Beverly Cleary Quotes

There are certain realities we must speak of with our children that were not present when I was a child.

I come from big families. My momma was the oldest of three and my daddy was one of six - and I've always loved children. They bring a lot of joy to the world and they make us adults look at things in a better way.

Our great trouble is that we tend to bring up our children for the world in which we ourselves have lived. We rarely take into consideration the changes which have come about in our own lifetime and which are likely to come about before our children are fully grown. Perhaps we handicap them unnecessarily by too much anchoring to the old and too little preparation for the new.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Lot of things depend on the up bringing of a child.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

So as my kids will tell you, they had a pretty normal life.

I was actually raised around a lot of children. So, I'm very comfortable around children.

I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.

It takes a village to raise a child.

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

Our kids now face pressures that didn’t exist when I was growing up…. As parents, it’s very hard to help our children because their experiences are so different to anything we had.

I think our kids live an extraordinarily different life than what I lived growing up. Pretty much everything about their life is different than mine was.

I was brought up as a normal kid.

I think that, any young child or teenager, you take a lot from your parents when you're growing up.

I grew up like a boy, also because most of the children who came to our house were boys.

Children accept their world as the world. I grew up like kids that I went to school with. Their parents were either shrinks or actors.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

My parents were concerned that I would not get good schooling, so they put me up in my uncle's house in Dharwad, and I spent about six years there. So at a very young age, I was away from my parents. I developed an amount of independence and learned to stand on my own feet.

Because I see my own boys growing, and I see other children growing and I just have such a connection.

I grew up in a big family with a lot of kids around, and I definitely want to have children as well.

Raising children is an enormously important part of life. I think one of the most important, or the most important, period.

I had a complicated life until I was 25. I was born in Bristol and was brought up by my mum and my stepfather in Edinburgh. He introduced me to books.

We didn't have a TV in the living room and all my friends thought we were kind of weird. When they'd come over, my mom wanted to talk to them about current events.