Penelope Leach Quotes

We cannot know the young child's personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.

Children need close friends to help them grow up, to discover things about themselves and about life. They also need close friends to keep them sane

Ego is an immature stage of development for humans, and that's what it will be recognized as when the consciousness changes on the planet. Children will develop an ego and quickly outgrow it. That's very different from developing an ego and being stuck with it for the rest of your life.

The child’s progress does not depend only on his age, but also on being free to look around him.

Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

Parents don't come full bloom at the birth of the first baby. In fact parenting is about growing. It's about our own growing as much as it is about our children's growing and that kind of growing happens little by little.

We grow because the clamorous, permanent presence of our children forces us to put their needs before ours. We grow because our love for our children urges us to change as nothing else in our lives has the power to do. We grow (if we're willing to grow, that is: not every parent is willing) because being a parent helps us stop being a child.

What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.

When I think about it like that, it feels like a burden. But that won't mean I'll be single for the rest of my life - I hope. I feel very settled with myself in my world. I don't feel as needy and desperate to prove things about myself. In my twenties I was very keen to achieve this and disprove this and that. Now I enjoy just being able to concentrate on my children and my work and myself.

Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.

We often marvel at how introverted, geeky, kid 'blossom' into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it's not the children who change but their environments. As adults they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don't have to live in whatever culture they'er plunked into.

I think of a child's mind as a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.

For me, my lack of patience in real life - I have always had very little patience. It's been very much my downfall in life. But having a child puts it in perspective. Very quickly you're like, "Oh, I need to learn what patience is."

We've forgotten what it's like not to be able to reach the light switch. We've forgotten a lot of the monsters that seemed to livein our room at night. Nevertheless, those memories are still there, somewhere inside us, and can sometimes be brought to the surface by events, sights, sounds, or smells. Children, though, can never have grown-up feelings until they've been allowed to do the growing.

I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.