Quotations About / On: CHILDREN

For most of us, the word family carries very personal and emotional connotations, but it is essential that we learn to view all of humanity as part of the earth's family. While we have no trouble cherishing our own children, we must also appreciate our broader responsibility to the world's children. Only when we learn to value other people's children as our own will all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential. And only then can we be assured of our own future and the future of our planet.

Mothers who are strong people, who can pursue a life of their own when it is time to let their children go, empower their children of either gender to feel free and whole. But weak women, women who feel and act like victims of something or other, may make their children feel responsible for taking care of them, and they can carry their children down with them.

Just as all children's books shouldn't be read by children (nor by anyone else), neither should children read only children's books. Every young child should be exposed to poetry—good adult poetry—not only to learn to appreciate the rhythm of its sophisticated beat (as opposed to the amusing, political doggerel of Mother Goose) but because poetry has the scope and precision to conjure pictures that prose can seldom paint.

Before I had my first child, I never really looked forward in anticipation to the future. As I watched my son grow and learn, I began to imagine the world this generation of children would live in. I thought of the children they would have, and of their children. I felt connected to life both before my time and beyond it. Children are our link to future generations that we will never see.

Although we like to think of young children's lives as free of troubles, they are in fact filled with disappointment and frustration. Children wish for so much, but can arrange so little of their own lives, which are so often dominated by adults without sympathy for the children's priorities. That is why children have a much greater need for daydreams than adults do. And because their lives have been relatively limited they have a greater need for material from which to form daydreams.

Although adults have a role to play in teaching social skills to children, it is often best that they play it unobtrusively. In particular, adults must guard against embarrassing unskilled children by correcting them too publicly and against labeling children as shy in ways that may lead the children to see themselves in just that way.

Parents do not give up their children to strangers lightly. They wait in uncertain anticipation for an expression of awareness and interest in their children that is as genuine as their own. They are subject to ambivalent feelings of trust and competitiveness toward a teacher their child loves and to feelings of resentment and anger when their child suffers at her hands. They place high hopes in their children and struggle with themselves to cope with their children's failures.

When it comes to evil, there are no gray areas. Fathers who abuse their children by battering or starving or raping them automatically relinquish any entitlement to mitigation or sympathy. They commit the unpardonable moral offense of betraying their children. It matters not what their own histories were; millions of people with childhood horror stories to tell do not repeat them with their own children.

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.

Despite the long-term reduction in familial roles and functions, we believe that parents are still the world's greatest experts about the needs of their own children. Virtually any private or public program that supports parents, effectively supports children. This principle of supporting family vitality seems to us preferable to any policy that would have the state provide children directly with what it thinks they need.