Children

(58 votes)   For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.

Ellen Key
1849-1926, Swedish Author, Feminist

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(58 votes)   You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Kahlil Gibran
1883-1931, Lebanese Poet, Novelist

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(56 votes)   I was cesarean born. You can't really tell, although whenever I leave a house, I go out through a window.

Steven Wright

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(55 votes)   Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Betty Friedan
1921-, American Feminist Writer

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(54 votes)   I have no greater joy than to see my children playing at their mother's feet.

unknown

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(54 votes)   We must care about the world of our children and grandchildren, a world we may never see.

Bertrand Russell

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(53 votes)   Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow.

Thomas Bray

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(53 votes)   Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

June Jordan
1939-, American Poet, Civil Rights Activist

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(52 votes)   It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.

Midge Decter
1927-, American Author, Editor, Social Critic

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(52 votes)   We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.

Dr. Jess Lair
American Professor, Counselor

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(51 votes)   A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

Mark Twain

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(51 votes)   Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Lazarus Long

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(51 votes)   There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world: dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it --benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their ''good'' subjects and punishment to their ''bad'' ones, who are amused at the ''cleverness'' of children and annoyed by their ''stupidities.''

Viola Spolin
1911-, American Theatrical Director, Producer

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(51 votes)   We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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(50 votes)   Children are poor men's riches.

John Ray
1627-1705, British Naturalist

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