Child Development Quotes

Governments that invest billions in new hardware still find it hard to accept that they might benefit just as much from systematic innovation in such things as child development or cutting crime.

I teach child development and social policy as an undergraduate course, and I tell my students, "Look, on any of these issues, if you don't want to work on it for thirty years, don't start."

A treasure trove for parents and for professionals in the child-development fields.

The soul is healed by being with children. --Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It seems to me if you don't know anything about child development you shouldn't intimate in your "reporting" that you do.

For every dollar spent on early child development you save $7 over the life course because children with better early child development are less likely to end up delinquent, involved in crime, unemployed and so on.

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

Saying we can't afford to invest in early child development means we're storing up bigger costs in the future.

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a childs soul.”• “Play is the highest level of child development . . . It gives . . . joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world . . . The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life.”• “Children are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers.

The soul is healed by being with children.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.

You may give them your love, but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts.

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.

Children do learn what they live. Then they grow up to live what they've learned.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. 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. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.

If a child lives with approval, he learns to live with himself.

A child is nothing like a racing car. . . . Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certainirreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant. . . . Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.

Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.

It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world

Understanding child development takes the emphasis away from the child's character--looking at the child as good or bad. The emphasis is put on behavior as communication. Discipline is thus seen as problem-solving. The child is helped to learn a more acceptable manner of communication.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

Wherever possible, home is by far the best nest until at least eight, ten or twelve. Psychologists and psychiatrists who understand child development would prefer an even later age. In a reasonably warm home, parent-child responses, the true ABC's of sound education, are likely to be a hundred times more frequent than the average teacher-child responses in a classroom.