Today's pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early in...tellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase "early ripe, early rot!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I really don't think this war will end soon. We are completely aware of the difficulties, no food or fuel, the danger, but we want... to be stronger than all that. With each child, we are fighting back with our love of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Another appealing aspect to having grandparents is that they do help, to give [your child] a sense of continuity--of his place in ...the world and in the generations. Not only do grandparents help him intellectually to comprehend that there are parents of parents, but they also aid him in understanding where he fits in the succession of things. Even a very young child can begin to feel a sense of rootedness and history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You want to prepare your child to think as he gets older. You want him to be critical in his judgments. Teaching a child, by your ...example, that there's never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience--but it won't help him in the long run to be discriminating in choices and thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once you've been launched into parenthood, you'll need all your best skills, self-control, good judgment and patience. But at the ...same time there is nothing like the thrill and exhilaration that come from watching that bright, cheerful, inquisitive, creative, eccentric and even goofy child you have raised flourish and shine. That's what keeps you going, and what, in the end, makes it all worthwhile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Often, while contemplating works of art, not in their easily perceptible materiality, in the too-clear hieroglyphs of their contou...rs or the obvious meaning of their subject, but in the soul with which they are endowed, in the atmospheric impression that they convey, in the spiritual light or darkness which they pour into our souls, I have felt entering into me a kind of vision of the childhood of their creators. Some little sorrow, some small pleasure of the child, inordinately inflated by an exquisite sensibility, become later on in the adult man, even without his knowing it, the basis of a work of art.... Genius is nothing but childhood clearly formulated, newly endowed with virile and powerful means of self-expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Especially with our first child, we tend to take too much responsibility--both credit and blame--for everything. The more we want ...to be good parents, the more we tend to see ourselves as making or breaking our children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »