Children have an uncanny way of living up — or down — to what is expected of them.
Ann Landers (1918-2002) American advice columnist [pseud. for Eppie Lederer]
“Parenthood: What Do You Owe Your Children?” Family Circle (1977-11)
(Source)
Collected in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia (1978).
Quotations about:
child development
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
I don’t think he had known much demonstrative love in his childhood and what a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give.
P. D. James (1920-2014) British mystery writer [Phyllis Dorothy James White]
Time To Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, “Diary 1997” (1999)
(Source)
Writing of her father. Often just the last half of this quote is given ("What a child ...").
Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.
P. D. James (1920-2014) British mystery writer [Phyllis Dorothy James White]
Time To Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, “Diary 1997” (1999)
(Source)
The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.
Haim Ginott (1922-1973) Israeli-American school teacher, child psychologist, psychotherapist [b. Haim Ginzburg]
Between Parent and Teenager, ch. 2 “Rebellion and Response” (1969)
(Source)
Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
Khaled Hosseini (b. 1965) Afghan-American novelist, physician [ خالد حسینی]
The Kite Runner, ch. 3 [Rahim Khan] (2003)
(Source)
Anyone who has raised more than one child knows full well that kids turn out the way they turn out — astonishingly, for the most part, and usually quite unlike their siblings, even their twins, raised under the same flawed rooftree.
Children learn what they experience. They are like wet cement. Any word that falls on them makes an impact.
Haim Ginott (1922-1973) Israeli-American school teacher, child psychologist, psychotherapist [b. Haim Ginzburg]
Between Parent and Child: Revised and Updated Edition, ch. 10 “Summing Up” (2003 ed.) [with A. Ginott and H. W. Goddard]
(Source)
Frequently paraphrased (e.g.) as "Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression."
This is usually cited as being from the original 1965 edition of the book, but cannot be found there. Instead, it appears to be from the 2003 edition, as revised and updated by his wife, Dr Alice Ginott, and Dr H Wallace Goddard. It is unclear if Haim Ginott may have used this phrase in other contexts.
We have a marvelous gift, and you see it develop in children, this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own and feelings that are just as important as your own, and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.
Ian McEwan (b. 1948) English novelist and screenwriter
The Root of All Evil? documentary, Channel 4, United Kingdom (Jan 2006)
