Gary Chapman Quotes

Much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the cravings of an empty LOVE TANK.

One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.

The complaints of the child in us will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man - the sense of wonder.

You know that your toddler needed love and approval but he often seemed not to care whether he got it or not and never seemed to know how to earn it. Your pre-school child is positively asking you to tell him what does and does not earn approval, so he is ready to learn any social refinement of being human which you will teach him....He knows now that he wants your love and he has learned how to ask for it.

I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them often in the same bed a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.

By giving children lots of affection, you can help fill them with love and acceptance of themselves. Then that's what they will have to give away.

It is not possible to 'spoil' a child with love and affection...a child needs all the love and affection it can possibly get.

It didn't take elaborate experiments to deduce that an infant would die from want of food. But it took centuries to figure out that infants can and do perish from want of love.

A child's mental health is just as important as their physical health.

I wish that every child could have growing space because I think children are a little like plants. If they grow too close together, they become thin and sickly and never obtain maximum growth. We need room to grow.

I suppose actors crave attention of some kind or they have suffered some form of arrested development and are still living in a sort of child's fantasy existence at some level in their psyche.

I always love working with children. I never had children of my own. God has his purposes. God didn't let me have children so everybody's children could be mine. That's kind of how I'm looking at it.

The roots of a child's ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child's having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return. If a child finds this during the first years of life, he or she can grow up to be a competent, healthy person.

When a child shuts down his painful emotional side, he also loses the ability to express his joyous side. Emotions are a whole. With anger comes the ability to express delight; with sadness comes the ability to express lightheartedness. This is the breadth of emotion that allows an adult to experience intimacy with a spouse, with God, and with his children

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

We don't really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don't encourage boys to be whole.

A child hasn't a grown-up person's appetite for affection. A little of it goes a long way with them; and they like a good imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows.

Affection can no more spoil a child than the sun could be put out by a bucket of gasoline.

A child may be "spoiled" by a lack of training or by inappropriate love that gives or trains incorrectly.

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

A child of three cannot raise its chubby fist to its mouth to remove a piece of carpet which it is through eating, without being made the subject of a psychological seminar of child-welfare experts, and written up, along with five hundred other children of three who have put their hands to their mouths for the same reason.

I wonder if anyone can ever succeed in making their children content.

We probably stagnate our children's emotional growth by not letting them have some separation from us.

Children are all more or less little monkeys in that they imitate everything they see. If their mother treats them exactly as she does her visitors they in turn play "visitor" to perfection. Nothing hurts the feelings of children more than not being allowed to behave like grown persons when they think they are able.