Quotes About Childhood

What sticks with her students long after they're gone and grown up is the feeling that, as children, this adult treated them as human beings.

It is often the case, as I have mentioned before, that isolators unwittingly recreate the struggle of their childhood by marrying fusers, people who have an unsatisfied need for intimacy. This way, they perpetuate the conflict that consumed them as children, not as an idle replay of the past or as a neurotic addiction to pain, but as an unconscious act aimed at the resolution of fundamental human needs.

In fact, you chose him or her, in part, because he or she recreated the same difficulties you had in childhood.

Your partner may not look like your parents, and on the surface they may not act like your parents. But you will end up feeling the same feelings you had as a child when you were with your parents. This includes the sense of belonging and the love you felt. But it also includes the experience and upset of not getting all your needs met.

Romantic Love delivers us into the passionate arms of someone who will ultimately trigger the same frustrations we had with our parents, but for the best possible reason! Doing so brings our childhood wounds to the surface so they can be healed.

All this may seem like a terrible tangle. But since partnership is designed to resurface feelings from childhood, it means that most of the upset that gets triggered in us during our relationship is from our past. Yes! About 90 percent of the frustrations your partner has with you are really about their issues from childhood. That means only 10 percent or so is about each of you right now. Doesn't that make you feel better?

Ironically, for reasons we will explore in later chapters, fusers (who experienced neglectful caretaking) and isolators (who experienced intrusive parenting) tend to grow up and marry each other, thus beginning an infuriating game of push and pull that leaves neither partner satisfied.

the unconscious is trying to resurrect the past is not a matter of habit or blind compulsion but of a compelling need to heal old childhood wounds.

They did a lot of cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child's life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping.

Every soul is born with concentration; it loses this faculty as it grows up.

As a parent, you do have to constantly remind yourself that you are not a god, molding a human in your own image. You are merely supporting whatever your child chooses to become, even if those choices don't always thrill you.

Children laugh an average of three hundred or more times a day; adults laugh an average of five times a day. We have a lot of catching up to do.

Only adults weep with joy. Children don't. They haven't learned how rare moments of true happiness are.

I've wanted to perform my entire life. I found a paper I wrote in kindergarten class about what I wanted to be when I grew up - and I wrote 'a famous singer!'

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.

Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go hide in the closet for three or for hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.

Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

Off and on for many years, I tried to write a book about my childhood. I'd bring chapters to workshop, to writing group, and I always got the same comments: How could you live this way? How could you survive this? It's too raw. You don't speak to these people, do you? I was deeply hurt by these reactions, and also confused. This was my mother. I loved her. This was my family. My life. How could it be too raw?

As children, we are profoundly loyal to our parents, and to their pain: I wanted to be related to my mom, not ruined by her

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized. —Margaret Atwood

How simple it could be! The answer to the problem of being anything was being it. How admirable Teddy was! From the ashes of his broken childhood he had formed a decision to be a cheerful person, a do-gooding scientific type with knowledge of English literature. That he had undercurrents of sadness as long and deep as a river was not the point. He had claimed a territory for himself and did not think too much about the complications.

Because when a little girl wants to wear jeans and play soccer, her parents are thrilled, but when a little boy wants to wear a dress and play dolls, his parents send him to therapy and enroll him in a study. We just don't know yet the long-term effects on these kids of puberty suppression.

Claude's kindergarten was full-day, six whole hours of sitting quietly and following rules and being away from home where someone—everyone—loved him best of all.