Robert Coles Quotes

Young children...are often uninterested in conversation It is not that they don't have ideas and feelings, or need to express them to others It is simply that as one eight-year-old boy once told me, "Talking is okay, but I don't like to do it all the time the way grown-ups do; I guess you have to develop the habit."

Indeed, there are no easy correlations between parental ideology, class or race and "successful" child development. Many children the world over have revealed a kind of toughness and plasticity that make the determined efforts of some parents to spare their children the slightest pain seem ironic.