In case it is not obvious, whilst many of these quotations are consistent with Taking Children Seriously, many of them are not. Sometimes it is just interesting that that person said it, or it is interesting for some other reason.
“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough—that we should try again.
– Julia Cameron, 2016, The Artist’s Way, p. 120
“Gentleness, patience, and love, are almost everything in education; especially to those helpless little creatures who have just entered into a world where everything is new and strange to them. Gentleness is a sort of mild atmosphere; and it enters into a child’s soul, like the sunshine into the rose-bud, slowly but surely expanding it into beauty and vigor.”
– L. Maria Child, 1844, The Mother’s Book, Chapter I: The bodily senses, p. 2
“Who can blame a child for fretting and screaming, if experience has taught him that he cannot get his wants attended to in any other manner?”
– L. Maria Child, 1844, The Mother’s Book, Chapter IV: Management, p. 23
“I have said much in praise of gentleness. I cannot say too much. Its effects are beyond calculation, both on the affections and the understanding. The victims of oppression and abuse are generally stupid, as well as selfish and hard-hearted. How can we wonder at it? They are all the time excited to evil passions, and nobody encourages what is good in them. We might as well expect flowers to grow amid the cold and storms of winter.”
– L. Maria Child, 1844, The Mother’s Book, Chapter IV: Management, p. 46
“I shall feel that I have got to be back at a certain time and it would hang like a dark shadow over my pleasure.”
– Winston Churchill, in a July 1897 letter to his mother, arguing against even one hour of tutoring a day in his summer holidays, quoted in Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert, 1991, Chapter 1: Childhood. For the full letter, and other letters expressing similar requests, see Winston Churchill’s letters, quoted in Randolph S. Churchill, 1966, Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 1874-1900, Chapter 4: Brighton
“How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I made very little progress at my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor. The greatest pleasure I had in those days was reading. When I was nine and a half my father gave me Treasure Island, and I remember the delight with which I devoured it. My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.”
– Winston Churchill, 1930, My Early Life: A roving commission, pp. 12-13
“We expect children to be respectful, yet we continually order them around. […] We yell, threaten, and punish, demonstrating to them that power and coercion are our go-to tools.”
– Hunter Clarke-Fields, 2019, Raising Good Humans, Introduction, p. 23
“It’s amazing to look back now, […] and remember how incredibly difficult [being a parent of a young child] was. We shared wonderful, life-altering joy and she pushed buttons in me that I didn’t even realize I had. At that time, I didn’t know that I was reenacting my own father’s temper, perpetuating a pattern passed down through the generations.”
– Hunter Clarke-Fields, 2019, Raising Good Humans, Introduction, p. 21
“[S]ometimes we [parents] behave impatiently, yell, and act mean. For most of us, thinking about these missteps brings up a kind of shame that feels unbearable. You can choose to wallow in that, or you can choose to use it as a catalyst to learn and change. I invite you to do the latter.”
– Hunter Clarke-Fields, 2019, Raising Good Humans, Introduction, p. 23
“Children naturally want to be like their parents, and to do what they do.”
– William Cobbett: Advice to Young Men, 1829, v
“Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers. […] And, with regard to young women, everlasting book-reading is absolutely a vice. When they once get into the habit, they neglect all other matters, and, in some cases, even their very dress. Attending to the affairs of the house: to the washing, the baking, the brewing, the preservation and cooking of victuals, the management of the poultry and the garden; these are their proper occupations. It is said (with what truth I know not) of the present Queen (wife of William IV.), that she was an active, excellent manager of her house. Impossible to bestow on her greater praise; and I trust that her example will have its due effect on the young women of the present day, who stand, but too generally, in need of that example.”
– William Cobbett: Advice to a Father, 1829, pp. 261-262
“I made everything give way to the great object of making their lives happy and innocent. I did not know what they might be in time, or what might be my lot; but I was resolved not to be the cause of their being unhappy then…”
– William Cobbett, 1829, Advice to young men and (incidentally) to young women in the middle and higher ranks of life, in a series of letters addressed to a youth, a bachelor, a lover, a husband, a father, and a citizen or a subject, Letter V: Advice to a father, p. 230
“Very few adults respect the feelings of children. Generally, expressions of emotion on the part of the young are… dismissed as… of no importance. People who empathize with the feelings of minorities and women persist in insulting the feelings of children. Even the most radical among us is apt to come full halt at the idea of the validity of a child’s feelings. […]
We say things to and about children that would be unthinkable were our victims ‘mature.’ We criticize the way the child looks and behaves. We call attention to faults and failures in a brutal stream of comment and we very often do so within the hearing of other adults or other children. We feel free to question a child’s honesty, his dreams, his thoughts, and his friendships. [W]e do not hesitate to analyze his associates to…his disadvantage. We express our opinions about him, and all that is his, without pity. Furthermore, we ask him to believe that we say these things for his own good.”
– Virginia Colgney, 1975, Children Are People Too, p. 37
“John B Watson, a ‘founding father’ of modern psychology, stated, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.’
Watson’s shadow looms large in many families as parents try to make their children into their preferred version of success.”
– Justin Coulson, 2018, 10 Things Every Parent Needs to Know
“Do your children know that they matter to you? Mattering is crucial for building feelings of worth and value, and growing resilience.”
– Justin Coulson, 2018, 10 Things Every Parent Needs to Know, Chapter 2: Mattering and belonging
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations C’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/