Quotes About Childhood

Boy's natural play is rough and tumble play, it's the universal play of little boys. And it's very different from aggression. And we are a society that's failing to understand the distinction.

If asked to make a drawing, little girls almost always create scenes with at least one person, while males nearly always draw things—cars, rockets, or trucks.

My sister and I shared a bedroom our entire lives and I believe she discovered the Beatles when she was about 11 and I'm four years younger. So from the age of 7 until 17 we had nothing but Beatles paraphernalia in our room, even those little stuffed Beatles that went on stands that are dressed as the Sgt. Pepper band.

They never asked any reasons for their parents' fights, thinking all adults unreasonable, violent beings, the toys of their own monstrous tempers and egotisms

There were torments in the Himalayas, windspouts in the Grand Canyon, and Judges of the Supreme Court got into sacred rages. What could little boys do, too, about differences between their hearthstones, Mother and Father?

Unbearable pain that is expressed and acknowledged becomes bearable. But borderlines received no such responses in their childhood. Therefore, they are stuck in the past, trying to elicit what they needed as a child—validation of their unbearable pain.

Upon entering therapy, adult children of borderlines are initially reluctant to discuss their childhood experiences. Several patients developed psychosomatic symptoms such as feeling a lump in their throat or experienced panic attacks following sessions during which they discussed their mother.

Highly scheduled lives and early academics aren't what our children's brains evolved to need.

As a little girl I used to daydream about my real father coming on a white horse to rescue me.

Developmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as imperfect speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time.

It takes at least ten years for a child to learn to coordinate lips, tongue, mouth, and breath with the exacting fine motor control that adults use when they talk.

Advances in biological knowledge have highlighted the potential chronicity of effects of childhood maltreatment, demonstrating particular life challenges in managing emotions, forming and maintaining healthy relationships, healthy coping, and holding a positive outlook of oneself.

When they drove past it on the motorway, he used to fantasise that his parents were about to turn their vehicle towards the car park and surprise him, say the boot was full of secretly packed luggage and they were heading off for a fortnight. When he had kids of his own, he'd told himself, he'd surprise them that way for real.

They say we all have a child within, but that didn't necessarily mean some soul of innocence and lost dreams. Having borne two, Simone knew there was nothing more selfish in the world than a child, until that child is forced to learn that it must share the place with everyone else.

But shopping, cooking and housework must not be allowed to consume all of one parent's time. Both parents need precious time together with their child.

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

Lily had lived in fear before she knew why she was afraid. She'd grown up knowing that people hated her. Perfectly ordinary people, the kind of adults who ought to be helping her to cross the road, hated Lily and wanted her gone. That was the climate of her childhood.

It is no wonder that so many children preferred life on the streets, for street children forced into petty theft and prostitution were also a singular phenomenon of 1940s Spain

Every childhood is a dismantling of wholeness, and every adulthood is a process of putting the pieces together again.

children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary.

When I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema something unexpected happened when the first dinosaur came on screen: I felt a huge, hopeful pressure in my chest and my eyes filled with tears. It was miraculous: a thing I'd seen representations of since I was a child had come alive.

It wasn't just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of all the books I read as a child, his was the only one I remembered where the animal didn't die.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived when grief is experience in later life.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones.