Esther Hicks Quotes

Everyone learns how to talk by doing an impression of their parents. I'm one of many people who has a highly developed ability to do that.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Reading with children is an enormous gift to them. It's a great honor to invite children to read with adults.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

The first years of life are not just important; they are more crucial to shaping children than any other time. Even before they speak, children are extremely sensitive to the messages adults send them.

...long before the child learns to talk properly-and long before it learns to think philosophically-the world will have become a habit. A pity, if you ask me.

It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

At birth, the child leaves a person - his mother's womb - and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest.' By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.

No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

Fatherhood is helping your children learn English as a foreign language.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything.

How many languages can a child learn? As many as you will take the time to teach them.

Children are all more or less little monkeys in that they imitate everything they see. If their mother treats them exactly as she does her visitors they in turn play "visitor" to perfection. Nothing hurts the feelings of children more than not being allowed to behave like grown persons when they think they are able.

See that your children are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother tongue, and then let them proceed to higher branches of learning.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.

As one does with a first child, I found out that my baby could roll by hearing the sound of her body hit the ground at 4 a.m. and obviously, for any new parent, that is the most horrifying thing that could happen, right? You're exhausted and you take your tiny little baby out and you put them on the bed to change diapers before nursing and you turn around and you discover... my baby can roll! And you think you're going to die.

At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.

The little child learns to speak, though it has no learned teachers - because it lives with those who know how to speak.