Frederick Leboyer Quotes

Touch is our most highly developed sense when we are born, and it remains a fundamental mode of communication throughout a baby's first year and an important influence throughout a person's life.

The level of communication you can achieve with an infant is really profound.

One of the ways we interact with other human beings and form social bonds is through touch, and probably most of us are not aware of the extreme importance of touch.

I hug employees all the time. I'm a huge contact person. Touch is an extremely important part of the human condition.

I never dreamed I would have a job in which so many people could touch me and I could touch them.

Parents should talk to their children, even when they are babies and can't talk back.

Instead of giving your children more things, give them more time.

My kids really still share the one thing that I think is life-changing, and that's eye contact with me. As they've gotten older, I have made it a priority to continue that.

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.

Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

Words are a wonderful form of communication, but they will never replace kisses and punches.

The happiest and holiest children in the world are the children whose fathers succeed in winning both their tender affection and their reverential and loving fear. And they are the children who will come to understand most easily the mystery of the fatherhood of God.

Sexuality has always been for humans a form of communication, a way we express love and caring and bonding, not only a way we have children if we choose to.

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.

Our children need our presence, not our presents.

Cara waggled a hand over the two of them. "It works better with your clothes off." Richard frowned. His voice came as a hoarse croak. "What?" She seemed mystified by the question. "I believe you will find such things work better without clothes." She put her hands to her hips. "I thought you would know at least that much.

I will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.

Children are like puppies: you have to keep them near you, and look after them, if you want their affection.

All it means is that, while our minds may have trouble communicating, our bodies don't have any problem at all." "I don't think it's that simple." "Sure it is." "The earth moved," she said softly. "That has to be more than bodies communicating.

In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.

What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake.