Children use that word "hate" to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened...It is not physical harm that is feared...so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.
Be careful, fathers, when you inordinately desire things to be better for your children than they were for you. Do not, however unintentionally, make things worse by removing the requirement for reasonable work as part of their experience, thereby insulating your children from the very things that helped make you what you are.
No, Roger had not seen the funny side. But there had been a moment when, after looking at his watch, he had thought: I can remember when Christmas morning would start at about half past ten with a glass of Buck's Fizz in bed. Now it begins at half past five, with a test of my fine motor skills and ability to read Korean.
TV news is like kryptonite to children. The two major shifts in taste for children to adulthood are news and mustard. Kids hate news and mustard. Well, mustard even has the word 'turd' in it. Maybe I should threaten my kids that if they don't go to bed, I will force them to watch an hour-long newscast about mustard.
I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all - and more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.
Listen in close, Wall Street Conquistadors, you’re spreading like vapor up through people’s floors, you’re moving en masse under the cracks of our doors and grabbing our children to work in your stores, feeding the needy to make them your whores, but you need to remember the grave you’re digging is yours.
Culpable obtuseness. He should know better. That's one reason why we don't use the a-word, for example, of little children. They can merit the s-word, because there's a malignity that's innate in little kids sometimes, but you can't merit the a-word until you're old enough so that you ought to know better.
Every major movement in world history has recognized the strategic importance of mobilizing children. The Nazis had their Hitler Youth bands. The Chinese Communists had their Red Guards. The Taliban in Afghanistan had their madrash schools to instill extremism in the young. The great omission seems to be unique to Christians.
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.
Either way, one should love their children, shouldn’t they? After all, children are only duplicates of your own genes. What did these children ever ask for? They wanted love, family, and support. But WE kicked them out onto streets like animals just because WE, as adults, were scared of a situation WE weren’t used to.
The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machine-gun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span.
I have become convinced that the more wealth a country accumulates, the more isolated and lonely its people become. The loneliest are usually the children and the elderly. Children learn what they live, and isolation in the ‘village’ is one of the most destructive messages we daily write on the tablets of their hearts.
Good fathers, and by that I mean real fathers who are there, have the ability to change almost every social problem we now find ourselves facing. I’d be assumptive enough to say that there isn’t a single type of crime or a single problem so big that it couldn’t be fixed or wiped out if fathers would just step up.
What must I do now?” Mrs. Muller considered her silently for a while. “You are still a child. You must go where you are told and do as you are told. But it won’t always be so. Soon you will be in charge of yourself. Until that time: Be aware. Listen. Look. Touch. Smell. And remember. But for now, you must go home.
The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? […] Where I formerly had one pleasure, I now have two.
