Thomas Sowell Quotes

It’s not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television... because everything that children see on television is teaching them something.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they're trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that's beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they've spent years just hanging out with adults and they don't even have a sense of what it's like to grow up with kids their own age.

You know how kids are. They like to do what parents do.

Let’s get real. It does make a difference what children see on television.

The way I see it, we teach our children through modeling.

Whatever the parents are doing, the kids will follow suit.

[Children] receive direct instruction from time to time about the appropriateness of various social comparisons

Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people. ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals.

If a child has been able in his play to give up his whole loving being to the world around him, he will be able, in the serious tasks of later life, to devote himself with confidence and power to the service of the world.

It concerns me when I see a small child watching the hero shoot the villain on television. It is teaching the small child to believe that shooting people is heroic. The hero just did it and it was effective. It was acceptable and the hero was well thought of afterward. If enough of us find inner peace to affect the institution of television, the little child will see the hero transform the villain and bring him to a good life. He'll see the hero do something significant to serve fellow human beings. So little children will get the idea that if you want to be a hero you must help people.

Children become like the things they love.

School success is not predicted by a child's fund of facts or a precocious ability to read as much as by emotional and social measures; being self-assured and interested: knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.

It's easier to see children as mini adults than it is to imagine or to remember what it is to be a child again.

Adults devise a plan and follow it, children do what feels good.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.

As the fathers live, so the children play.

That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups.

If you want to be treated like adults then start acting like them.

The television screen is the lens through which most children learn about violence. Through the magnifying power of this lens, their everyday life becomes suffused by images of shootings, family violence, gang warfare, kidnappings, and everything else that contributes to violence in our society. It shapes their experiences long before they have had the opportunity to consent to such shaping or developed the ability to cope adequately with this knowledge.

There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.

But many researchers operate as if it is their responsibility to demonstrate that video violence has a direct effect on the behaviour of young children, because that will help to explain why society is becoming more violent.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you. So, the best way to get them to read, is to read. The best way to get them to do anything is to do it yourself, and they will absolutely copy you. That way, you don't have to worry about what's supposedly age appropriate, a child will pick something up when the child is ready.