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.
“It is more important that I have a disobedient child than an obedient child… Because it is… disobedience that allows the creativity to come up with new ideas. And it’s… creativity that separates us from the robots…”
– Naval Ravikant, 2023, on the Tim Ferris podcast #662
“What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.”
– Jean Paul Richter, 1807, Levana, pref.
“When we start to view behaviour as a form of communication—when we see hitting another child not as an act of malice, but rather our child telling us, ‘I need your help right now’—then it is much easier to respond peacefully and calmly, and with the empathy that our children deserve. Although it can be so frustrating when our children act in ways which are difficult for us—especially when we are struggling too—we should remember that they are still learning self-control and finding ways to express themselves. We can help them by responding to their behaviour with empathy, and giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
– Eloise Rickman, 2020, Extraordinary Parenting, Chapter 1: Calm in the storm
“You may have heard said about a painful situation in a child’s life—like divorce, a loved one’s death, or abuse—‘But kids are so resilient.’ And by resilient, the person means, ‘This difficult situation isn’t really having that much of an impact on that child.’ Or, ‘He’ll get over it.’ May I tell you, emphatically, that is not true! Children are not resilient in that sense of the word. They are often experiencing as much or more pain as the adults involved, but they have fewer coping strategies to survive. They may have figured out creative ways to numb their pain or keep it hidden…”
– Jenna Riemersma, 2016, Altogether You: Experiencing personal and spiritual transformation with Internal Family Systems therapy, Chapter 4: Listening well to our exiles
“A respectful relationship requires presence, self-awareness, visibility, integrity, honesty, interacting with reality—internal as well as external.”
– Roslyn Ross, 2015, A Theory of Objectivist Parenting, p. 32
“We can’t allow ourselves to be visible to people we are trying to control; that would be ‘showing our cards’; they would know our weaknesses, and then they might ‘win.’ This leads to a loss of integrity since we are not being honest, so we will lie more, this time to ourselves. We will tell ourselves that we do not have to be honest because the people we are trying to control don’t merit our honesty.”
– Roslyn Ross, 2015, A Theory of Objectivist Parenting, pp. 25-26
“An authentic response is not behaviorism. If a baby takes his first steps and his mother responds, “How exciting! You’re walking!” that is an authentic expression of her feelings. If she says, “You’re walking! Good job!” with the conscious or unconscious belief that her approval will encourage him to walk more, that is behaviorism.”
– Roslyn Ross, 2015, A Theory of Objectivist Parenting, p. 10
“When we are controlling other people, we cannot allow ourselves to truly see them, because to do so, we would have to be aware of the pain and suffering we are inflicting on them. So our tendency is to see their feelings as not real—that’s not real pain children suffer when they cry. (This is why controlling relationships can so easily lead to evil, because our tendency will be to fail to see the person we are trying to control as a person. As with slaves, women, ‘savages’, or ‘heathens’—we transform our adversary into something that needs to be controlled: ‘Oh, children, they’re irrational, like rats; they feel safer when you control them; they need it.’)”
– Roslyn Ross, 2015, A Theory of Objectivist Parenting, p. 26
“[W]hen we, as parents, combine the mind destruction of external motivators with playing the role of a warmly authoritative benevolent dictator to our children, we create in our children a habit of subjugation that only ‘heroically independent exceptions’ will escape.”
– Roslyn Ross, 2015, A Theory of Objectivist Parenting, p. 35
“We can’t be present with our child in this moment if we are busy thinking of ways to get him to do what we want him to do and monitoring whether what we are doing is working. This limits our ability to enjoy our relationships with our children, to be consciously aware of them, to connect.”
– Roslyn Ross, 2015, A Theory of Objectivist Parenting, p. 25
“When my son was two years old people kept asking me, ‘Is he defiant yet?’ This is a question that would only make sense to someone who operates in the system of control. I don’t operate there, so I would say something like, ‘To be defiant, one must have someone to defy. There must be a ruler and a subject, someone in control and someone being controlled. I don’t relate to my son in that way.’ ‘Ah,’ the people would reply, smiling sadly at me, ‘you’re permissive. You just let your son do whatever he wants!’ If I am not authoritative, I must be permissive; if I’m not the master, I must be the slave. This is the same false dichotomy.”
– Roslyn Ross, 2015, A Theory of Objectivist Parenting, pp. 39-40
“Work or play are all one to him, his games are his work; he knows no difference. He brings to everything the cheerfulness of interest, the charm of freedom, and he shows the bent of his own mind and the extent of his knowledge.”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762, Émile, Book II
“Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education.”
– Bertrand Russell, 1928, Sceptical Essays, Freedom Versus Authority in Education, p. 172
“The child is weak and superficially foolish, the teacher is strong, and in an everyday sense wiser than the child. The teacher without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily despises the child for these outward inferiorities. He thinks it is his duty to ‘mould’ the child: in imagination he is the potter with the clay. And so he gives to the child some unnatural shape, which hardens with age, producing strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of which grow cruelty and envy, and the belief that others must be compelled to undergo the same distortions.
The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to ‘mould’ the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world.”
– Bertrand Russell, 1916, Principles of Social Reconstruction, Chapter V: Education, pp. 146-147
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations R’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/