Quotes about children
children growing-up waiting
David Berkowitz I have several children who I'm turning into killers. Wait till they grow up.
children growing-up father
David Blankenhorn The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.
children father advice
David Blankenhorn More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.
children school two
David Blankenhorn Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal.
children school men
David Blankenhorn The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.
children believe never-forget
David Blaine As children we believe that anything is possible, the trick is to never forget it.
children eye thinking
David Bowie If I hadn't had my children, I would have been discouraged a lot quicker. It would have been much more easy for me to say, "You know what, let the whole thing go. Have a good time, because these people, this place - it's just not worth it." You know? I can't do that anymore. I look into those eyes and they look at me so trustingly that I'm gonna make sure that [they're thinking], "Hey, you did a good thing bringing me into the world, daddy. I'm going to have a great life!"
children father home
David Bowie My father worked for a children's home called Dr. Barnardo's Homes. They're a charity.
children consuming recalls
David Johansen As I recall, my life as a child was so all-consuming that I barely had time to consider the future.
children confusing world
David Jeremiah If your world today seems confusing, be comforted by the words of the prophets of God who have told you what the future holds for you as a child of God.
children able facts
David Jeremiah He is able to help His children work through anything, and not a single thing is going to happen in the future that can change that fact.
children love-life lessons-to-be-learned
David Jeremiah The greatest lessons to be learned about life, love, purpose, meaning, and priority are to be learned from children.
children heart parent
David Jeremiah Every child is created uniquely by God. God puts a certain formula in the heart of every child. And it is the parents' challenge to figure out the combination. We need to spend time studying, looking, listening, and observing.
children world care
David Jeremiah We don't know what will happen tomorrow, but one thing is guaranteed-God's overarching care for His children. We can be sure enough of that. In a world where nothing is sure, He is sure.
children character people
David E. Kelley When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.
children grandparent temptation
David Elkind Preschoolers sound much brighter and more knowledgeable than they really are, which is why so many parents and grandparents are sosure their progeny are gifted and super-bright. Because children's questions sound so mature and sophisticated, we are tempted to answer them at a level of abstraction far beyond the child's level of comprehension. That is a temptation we should resist.
children believe responsibility
David Elkind Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.
children perspective parent
David Elkind If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one's own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.
children good-life work
David Elkind Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-classparents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement--a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.
children writing age-difference
David Elkind The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.
children views effort
David Elkind Taking the child's point of view demands good will, time, and effort on the part of parents. The child is the clear beneficiary. Parents who make the effort to understand their children's point of view are likely to treat children fairly and in an age-appropriate manner.
children past support
David Elkind The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at anearly age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.
children teaching mean
David Elkind It makes little sense to spend a month teaching decimal fractions to fourth-grade pupils when they can be taught in a week, and better understood and retained, by sixth-grade students. Child-centeredness does not mean lack of rigor or standards; it does mean finding the best match between curricula and children's developing interests and abilities.
children school childhood
David Elkind Young children learn in a different manner from that of older children and adults, yet we can teach them many things if we adapt our materials and mode of instruction to their level of ability. But we miseducate young children when we assume that their learning abilities are comparable to those of older children and that they can be taught with materials and with the same instructional procedures appropriate to school-age children.
children simple people
David Elkind When we are polite to children, we show in the most simple and direct way possible that we value them as people and care about their feelings.
children practice numbers
David Elkind Certainly, young children can begin to practice making letters and numbers and solving problems, but this should be done without workbooks. Young children need to learn initiative, autonomy, industry, and competence before they learn that answers can be right or wrong.
children play culture
David Elkind Children in the 21st (century) have been transformed from net producers of their own toy and play culture, to net consumers of play culture imposed by adults.
children independent self
David Elkind Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotiona l development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.
children math support
David Elkind Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do math. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.
children lying israel
David Ben-Gurion If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.
children israel would-be
David Ben-Gurion If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.
children writing lap
David Baldacci I can write with a crying child on my lap. I have. Often.