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.
“As between children and grown people, it is the grown people that need training.”
– Gail Hamilton, 1875, Nursery Noonings, III: Bringing up parents, p. 63
“[C]hildren are beyond parental control. They are separate and independent human beings, with tastes and tendencies and tempers as distinct as if they were a hundred years old.”
– Gail Hamilton, 1875, Nursery Noonings, VIII: Disciplining children, p. 190
“Loving-kindness is not about being nice in some sentimental or superficial way: it is a fearless, passionate cherishing of everyone and everything, omitting none.”
– Rick Hanson, 2009, Buddha’s Brain : the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom, p. 400
“[L]oving-kindness … calls on equanimity to keep the heart open, especially in the face of great pain or provocation. Kindness is for everyone—‘omitting none,’ in the traditional phrase—with all beings held as ‘us’ in your heart. … You can even be kind to parts of yourself. For example, it’s touching and powerful to be kind to the little child within you. You could also be kind to aspects of yourself that you wish were different, such as a craving for attention, a learning disability, or a fear of certain situations.”
– Rick Hanson, 2009, Buddha’s Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom, pp. 396-397
“Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.”
– William Hazlitt, 1821, The Ignorance of the Learned
“[T]he true antidote to shame is self-compassion, which has the additional benefit of helping people take responsibility for their behavior and actions.”
– Toni Herbine-Blank, Donna M. Kerpelman, and Martha Sweezy, 2016, Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and compassion in couple therapy, Chapter 9: ‘Shaming and feeling shamed’, p. 129
“[C]onflict is an opportunity for mutual growth and understanding. We are not advocating a need for perfect harmony in relationships, but a rupture that goes unacknowledged and leaves anger unresolved will do damage.”
– Toni Herbine-Blank, Donna M. Kerpelman, and Martha Sweezy, 2016, Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and compassion in couple therapy, Chapter 12: ‘Repairing relationship rupture’, p. 157
“They say that children like routine, but do they? The times that stand out for me from my childhood are the times when the routine was broken: fire alarms at school, broken glasses, the stray match that landed in the fireworks box, cars breaking down. Broken routine adds intensity to life.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 17: Learn how to live from your kids
“Try not to fill children’s days. Let them live. The idle parent tries to unite two things: the now and the future. We must try to enjoy our own daily lives while ensuring that our children are enjoying theirs.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 11: End all activities; be wild
“[T]he idle mother does not actually avoid work. On the contrary, like the idle father, she embraces it. Work of her own choosing, that is, independent work, autonomous work, creative work. […] For the idle mother, it is not a choice between ‘going back to work’ or ‘staying at home.’ She explores that vast and rich territory between those two barren poles. She creates her own job, one that she can fit around her children or even stop doing for a few years. And having made the conscious decision to both work and look after the children, she enjoys both. It is our habit of seeing life as a series of burdens imposed on us by outside forces that creates misery. Once we recognise that we are free and responsible creatures, the burden is lifted.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 3: Seek not perfection, or why bad parents are good parents
“Hang out, in that wonderful American phrase. Don’t do things. Let things happen. Just sit one day around the table, start talking and see what happens. You will be amazed at all the wonderful ideas that come out of the children’s minds, and amazed at the creativity that you will find in yourself if you simply stop and listen.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 12: No more family days out
“I am not interested in creating a certain sort of child for a certain sort of role in society. I am interested in making everyday life enjoyable for both parent and child. We should give up the idea of an ideal or perfect education. Everything else will follow from the simple principle of fun, now. Indeed, attempting to look into the future is one of the most dangerous habits when it comes to kids, whose every instinct is to remain gloriously in the present.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 2: Stop the whining
“Drink a glass of wine at bath time. I’m not saying for a moment that you stop loving, hugging, kissing and praising your children and calling them beautiful and wonderful. But all this will come naturally if you enjoy your life and stop resenting their intrusion. […] Hold on to your pleasures.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 3: Seek not perfection, or why bad parents are good parents
“[W]hen oppressed we naturally rebel […] The more rules, the more rules there are to be broken. […] Children resist tyranny at every turn. Do not become a Captain Bligh, ruling through fear, hunger and the lash until the men can see no other option but mutiny.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 2: Stop the whining
“It is our habit of seeing life as a series of burdens imposed on us by outside forces that creates misery. Once we recognise that we are free and responsible creatures, the burden is lifted.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 3: Seek Not Perfection, or Why Bad Parents Are Good Parents
“As John Locke wisely observed, children are lovers of liberty. They resist confinement. […] We should learn from these liberty-lovers to resist enclosure ourselves, rather than attempting to drag the kids down to our slavish level. Forget ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour. Keep instead the poles of ‘free’ and ‘enslaved’ in your mind. Reduce authority and enlarge freedom.”
– Tom Hodgkinson, 2009, The Idle Parent, Chapter 17: Learn how to live from your kids
“[C]hildren do not need to be made (or ‘motivated’) to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. What they need from us is not orders, and usually not even much advice or help, but access to the world—to places and experiences (like the baby climbing the stairs, or the children cooking), to people (children and adults, above all adults whose full-time work is not looking after children), and to tools and resources, including books, music, and the raw materials of art and science.
Our task is to make such things available, and finally, to understand, as Mrs. Stallibrass says, that babies (and I would add all children) ‘can be seriously harmed by being starved of food for their faculties and by the disregard of their wishes.’ May we learn this lesson soon.”
– John Holt, in Alison Stallibrass, 1989, The Self-Respecting Child, Foreword, p. 6
“The right I ask for the young is a right that I want to preserve for the rest of us, the right to decide what goes into our minds. This is much more than the right to decide whether or when or how much to go to school or what school you want to go to. That right is important, but it is only part of a much larger and more fundamental right, which I might call the right to Learn, as opposed to being Educated, i.e., made to learn what someone else thinks would be good for you.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 24: The right to control one’s learning, pp. 242-243
“The requirement that a child go to school, for about six hours a day, 180 days a year, for about ten years, whether or not he learns anything there, whether or not he already knows it or could learn it faster or better somewhere else, is such a gross violation of civil liberties that few adults would stand for it. But the child who resists is treated as a criminal.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 24: The right to control one’s learning, p. 241
“I saw a … father, with a child [aged perhaps 18 months to two years old], waiting for a plane. The child wanted to walk around and explore, and the father was wise and kind enough to let him. As the child walked about in the waiting area and corridor, the man followed him, not so close as to make the child feel that he was being followed or pursued (which usually makes little children want to run) but close enough so that if the child got near anything that might hurt him, the father could move in and prevent it. Also, he stayed just close enough so that now and then, when the child in the middle of his exploring would suddenly think, ‘Where is Daddy?’ and would look around for a glimpse of a familiar face, he could find it. It was a wonderfully tactful and sensitive kind of supervision. The child wandered happily about, over not too great an area—for most small children are timid as well as bold—until he grew tired of exploring altogether and wanted a rest.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 10: The competence of children
“[W]hen I see a very small child intent and absorbed in what he is doing and I am tempted to think of him as cute, [I say to myself] ‘That child isn’t trying to be cute; he […] is as serious about what he is doing now as any human being can be, and he wants to be taken seriously.’”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 12: On seeing children as cute
“The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape.”
– John Holt, 1964, 1982, How Children Fail, Revised Edition, currently in print and published by Penguin, pp. 294-295
“Most children, some time during their growing up, become aware that much of the time their parents talk to them as they do not talk and would not dare to talk to any other people in the world. Of course, we justify ourselves in doing this, as in all our exercise of power over the young, by saying that we have their best interests at heart, are only doing it because we love them—like the proverbial parent saying before the spanking, ‘This hurts me more than it does you’—perhaps one of the world’s oldest lies. […] And so the family home […] turns out much of the time to be the place where at least to our children we can be harsher, more cruel, more contemptuous and insulting, than we would be anywhere else. This supposed refuge for the young becomes the place of greatest danger, where they can get in more and worse trouble than anywhere else, and with people whose support and protection they most depend on.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 8: One use of childhood
[John Holt had taken some young people to France on a trip, and on the way home, he says] “I asked my companions what had impressed them most of all the things they had seen and done, what did they most want to bring back with them and make a part of their lives. Almost all of them said, ‘We like the daily family dinner, all the family coming together, young and old and in between, with plenty of time for leisurely talk, a chance for everyone to have his say, no one left out.’ They spoke with surprising nostalgia, longing, and regret. Without exception, these otherwise typical young Americans told me that in their families, and in all the families they knew, such family meals hardly ever took place—only at Christmas, Thanksgiving, and such special occasions.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 3: Childhood in history
“Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, by trying to ‘educate’ us, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience has no value.”
– John Holt, 1976, Instead of Education, Chapter 1: Doing, Not ‘Education’, p. 4
“Having turned the child into an ideal abstraction, many parents […] have a trajectory (life) all mapped out for this child, and they are constantly monitoring him to see whether he is on the path or whether he needs a little boost from this rocket (psychologist) here or a sideways push from that rocket (learning specialist) there. Is he on course? Is he on schedule? Is he in the correct attitude?”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 13
“Even with babies we must take care to learn to read their signals and to respect them.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 11: The child as love object
“[O]ne might say that all those students are learning something. Perhaps they are. But they will not long remember more than a small part of it, or use or benefit from more than a small part of that. They are learning this stuff to pass exams. Most of them could not pass the same exam even a year later, to say nothing of ten years later. And, if some of what they learn should someday prove useful, they would probably have learned it ten times faster when they needed to use it and thus had a reason for learning it.”
– John Holt, 1972, Freedom and Beyond, p. 200
“[M]ost adults around children do not act as people do when they are with people they like, but very much the opposite. They are anxious, irritable, impatient, looking for fault and usually finding it. There is no ease, let alone joy. And this is true of people on vacation, or celebrating, or going to the park, or coming out of one of the big shows, or doing things that one might have supposed and hoped might be fun. There is always this air of strain, tension, conflict, and a frightening kind of patience that is not a good-humored acceptance but anger barely held back by an effort of will.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 7: The burden of having children
“The trouble with sentimentality, and the reason why it always leads to callousness and cruelty, is that it is abstract and unreal. We look at the lives and concerns and troubles of children as we might look at actors on a stage, a comedy as long as it does not become a nuisance. And so, since their feelings and their pain are neither serious nor real, any pain we may cause them is not real either. In any conflict of interest with us, they must give way; only our needs are real. Thus when an adult wants for his own pleasure to hug and kiss a child for whom his embrace is unpleasant or terrifying, we easily say that the child’s unreal feelings don’t count, it is only the adult’s real needs that count. People who treat children like living dolls when they are feeling good may treat them like unliving dolls—fling them into a corner or throw them downstairs or out of the window—when they are feeling bad. ‘Little angels’ quickly become ‘little devils.’”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 12: On seeing children as cute
“Children do not like being incompetent any more than they like being ignorant. They want to learn how to do, and do well, the things they see being done by bigger people around them. This is why they soon find school such a disappointment; they so seldom get a chance to learn anything important or do anything real.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 12: On seeing children as cute
“I asked [ninth graders this] question: ‘If you could legally live away from home, how many of you think that at least some of the time you would do so?’ Every hand shot into the air, so quickly and violently that I half expected shoulders to pop out of joint. Faces came alive. Clearly, I had touched a magic button. […] I think that they were… saying that they want to live, at least for a while, among other people who might see them and deal with them as people, not as children.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 2: The institution of childhood
“[W]hen we think of children as cute we abstract and idealize them, judge them, exploit them, and, worst of all, teach them to exploit us and each other, to sell themselves for smiles and rewards. This is in every way bad for them and for their relations with us.”
– John Holt, 1974, Escape From Childhood, Chapter 13
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations H’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/