Parker Palmer Quotes

If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers.

It is our continuing love for our children that makes us want them to become all they can be, and their continuing love for us that helps them accept healthy discipline--from us and eventually from themselves.

The adult ought never to mold the child after himself, but should leave him alone and work always from the deepest comprehension of the child himself.

To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature, this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".

While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.

This is the treasure we need today - helping the child become independent of us and make his way by himself, receiving in return his gifts of hope and light.

I'm interested in avoiding two types of behaviour [in my children]: one is the sense of guilt and the other is a sense of entitlement. If these two are avoided, then the rest is up to them.

Who can justly measure the righteous influence of a mother's love? What enduring fruits result from the seeds of truth that a mother carefully plants and lovingly cultivates in the fertile soil of a child's trusting mind and heart? As a mother, you have been given divine instincts to help you sense your child's special talents and unique capacities.

The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind.

Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.

Freedom is the basic thing. Consciousness grows in freedom and starts dying, becomes paralyzed and crippled, when things are forced. And up to now, this has been done. This is the greatest crime that parents have always committed against children. They go on forcing the child.

Every child is simple, just a clean slate. Then the parents start writing on his slate - what he has to become. Then the teachers, the priests, the leaders - they all go on emphasizing that you have to become somebody; otherwise, you have wasted your life. Just the opposite is the case. You are a being. You need not become anybody else. That is the meaning of simplicity: remaining at ease with one's being, and not going on any track of becoming - which is unending.

. . . if we have children. When they are just born we do everything for them. We are omnipotent, they are completely dependent on us, but then when they grow up you must take back your influence on them, to give them freedom.

A child is being properly educated only when he is learning to become independent of his parents.

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.

Whatever discipline you exercise should be based on the goal your child is eventually to reach, namely, freedom and happiness. I would show him towards what he is growing, his ultimate fulfilment, and help him to adapt himself to that. In everything that you do, you should keep the goal in view, and hence your discipline must aim at helping the child to realize that at a certain stage he will be above all discipline.

Parental trust is extremely important in the guidance of adolescent children as they get further and further away from the direct supervision of their parents and teachers. I don't mean that trust without clear guidance is enough, but guidance without trust is worthless.

children once settled and confident can mostly be left, it seems, to manage their difficulties without us. Only what we must do, always and unalterably, is hold their hand firmly in general goodwill, then they themselves seem to deal with their own particular troubles far better than we can.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

If you educate children, then they are capable of so much - you empower them, you give them choices, and you enable them to create the lives that they dream for themselves.

There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build.

Furnish an example, stop preaching, stop shielding, don't prevent self-reliance and initiative, allow your children to develop along thier own lines.

I think every single one of us can think back on the key individuals in our lives who really made a difference, and also maybe some of those who sent us astray. There are those are the teachers who are brave enough to buck the system, and obviously not in such a way that jeopardizes their jobs, but brave enough to say, "I know I have to accomplish that, but I want to know how I'm going to help this child get there differently. I want to know what makes this child tick, and I want to help him get there from a place of curiosity, rather than from a place where I impose my ideas on him."