Quotations S

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.

“All Truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

“Self-leadership is a non-coercive, collaborative style of leadership. The Self will try to understand parts and people and release them from their extreme roles, rather than trying to force them to change.”

– Richard C. Schwartz, 1995, Internal Family Systems Therapy

“It is one of the great injustices in this world that so often people who are abused as children are doomed to lives of recurrent mistreatment by the beliefs and emotions they accumulated during the initial abuse. Often such people are blamed by family members … for choosing and deriving pleasure from their plight. ‘There has to be something she’s getting from being with such an awful guy.’”

– Richard C. Schwartz, 2008, You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing courageous love to intimate relationships, p. 81

“None can be call’d deform’d but the unkind.”

– Shakespeare, c. 1601, Twelfth Night, III

“And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.”

– Shakespeare, c. 1600, As You Like It, II

“Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.”

– George Bernard Shaw, 1903

“Children need to be enjoyed and valued, not managed.”

– Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell, 2004, 2014, Parenting from the Inside Out: How a deeper self-understanding can help you raise children who thrive, 10th anniversary edition, Introduction, p. 45

“When parents don’t take responsibility for their own unfinished business, they miss an opportunity not only to become better parents but also to continue their own development. … An unresolved issue can make us quite inflexible with our children and often unable to choose responses that would be helpful to their development. We’re not really listening to our children because our own internal experiences are being so noisy that it’s all we can hear. We are out of relationship with them and we will probably continue taking the same actions that are unsuccessful and unsatisfying to us and to our children because we’re stuck in reactive responses based on our past experiences.”

“No one had a ‘perfect childhood’ and some of us had more challenging experiences than others. Yet even those with overwhelmingly difficult past experiences can come to resolve those issues and have meaningful and rewarding relationships with their children.”

“A culture of compassion promotes appreciation of differences, mutual respect, compassionate interactions, and empathic understanding among family members. … A culture of compassion in the home promotes the attitude that sharing others’ emotions, feeling their pain and their joys, is valuable. … When family members understand and respect each other, they are more likely to act in caring ways.”

“It’s important to remember that even if your children’s messages don’t immediately make sense to you, they are trying to get their needs met in the best way they can at that point in time.”

“We learn how someone is feeling by putting ourselves ‘in the other person’s shoes’—we know how others are feeling by how our own body/mind responds. We check our own state to know the state of mind of another person. This is the basis for empathy. At the heart of feeling joined is the experience of empathic emotional communication. The way one mind becomes interwoven with another is through the sharing of the surges of energy that are our primary emotions. When children feel positive sensations, such as in moments of joy and mastery, parents can share these emotional states and enthusiastically reflect and amplify them with their children. Likewise, when children feel negative or uncomfortable sensations, such as in moments of disappointment or hurt, parents can empathize with their feelings and can offer a soothing presence that comforts their children. These moments of joining enable a child to feel felt, to feel that she exists within the mind of the parent. When children experience an attuned connection from a responsive empathetic adult they feel good about themselves because their emotions have been given resonance and reflection.”

“When our internal experience keeps us from connecting with our children, their experience of our intense emotion may trigger the arousal of a defensive emotional state in them. When this takes place, we are no longer in a collaborative relationship but each person has separated into his or her own internal world and feels alone and isolated. When both the parent’s and the child’s authentic, inner self is hidden behind the mental walls of psychological defense, neither person feels connected or understood. When our children feel this sense of aloneness they may express their fear or discomfort at this disconnection either by behaving aggressively or by withdrawing. Children’s behavior may then become the focus of our attention and our own feeling of isolation can keep us from making meaningful attempts at reconnecting with our children. In this way, our own emotional issues can create responses in our children that further impair our ability to emotionally understand them or ourselves. Without emotional understanding it is difficult to feel connected. Emotional relating opens the door for collaborative, integrative communication in which a dialogue can take place that allows us to connect to each other.”

“Learn and respect your child’s style for processing a rupture and making a reconnection. Timing is important. If you feel rebuffed after your first attempt, don’t give up. Your child wants to be back in a warm and positive relationship with you. It is the parent’s role to initiate repair and you should find another time to initiate a reconnection. … Reconciliation does not happen if you are trying to place blame. As the parent, you have the responsibility to own your behavior and know your internal issues.”

“By freeing ourselves from the constraints of our past, we can offer our children the spontaneous and connecting relationships that enable them to thrive. By deepening our ability to understand our own emotional experience, we are better able to relate empathically with our children and promote their self-understanding and healthy development.”

“So many times parents have said, ‘I never thought I’d do or say the very things to my children that felt hurtful to me when I was a child. And yet I find myself doing exactly that.’ Parents can feel stuck in repetitive, unproductive patterns that don’t support the loving, nurturing relationships they envisioned when they began their roles as parents.”

“The intrusions of unresolved issues can directly influence how we … interact with our children. When unresolved issues are writing our life story, we are … no longer making thoughtful choices about how we want to parent our children, but rather are reacting on the basis of experiences in our past. It’s as if we forfeit our ability to choose our direction and put ourselves on automatic pilot without even knowing where the pilot is taking us. We often try to control our children’s feelings and behavior when actually it is our own internal experience that is triggering our upset feelings about their behavior.”

“Your children give you the opportunity to grow and challenge you to examine issues left over from your own childhood. If you approach such challenges as a burden, parenting can become an unpleasant chore. If, on the other hand, you try to see these moments as learning opportunities, then you can continue to grow and develop. Having the attitude that you can learn throughout your life enables you to approach parenting with an open mind, as a journey of discovery.”

“No one can be perfectly free till all are free.”

– Herbert Spencer, 1851 Social Statics, II

“When I genuinely persuade my child, I become a trusted consultant and even a defender of his interests. When I force him, I become an adversary who needs to be avoided, deceived or otherwise circumvented. My child needs to put his guard up when I’m around.”

– Aaron Stupple, 2022, The relationship-building power of explanations

“Emotional dismissal and emotional disapproval are forms of emotional abuse. When a parent disapproves of their child’s emotion or dismisses it, the child begins to accept the parent’s estimation of the event and learns to doubt his or her own judgment. As a result, the child loses self-confidence. […] [T]he child learns that it’s wrong to feel the way that they feel.
And […] if it’s wrong to feel the way they feel, but they feel that way anyway, […] something must be wrong with them.”

– Teal Swan, 2016, The Completion Process, Chapter 2

“Shaming is an extraordinarily dynamic phenomenon that loops from external to internal relationships and back, gathering strength like a hurricane that can blow the message I am flawed and alone through generations. Yet the content of shaming is a motivated fiction, often a shame regulation strategy and not an accurate communication about the worth or singular (and therefore shameful) nature of the individual being shamed. We are born imperfect but not unacceptable, unique or alone. We spend our lives embedded in relational systems, usually external, always internal.”

– Martha Sweezy, 2013, ‘Emotional Cannibalism: Shame in action’, in Internal family systems therapy: new dimensions, edited by Martha Sweezy and Ellen L. Ziskind, pp. 33-34

Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages

Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations S’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/