Quotes About Childhood

Good relationships in childhood do not mean that our emotional life becomes consistently even and positive, but it does mean that we are more likely to discover that our negative emotions are workable and useful and that our positive emotions can be trusted and rejoiced in.

all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.

Aunt-Sister said Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.

No, the mother told her. It's too dangerous there. A small incident, but when multiplied a hundred, a thousand times in a little girl's life, she learns that she's not as capable as a boy of handling life on the edge. She learns to hang back.

It's my earliest memory: arranging my brother's marbles into words. It is summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time.

Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness. Missus was a short

the stethoscope in little David's ears. "Can you hear that?" I asked. "What do you suppose that is?" He frowned for a moment as if he were lost in the wonder of the strange tapping in his chest. Then he broke out in a grin and startled me by saying, "Is that Jesus knocking?

Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.

When I was nine, I discovered God's secret name: I Am Who I Am. I thought it was the truest, most wondrous name I'd ever heard.

Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ?

Wish on a star, said a tiny voice in his head from some long-departed day of early childhood: Wish on a star--the cry of pleasure and faith as ancient as the eyes of man.

The child I was is the only child I really know.' That's it. I can still feel what it was like to be that child of the 1940s from inside; I am still the same mixture of insecurity and determination, shyness and arrogance, curiosity and fear. I have the same talent she had; the same imagination. I write for her, for that child, and so it is true when I say I write for myself.

In this way she perpetuated the pain she had experienced as a child. Not unexpectedly, her enormous accumulated rage had to find a way out, but since she was afraid to express it directly, her body and her moods expressed it for her: in the form of headaches, a knotted-up stomach, and depression.

Women who were unprotected as children don't believe they are worthy of love—on an unconscious level, they believe that if they were, their mothers wouldn't have allowed them to be hurt. "I don't trust that anything good will happen for me," a woman who was an unprotected child tells herself.

My father never did any of the things that my friends' fathers did with them. We never tossed a football around or even watched games together. He would always say, "I don't have time—maybe later," but he always had time to sit around and get drunk.

Adult children of toxic parent have an especially difficult time with their anger because they grew up in families where emotional expression was discouraged. Anger was something only parents had the privilege of displaying. Most children of toxic parents develop a high tolerance of mistreatment. You may have only a vague awareness that anything out of the ordinary happened to you as a child. Chances are, you don't even know how angry you really are.

Like a chemical toxin, the emotional damage inflicted by these parents spreads throughout a child's being, and as the child grows, so does the pain.

Children have a right to be children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful, spontaneous, and irresponsible.

Children growing up in alcoholic homes are buffeted by unpredictable and volatile circumstances and personalities. In reaction, they often grow up with an overpowering need to control everything and everyone in their lives.

The more compliant she is, the more her feelings and needs are ignored, the angrier the girl becomes, and then the more compliant she becomes in order to deal with the anger. This cycle is the track that every mistreated child runs.

I have a horrible time trying to figure out who I am, what I want, or what I need. I'm just beginning to figure it out. The hardest part is for me to like myself. Every time I try, I hear Daddy telling me what an awful kid I was.

The only way emotional assaults or physical abuse can make sense to a child is if he or she accepts responsibility for the toxic parent's behavior.

In fact, not only have a good many formerly abused children grown into nonabusing adults, but a number of these parents have great difficulty with even modest, nonphysical methods of disciplining their children. In rebellion against the pain of their own childhoods, these parents shy away both from setting limits and from enforcing them. This, too, can have a negative impact on a child's development, because children need the security of boundaries.

Alla barn längtar att känna sig trygga, skyddade och älskade av sina föräldrar. De behöver också få lov att växa upp och bli oberoende. Paradoxalt nog kan människor bli oberoende vuxna bara om deras behov av beroende blev fyllt när de var barn. Om deras behov av beroende inte fylldes finns det en värkande tomhet inom dem, och den känslan bär de med sig in i vuxenlivet.