Quotes About Childhood

meant working-class kids like Stan no longer spent their childhoods whacking a tennis ball but hunched over tiny screens. Logan's point was: Don't you dare think I grew up rich and privileged just because this bush neighbourhood got all posh and gentrified.

Joy and Stan used to exchange smiles as their ponytailed daughter glided back and forth across the court, when she was maybe eight or nine, back when she had a "funny little personality" not "a possible mental illness." (Joy never forgave the GP who wrote that particular referral letter.)

One minute they were driving her home from the hospital, a tiny, wrinkled, squalling baby. The next she was all legs and cheekbones and opinions. Whoosh. It made Alice's head spin.

That's true," she'd said, amazed and terrified by the thought. A toddler: an actual miniature person, created by them, belonging to them, separate from them.

A child laughed; a long, gurgling giggle, like a stream of soap bubbles.

The girl said, 'Sometimes you locked me in my room with only water. I had to ration the water. That was a terrible thing to do to a little girl. I thought I would be there forever. I thought I would die. I think I might have come close to dying. A few times.

It gave me a shock. A sudden shock of indescribable pain, like when you're a kid, and you're hit on the nose with a basketball on a cold morning, and you cannot believe how much it hurts, and your friends all laugh and you want your mother so bad.

Separation anxiety was the very first label Joy heard applied to her oldest child, the first of many labels she'd hear over the years, but Joy had felt no sense of foreboding when she heard that first one. She'd felt foolish pride: my child can't bear to be separated from me! That's how much she loves me. Amy used to cling to her like a koala, her face pressed against Joy's collarbone.

He'd be fine. Every child went to school. They survived. They learned the rules of life.

And of course Madison would have been smart enough to pick up on Alice's resentment. She was already a child who felt everything far too deeply. She'd seen her mother's friend killed in an accident and then her parents separated. No

Mummy!" Maddie toddled back into the kitchen, an expression of perplexed delight on her face. "Look!" She held up two copies of Good Night, Little Bear. Lyn said, "Fancy that!" and Maddie plunked down onto her bottom with both books in front of her, her head turning back and forth, as she flipped each page, intent on solving this mystery.

care that he didn't care? When he was a kid all he'd wanted to do was beat his older brother, in anything and

If you're not asking every child in the class, you don't hand out the invitations on the playground," said Madeline. "Every mother knows that. It's a law of the land." "I could talk about this subject all day long," said Ed. "I really could. There is nothing else I want to talk about today other than Amabella's fifth-birthday party.

When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. "You see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don't like them!

She often experienced an uneasy sense that she was somehow faking a life for him, giving him a pretend childhood.

It turned out that a conversation with Bonnie was just like being in labour: the pain could always get much, much worse. chapter fifty-three 'Ziggy is a lovely little boy,' said the psychologist.

Chloe handed a pink envelope to Madeline. "Can you keep this, Mummy? It's an invitation to Amabella's party. You have to come dressed as something starting with A. I'm going to dress up as a princess." She ran off.

guess Jack is too big for sandboxes now, although it's still there in their backyard. Sometimes, when Patrick is at work and Jack is at school, I go to the house and eat my lunch in the backyard.

No kid was going to go to school in a place that looked like freaking Buckingham Palace and come out of it resilient.

The last time she had had anything close to an enemy, she was in primary school herself. It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.

Lars swirled the tasting glass... an instant memory of an autumnal day... It felt like a childhood memory, but probably wasn't. More likely a memory he'd borrowed from a book or movie.

Nowadays we label children too quickly as bullying, when in fact they can only behave like children.

Loving parental care has unmatched transformational powers in restoring the child's developmental momentum in risk situations.

Babies and young children thrive when they feel secure in their parents' care as they experiment with their bodies, relationships, and physical environment. When the child cannot feel safe because the parent is consistently unavailable, unpredictable, or frightening, the basic conditions that promote early mental health are severely undermined.