Tom Colicchio Quotes

I can't eat beans - all beans. I think because I'm half Cuban. So growing up, we were always eating black beans and rice, and I think I just said, 'Enough with it,' and I can't even stand to taste it anymore.

Children, if they haven't been introduced to foods by the time they're 3 years old, are afraid of it, as if it would hurt them. They don't really get out of that until they're 6 or 7 - it's a safety mechanism, and you're not going to win.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

How can I tell if I was born hating coconut or developed a hatred of coconut because my father distrusted it as an ingredient?

There's nothing I want less than a piece of cheese or a burger. I have nightmares I'm being force-fed these things. I have no interest in converting anyone. It's purely how I want to live my life. I don't judge anyone.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

I panicked when my son, Jett, stopped eating baby food. He's only two, but his food vocabulary is fantastic. He likes my baked tilapia and string beans with chopped garlic. But he really likes pizza. Sometimes every inanimate object to him is pizza.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

All the things I used to like - cookies, ice cream, gumbo - I don't like anymore.

I knew how to swim by the time I turned 4.

Ours was a loving, nurturing household, but, at the same time, my parents' goal was to make all their children self-sufficient.

I'm a really picky eater.

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.

I worry about my kids growing up and how the world might hurt them. But at the same time, I absolutely do not worry about them growing up - because they have great values and a great sense of self.

My son, before he went to school, he'd eat pretty much everything. Then as soon as he went to school, he got some peer pressure, and other kids would say, 'Oh, you're gonna eat that. That's horrible. That's disgusting.'

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

Sometimes I think that kids who are given junk food then don't crave it as adults in the same way. I don't know. I'm trying to figure out what the psychology is behind it before I have children.

I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.

The character of a child is formed largely during the first twelve years of his life. He spends 16 times as many waking hours in the home as in the school, and 126 times as many hours in the home as in the church. Each child is, to a great degree, what he is because of the ever-constant influence of home environment and the careful or neglectful training of parents. Home is the best place for the child to learn self-control, to learn that he must submerge himself for the good of another. It is the best place in which to develop obedience, which nature and society will later demand.

It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.

It's wrong I think, morally and annoying in general, to try to get a kid to be a foodie, so I never even suggested, "Hey baby it's good, maybe you should try it." That never worked for me.

Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.

How can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives