Quotes About Childhood

In dysfunctional families, people overfocus on problems—even very small ones—without allowing any focus on the innumerable ways a child does things well. This is one of the primary causes of low self-esteem. A child can do ten, fifty, a hundred things right in a day, but an overly critical parent will pick out the one thing that doesn't go well, and harp on it over and over.

If a small child's needs are not met with at least some regularity, there is a tremendous sense of frustration, of powerlessness to get anything that he or she needs. Over time, as the frustration builds up and is repressed again and again, it becomes too painful to face, and a sense of futility develops. If it isn't acknowledged and allowed expression, the frustration will continue to hide under the surface and grow into a feeling of futility.

Usually this is a result of having had to be hypervigilant as a child—especially if your family situation was chaotic or frightening—and consequently developing a habit of trying to see problems before they even show up.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller reports that many adults are unable to remember their childhoods. According to Miller, these memories are repressed at a time when it is necessary for the child's emotional survival to forget. To experience the pain of wounds inflicted by parents on whom the child is totally dependent is, in the child's undeveloped mind, tantamount to death. And so the child learns not to feel—and eventually, not to remember—these hurts.

It was nice, them having this kind of knowledge about each other. No one else knew this about him. She supposed in every person there were bits of you that you shared only with the people you had been a child with.

Those fields of childhood, tall Meadow-grass and flowers small, The elm whose dusky leaves Patterned the sky with dreams innumerable And labyrinthine vein and vine And wandering tendrils green, Have grown a seed so small A single thought contains them all

Easing back in her seat, Grace watched the children in the playground opposite, coats off, faces flushed, laughing hysterically with pleasure. They were so vividly alive, completely immersed in the game. She tried to recall a time when she'd been that way and realized she couldn't remember when that had been. She'd lost the knack of forgetting herself. Instead she seemed to look down on herself throughout the day, scrutinizing, judging; finding herself wanting more.

It's a miracle, really, that any of the royal children went on to become King. But maybe there's no version of childhood that could adequately prepare you for that particular future.

That afternoon, I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself, a lesson reinforced often during a childhood of female warfare and tricky, shifting alliances, so often that my genius for envasion at last approaches that of my mother. She may sleep with a mask, but by the time I am a teenager I have made one within myself, I have hidden my heart.

We used to run all the time as boys, remember?" Archer's grin grew. "I remember Tryst trying to keep up. Poor little bastard.

The better the child, the worse the teenager

I see Christina, emerging, chewing and sticky-fingered, between two panels of the tent. Partly out of bravado and partly in order to test what will happen, I bite her on the arm as hard as I can

The mental Images were liquifying So I could no longer separate what I was recalling from the past from what I'd seen in detailed photos that afternoon. Like life. I've long suspected that many of my memories from childhood Are actually drawn from old pictures, That they are composed of snapshots, A mosaic of celluloids Images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backwards. Maybe it's better to recall The pass that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

The mental images were liquifying so I could no longer separate what I was recalling from the past from what I'd seen in detailed photos that afternoon. Like life. I've long suspected that many of my memories from childhood are actually drawn from old pictures, That they are composed of snapshots, A mosaic of celluloids Images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backwards. Maybe it's better to recall the past that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

I felt like I was ten again and had been caught using my uncle's Cuban cigars as miniature canoes in the toilet.

I was born. It was easy. My mother did all the hard work.

I feel it, that expansiveness specific to childhood, the breath filling you all the way up to the puff of your cheeks, the feeling that each breath is good.

My dad would give me $10, which is a lot of money when you're 9, to sing at church, on tables at restaurants, at family functions, just about anywhere.

The needy child voice inside me said, If she says you're a nut, then you must be a nut. She's your mother, the one who always tells the brutal truth.

I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.

I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster.

in the end it was better to have the love of a confessed killer, than to have no love at all, especially when you were just twelve years old.