Quotes About Childhood

It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

Whenever I hear about saintly parents, I get suspicious. It's not that I'm looking for problems. It's just that no parent is a saint. Most of us end up being the "good-enough" parents that Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, believed was sufficient to raise a well-adjusted child.

Children, bound by parental rules, are really free only in one aspect—emotionally. For a while, at least, they can cry or laugh or have tantrums unselfconsciously; they can have big dreams and unedited desires. Like many people my age, I don't feel free because I've lost touch with that emotional freedom.

Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?

The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side.

It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space. It's double shaming - shaming to REMEMBER as well, to fee so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people's purgatory.

Grandfather's skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on.

When I was a kid, I used to imagine animals running under my bed. I told my dad, and he solved the problem quickly. He cut the legs off the bed.

Humans, having the most complex brains and intricate society, have the most prolonged period of total dependency of any species (Cacioppo & Berntson, 2002). Compared with the young of other primates, human babies are born quite early relative to the maturity of their brains. In fact, the first 3 months of life have sometimes been referred to as the fourth trimester. If we followed the pattern typical for other primates, we would stay inside our mothers for 24 months (Gould

Cap truly believed there was nothing harder than being a kid. You were always an alien trying to learn the earth rules.

Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.

Avoid getting all upset by your child's demands and rigidities. Try to see these behaviors not as badness or rebellion but rather as immaturity. Try to appreciate the wonder and complexity of growing behavior, even when it makes trouble for you.

Eight-year-olds are quite normally all mixed up with their mothers. The mother-child relationship at this age is one of the strongest, deepest, most demanding, and yet most tangled to date.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

It's what we all wanted when we were children- to be loved and accepted exactly as we were then, not when we got taller or thinner or prettier...and we still want it... but we aren't going to get it from other people until we can get it from ourselves.

When We Grow Up, We Have a Tendency to Re-create the Emotional Environment of Our Early Home Life This is not good or bad, right or wrong; it is just what we know inside as "home." We also tend to recreate in our personal relationships the relationships we had with our mothers or with our fathers, or what they had between them. Think how often you have had a lover or a boss who was "just like" your mother or father.

Almost all of our programming, both negative and positive, was accepted by us by the time we were three years old. Our experiences since then are based upon what we accepted and believed about ourselves and about life at that time. The way we were treated when we were very little is usually the way we treat ourselves now. The person you are scolding is a three-year-old child within you.

When We Are Very Little, We Learn How to Feel about Ourselves and about Life by the Reactions of the Adults Around Us It is the way we learn what to think about ourselves and about our world. Now, if you lived with people who were very unhappy, frightened, guilty, or angry, then you learned a lot of negative things about yourself and about your world.

We also treat ourselves the way our parents treated us. We scold and punish ourselves in the same way. You can almost hear the words when you listen. We also love and encourage ourselves in the same way, if we were loved and encouraged as children. "You never do anything right." "It's all your fault." How often have you said this to yourself? "You are wonderful." "I love you." How often do you tell yourself this?

Did your childhood circumstances teach you to believe, "Nobody loves me"? Then you are sure to be lonely. Even when you bring a friend or relationship into your life, it will be short-lived.

The women in the room chatted about love, about childhood, about losing parents, about Mr. Spock, about good books they'd read. They mothered each other.

All children are sad, but some get over it.

Armand wondered if Florence understood that line from The Little Prince. He hadn't, as a child. It was only as he got older that he knew it to be true.

Florence had made a tent of her bedding and was under it with a flashlight, reading The Little Prince.