Quotes About Childhood

An adult can be fully aware of his feelings only if he had caring parents or caregivers. People who were abused and neglected in childhood are missing this capacity and are therefore never overtaken by unexpected emotions. They will admit only those feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, who is their parents' heir. Depression and a sense of inner emptiness are the price they must pay for this control.

WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.

Children use that word hate to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened...It is not physical harm that is feared...so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.

My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

Children Katy's age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.

The earth has a mouth?" Buckley asked. A big round mouth but with no lips," my father said. Jack," my mother said, laughing, "stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?

Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Susie misses...

One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: "Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End.

Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on a blanket near the flowers. And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

I knew gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren't.

It did not seem possible that people would bomb one another rather than talk. What fear was this, that kept silent until announced by the loudest sound on earth, the sound of worlds being destroyed. Was it the fear that ones own terror would be glimpsed, ones own childhood of terror guessed?

How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.

Parents and children help each other to grow. In raising their children, parents are also raising themselves. Child rearing gives parents the chance to redo their own childhood and to improve on it.

The child may feel strongly about his or her goals, but it is the parent who is raising the child and not vice versa. While retaining their empathy, adults need to achieve the self-confidence to have the last word when they are not being cruel or unreasonably arbitrary.

Loving children doesn't give them a destination. It gives them sustenance for the journey.

What makes us love a child isn't something about the child—it's something about us. We don't care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them.

Toddlers turn everything from blocks to shoes to bowls of cereal into means of transportation by the simple expedient of saying "brrmbrrm" and pushing them along the floor.

Henry is a youngling

A three-year old was examining his testicles while taking a bath. 'Mom,' he asked,'are these my brains?' 'Not yet.' she replied.

This means that if boys and girls grew up on a deserted island with no organised society or parents to guide them, girls would still cuddle, touch, make friends and play with dolls, while boys would compete mentally and physically with each other and form groups with a clear hierarchy.

was about ten years old. It was called The Geek.

We should not have the ambition to label as mental disorder every inconvenient or distressing aspect of childhood.

INFANCY, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, Heaven lies about us. The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.