David Perlmutter Quotes

Being able to jump off a swing is actually a useful and meaningful thing for a child to do... those are the tests that help us understand the limits of our body. That's a positive learning experience that we deny children on a regular basis.

A kid who moves is a kid who learns.

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on.

But, if you observe children learning in their first few years of life, you can see that they can and do learn on their own - we leave them alone to crawl, walk, talk, and gain control over their bodies. It happens without much help from parents.

Anyone with a child knows that children learn about the world through binary options: up or down, hot or cold, big or little, inside or outside, wet or dry, good or bad, boy or girl, man or woman.

I believe a child's most important job is to explore the world around them through play.

It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.

Physical development fosters learning.

Children are just little scientists.

The development of a child is guaranteed in his curiosity to discover the cause behind each and every incident.

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

Play is the work of children. It's very serious stuff.

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

Lego allows all levels of complexity. But a child can do their own thing at any level. They can built a pirate ship, for example, and then mash it up with completely different things.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

A boy cannot begin playing ball too early. I might almost say that while he is still creeping on all fours he should have a bouncing rubber ball.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Every child should try everything: sport, music, art, mathematics; they can do it all. Copying and competition are now seen as twin evils, but they are both useful tools.

Early childhood education begins early, even before birth.

If you put a baseball and other toys in front of a baby, he'll pick up a baseball in preference to the others.

Young children were sooner allured by love, than driven by beating, to attain good learning.

As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work - we begin life as little scientists.

Almost everyone who has claimed to know what kids need to learn or how they learn has turned out to be wrong.

What is it about summer that makes children grow? We feed and water them more. They do get more sun, but that probably doesn't matter as much as the book they read or the rule they broke that taught them something they couldn't have learned any other way.

You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.