Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

When what we introduce into the children's world of ideas and feelings is in line with the direction of the developmental forces of a given stage of life, we strengthen the entire developing person in a way that remains a source of strength throughout that person's life.

Few parents are aware of the difficulties that beset the minds of the little philosophers and theologians who sit upon their knees or play at their feet; and many a parent could not comprehend the disturbance, if he were aware of it.

I learned that there are two things that kids really like: movement and love. Happy kids move; unhappy, they don't move.

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations. This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

Throughout my work with family and child support organizations, one thing that has stood out to me time and again is that getting early support for a child who is struggling to cope is the best possible thing we can do to help our children as they grow up.

We can't have children growing up feeling unloved - the price is too high for that.

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

We know what makes babies smart and happy and thrive. It's having human beings who are dedicated to caring for them - human beings who are well supported, not stressed out and not poor.

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

My mom is a therapist, and my dad has a doctorate in psychology, and growing up, I felt 'very understood.'

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.

These are the influences that everybody has. Some individuals might stand out because of one thing or another, but whether one's perception as a child of what was important or not is accurate, I don't know.

When families are strong and stable, so are children - showing higher levels of wellbeing and more positive outcomes. But when things go wrong - either through family breakdown or a damaged parental relationship - the impact on a child's later life can be devastating.

There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence.

The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that's actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and it's not something that our society does very well at all.

I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships.

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

The underlying message of the Lancet article is that if you want to understand aggressive behaviour in children, look to the social and emotional environment in which they are growing up, and the values they bring to the viewing experience.

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.

The first thousand days of a baby's life are likely to determine the rest of her life - whether she grows up to be healthy or not, both physically and emotionally.