May Sarton Quotes

Early childhood education begins early, even before birth.

It's hard to think of a 16-month child being anything other than a delight to be around.

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.

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.

In the first year of a child's life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their lives we want them to sit down and be quiet.

Scientists who study play, in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam; more than a way for chubby kids to burn off calories; more than a frivolous luxury.

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

It's easier to learn things for life by the age of 12 and not the age of 18. This is just my guess.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.

Children need to move to develop their brain; it's a natural urge. That's why boys will run after a ball and play soccer despite how many video games are available to them, and they can't help themselves from building with Lego bricks as well. They want to be creating something that's uniquely their own.

If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

Many people must have noticed the intense attention given by children to the conversation of grown-ups when they cannot possibly be understanding a word of what they hear. They are trying to get hold of words, and they often demonstrate this fact by repeating joyously some word which they have been able to grasp.

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

It's crazy how intelligent kids can be at a very young age and how they know what they know.

Both the quantity and quality of the words children hear during their first three years of life make an enormous difference in how prepared they are to start school, and ultimately, their long-term achievement.

Most people understand that the more words children are exposed to, the stronger their vocabularies will be. But fewer people are aware that the quality of the words also significantly affects brain development.

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?

One of the best investments we can make is to give our kids the ingredients they need to develop in the first five years of life.

For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

If there were some recipe that would make all of our children really sane and civic-minded and hugely intelligent, I think we'd probably all do it. But I don't know that there is a recipe for creating that.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.