Lev Vygotsky Quotes

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?

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.

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.

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.

Over the past 20 years, I have presented many science programmes on BBC1. But none is, I think, more socially important, or of more human interest, than this ongoing series of 'Child of Our Time.'

There's increasing evidence on both sides of the Atlantic that when babies, beginning in the first or even the second year of life, spend long hours in childcare centers and maybe even with child minders, that as they go to school they're more likely to be more aggressive and disobedient than are other children.… that seems to be the case even when they've been, if you would, in better quality or good quality nurseries and child minder settings.

Children raised in families at the high end of the socioeconomic scale are more likely to be exposed to a stimulating environment and set upon an advantageous path in life with respect to health, cognitive development and social skills. If the brain does not receive the requisite environmental stimulation at certain critical periods, the window of opportunity closes and development fails to occur.

Children in day care get the short end of the emotional stick.

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.

The greatest development is achieved during the first years of life, and therefore it is then that the greatest care should be taken. If this is done, then the child does not become a burden; he will reveal himself as the greatest marvel of nature.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school. The acquisitions he has made are such that we can say the child who enters school at three is an old man.

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.

We've got to understand that the ages of zero to three are the most formative years of a person's life, the time they learn the concept of reward and punishment and develop a conscience, and that 50 percent of all learned human response is learned in the first year of life.

The early socialization of a child is crucial.

Inspiring children through play and creativity is crucial to early development, and no company has done more in that space over many generations than Mattel.

Children should be kept as normal as possible. At a very young age, they are not even aware of the happenings around them. You need to do whatever you can to grow them normally.

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

Interestingly, the British government announced a few weeks ago that they were going to introduce 500 educational targets for preschool children. And teachers complained that “when are the children going to have time to play?” Well, they’re not supposed to play, because play is a right-brain, ad-lib, creative pursuit. The idiot politicians who are introducing it don’t understand this, but the shadow-people from which it is generated certainly do. They want to stimulate the left brain as early as possible.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.

A child embarrassed by his mother,” she said, “is just a child who hasn’t lived long enough.

I firmly believe, however, that if your children have never hated you, you have failed as a parent.

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.