Quotes About Childhood

For the first few years of my life my mom used to cut my hair so there were a lot of bowl-cut hair styles.

Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is a not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child's brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends' kids will not get them, or you, where you want to go.

But what you do in your child's first five years of life—not just the first year—profoundly influences how he or she will behave as an adult.

TV also poisons attention spans and the ability to focus, a classic hallmark of executive function. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under the age of 3, the likelihood of an attentional problem by age 7 increased by about 10 percent. So a preschooler who watches three hours of TV per day is 30 percent more likely to have attentional problems than a child who watches no TV.

is to teach her impulse control in her early

Having a first child is like swallowing an intoxicating drink made of equal parts joy and terror, chased with a bucketful of transitions nobody ever tells you about. I know firsthand:

The fact is, the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.

Truth: The greatest pediatric brain-boosting technology in the world is probably a plain cardboard box, a fresh box of crayons, and two hours. The worst is probably your new flat-screen TV. (See "Hurray for play!" on page 129.)

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.

The world was revealing its death to me by the process of slow discovery: the slowly gnawing loss of innocence; and I found myself longing for the God in Whom, unquestionably, I had believed as a child. But this world of loneliness and desperation belied Him. The sky was now a black cave where once it had been limitless, stretching into that Heaven of childhood angels and peace.

And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window—remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up—and thinking: It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven?

And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself. And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window—remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up—and thinking: It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven?

Because somewhere in that plain of childhood time must have been planted the seeds of the restlessness.

I was bullied as a kid, and I got a job on television. And I had a camera. And so I wanted to go after those business bullies. And I just have been following that instinct.

child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence—

if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.

Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It's the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.

I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.

She had taken voice and piano lessons for ten years as a child, had considered a career as a singer before the lure of space grew too strong.

I haven't had a fight since I was eleven. I only won that because she had an asthma attack.

My name is John Wayne. When I was a kid I had ring worm. Hell, I was more worm than boy for a couple of years.

Her life was invariable, like a low hum; and it was watched over by her mother, who, when Edith was a child, would sit for hours watching her paint her pictures or play her piano, as if no other occupation were possible for either of them.

She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.