Quotes About Childrearing

Imitation is absolutely crucial for childrearing. You do not want your children imitating you unless you are imitating God.

Hardship in a story is grace; hardship without a story is just pain. Childrearing is the opportunity that you have to love your children in preparation for a harvest, but that means you need to have the harvest in mind.

mothers (mothers were more likely to be the focus of studies than fathers in that era) who helped the older child understand the baby by saying things like "The baby is crying. Why do you think he's crying? Do you think he's hungry or needs his diaper changed? Let's try to feed him and see if he stops crying" had children who were more likely to fight less and get along better as they grew up.

What the Shoshones valued above all else, and depended on absolutely, was the bravery of their young men. Their childrearing system was designed to produce brave warriors. "They seldom correct their children," Lewis wrote, "particularly the boys who soon became masters of their own acts. They give as a reason that it cows and breaks the Sperit of the boy to whip him, and that he never recovers his independence of mind after he is grown." In

Because men and women in a relationship have many conflicting interests, evolutionary theory does not view love relationships as harmonious partnerships for childrearing; but a universal feature of human cultures is that men and women form relationships intended to last for years (marriage) that constrain their sexual behavior in some way and institutionalize their ties to children and to each other.

No one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.

the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering.

At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55.

The central focus of childrearing is to bring children to a sober assessment of themselves as sinners.

There are enough women to do the childbearing and the childrearing. I know of none who can write my books.

Limbic structures generate feelings of pleasure and sexual desire—the emotions that feed sexual passion. But the addition of the neocortex and its connections to the limbic system allowed for the mother-child bond that is the basis of the family unit and the long-term commitment to childrearing that makes human development possible. (Species that have no neocortex, such as reptiles, lack maternal affection; when their young hatch, the newborns must hide to avoid being cannibalized.)

Equally misplaced was the notion "maternal instinct." With animals, childrearing is a matter not of instinct but of art. It can't be very much different for humans or they wouldn't keep adopting children of different species.

The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.