over the head with a hammer or shoving something down their throats. If the wisdom turns into advice, that's selfish. But if we simply share ourselves and let our children know our hearts, then it's a gift. And I think it's a gift we're responsible for giving them.

As our children turn even five or six degrees away from us, we have to be aware of our fear and our excitement and our hope for them. And as that five or sex degrees turns into ten or twenty degrees, even ninety degrees, we have to monitor those feelings every step of the way-and ultimately realize that our child is another human being and not necessarily and extension of us.

I think honesty and love help to create the safety that children need to just be children. If we want them to "fix" us, to cure us, to make us better, then we are not being honest with ourselves; we know that children can't heal us or heal our relationships with others. That is beyond their capabilities, and it is certainly not their responsibility.

This is what almost all parents want for their children: a lifetime of happiness and an easy passage.

Children don't learn from lessons or teaching. They learn from what we honestly have to say about our feelings, and they learn from our behavior.

It's very difficult to give up on things we can't control. And that's what a divorce represents. It represents the ultimate loss of control, a marriage and a mate we can't control. And if we give up on the mate and the marriage, by acknowledging that loss, we can free ourselves of the anger and resentment - and that will liberate our children. Finally, children are not affected by our grief and mourning. They are affected by our inability to grieve and mourn.

If we feel guilty about some aspect of our sexuality, I hope we can understand where that's coming from within ourselves and take responsibility for it. But feeling guilty is not taking responsibility; that comes with understanding the true origins of our guilt. And when that happens, it makes sexuality less burdensome for our children. It may not heal the scars and might not undo the damage, but it will certainly open some doors in their lives.

But, if you observe children learning in their first few years of life, you can see that they can and do learn on their own - we leave them alone to crawl, walk, talk, and gain control over their bodies. It happens without much help from parents.

Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a three-year-old who's not curious and self-directed? I haven't. That's how we are out of the box.

Montessori Schools. Dr. Maria Montessori developed the Montessori method of teaching in the early 1900s after observing children's natural curiosity and innate desire to learn.

the Reggio Emilia philosophy for the education of young children and the Waldorf schools.

One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards

To be clear, it wasn't necessarily the rewards themselves that dampened the children's interest. Remember: When children didn't expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you'll get that—had the negative effect.

Looking ahead, future generations may learn their social skills from robots in the first place. The cute yellow Keepon robot from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the ability to facilitate social interactions with autistic children. Morphy at the University of Washington happily teaches gestures to children by demonstration.

And the fetus hears music, as was recently discovered by Alexandra LaMont of Keele University in the U.K. She found that children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb, a year after they are born.

Children's penchant for music seems to begin in infancy. By seven months, infants can remember music for as long as two weeks and can distinguish particular strains of Mozart they've heard versus very similar ones they haven't, suggesting an innate—and evolutionary—basis for music perception and memory.