Quotes About Childhood

A little girl wo was criticized or ignored or abused or stifled by an unloving mother becomes an adult who tells herself she'll never be good enough or lovable enough, never smart or pretty or acceptable enough to deserve success and happiness. Because if you really were worthy of respect and affection, a voice whispers inside, your mother would've given them to you.

When a child is not permitted to express her pain, one of the important, destructive messages she gets is that if she is feeling bad it is due to her own deficiencies. Coupled with this is likely the message that if she needs comfort, then she is ugly and repulsive to others.

Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it's supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that's not what love is all about.

Positive humor is one of our most valuable tools for strengthening family bonds. But humor that belittles can be extremely damaging within the family. Children take sarcasm and humorous exaggeration at face value. They are not worldly enough to understand that a parent is joking when he says something like, "We're going to have to send you to preschool in China." Instead, the child may have nightmares about being abandoned in some frightening, distant land.

When a child isn't allowed to deal with his frustrations on his own—to cry, for instance, then to handle the situation, and then to go on playing—because his mother is always there to intervene and rescue him from any discomfort, in adulthood he will be unable to handle even the most minor setbacks.

The misogynist genuinely believes that his rage toward his partner is due to her deficiencies. It is easier for him to attack her than to deal with the real sources of his rage. He feels justified in acting out rage on women. Part of this justification may come from his experiences at home as a child, but a great deal of it comes directly from our culture.

the child becomes an emotional dumping ground, allowing the parents to relieve themselves of some of their discomfort without having to face the source of their problems.

Adult children of toxic parents 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.

When we're very young, our godlike parents are everything to us. Without them, we would be unloved, unprotected, unhoused, and unfed, living in a constant state of terror, knowing we were unable to survive alone.

Did it ever occur to you to rescue me? Do you have any idea what it felt like being a little kid in that house? Do you have any idea what kind of terror I lived with every day? Why didn't you do anything about it? Why don't you do something about it now?

Les had neither the time nor the appropriate role model from which to learn about the giving and receiving of love. He grew up without nourishment of his emotional life, so he simply turned off his emotions. Unfortunately, he found that he couldn't turn them back on again, even when he wanted to

While every parental behavior sends out a message of some kind, it is only the repetitive themes that form the child's picture of the world. If a girl sees her mother accepting physical abuse as well as psychological abuse, she learns that there are no limits to what a man is allowed to do to a woman. A battered woman demonstrates to her daughter that a woman must tolerate anything in order to hold on to a man.

While onlies have no at-home experience fighting with other children, they have another skill that siblings may not have. Onlies learn to fight with their parents and consequently have excellent verbal skills.

Churchill gave the perfect riposte: "When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think, my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.

I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.

When she was five years old, Mem had given her a pair of faceless rag dolls in typical Plain dress. The dolls were faceless to emphasize the notion that everyone is the same in the eyes of God.

Did you know a child laughs an average of three hundred times a day, and an adult just three?

As a child, she'd been a great reader, finding the ultimate escape within the pages of a story. She learned that opening a book was like opening a set of double doors—the next step would take her inside to Neverland or Nod, Sunnybrook Farm or Mulberry Street.

When she was little and a bad dream woke her, Gran would advise her to change the channel by turning her pillow over. It worked every time.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. —CYNTHIA OZICK, AMERICAN WRITER, B. 1928

Let's get lunch at Aunt Carrie's. She looked away, trying to hide her vivid memories of the outdoor café. She and Alex had gone there as kids, sunburnt, their hair stiff with salt and their bare feet, to eat clam cakes and blueberry pie.

So much of a parent's identity was wrapped up in the child: love, pride, self-worth, validation. It was an unfair burden on a small human being, but every child bore it, the lofty, seemingly unreachable expectations of her parents.

When she was a girl, Natalie used to start each day by skipping through the shop, calling good morning to her favorites as she passed them---Angelina Ballerina, Charlotte and Ramona, Lilly and her purple plastic purse.

The girls used to play together in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by Chinese grannies sipping their milk tea and playing board games. They'd snack on soft buns filled with sweet coconut, and when it rained, they'd dunk into the curio shops or the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, their senses dazzled by the delicious, sugary aroma.