Quotes About Childhood

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

Im haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words. Ive been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

Like a good harbor, the child therapist offers the besiegedc child physical shelter, tolerance of her defensive preoccupation, and a rare opportunity to let down her guard and rest. Just as a sinking hull must be righted and secured before more lasting repairs can be made, therapy can help a child enduringly heal only after she has been spared further abuse and neglect.

The child who knows his parents have sturdy end stops will not have to push and test to find the limits and boundaries.

A child learns gratitude by not getting everything she wants. A child learns patience by waiting. A child learns generosity by sharing and giving. A child learns self-control by having to control herself. And above all, she learns contentment by not being trained to always need more and faster.

Being an unspoiling parent is a lot of work. But it is a small price to pay for an unspoiled child.

Tantrums should become less frequent as you proceed through unspoiling. However, they might become more intense for a short while.

Allowing children open access to every aspect of parents' lives can make for children who simply cannot bear the idea of their parents having experiences, relationships, and more that exclude them.

Unspoiling is nothing more than the absence of spoiling.

She would lie in the darkness and hear the rain, then hear her father's soft, soft step rising on the stairs after he had slipped the bolt into the lock of the attic door, and she would slip out of her long woolen night dress and wait for the warmth of him and the wonder of him.

British and American children are often put in a separate room, right away or after a few weeks or months.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

A parent always tries to protect his child's world from the harsh reality of adulthood. - Busch

A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! William Wordsworth - Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one's material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. I daresay that would be all to the good.'16

Bronwen came over plenty of Saturdays after that, but I was always shy of her. I think I must have fallen in love with Bronwen even then and I must have been in love with her all my life since. It is silly to think a child could fall in love. If you think about it like that, mind. But I am the child that was, and nobody knows how I feel, except only me. And I think I fell in love with Bronwen that Saturday on the Hill. Still, that is past.

Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children's sports in history.

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching?

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child's life.

They said he used to cackle and bark in his crib after dark. They said he walked at two months and sat staring at the moon whenever it shone. Those were things that people said. His parents were always worried about him. An only child, they noticed his flaws quickly. They thought he was blind until the doctor told them it was just a vacuous stare.