Bruno Bettelheim Quotes

Play permits the child to resolve in symbolic form unsolved problems of the past and to cope directly or symbolically with present concerns. It is also his most significant tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks.

If you watch young children play, you will notice that they create games, characters, situations, whole worlds in which they immerse themselves with intense concentration.

In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

Children have such vibrant minds. They need to play. They need to be creative. They need to imagine. It's so important for their sense of self discovery. And it helps them learn problem-solving.

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.

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

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

Working with children is very different than the way in which I work with adults. I never tell the children the actual truth of the thing that I want them to act. Although children are really into play and play acting, and this is a major part of their existence, they never actually find the playing or acting of adults credible.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

Children that play outside develop better problem solving skills and have a stronger ability to work within a group.

All children want to do is play in worlds they create and project on their external world. If allowed to do that, they are constantly building new neural structures for creating internal worlds and projecting them on their external world. And they build up an enormous self-esteem and feeling of power over the external world through their own capacities.

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

I majored in Psychology in college. I was going to be a child psychologist.

One way to think about play, is as the process of finding new combinations for known things--combinations that may yield new formsof expression, new inventions, new discoveries, and new solutions....It's exactly what children's play seems to be about and explains why so many people have come to think that children's play is so important a part of childhood--and beyond.

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

The sports of children satisfy the child.

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie".

If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.

It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.

The good enough parent, in addition to being convinced that whatever his child does, he does it because at that moment he is convinced this is the best he can do, will also ask himself: "What in the world would make me act as my child acts at this moment? And if I felt forced to act this way, what would make me feel better about it?

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.

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.