Bruno Bettelheim Quotes

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world--what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.

Working with children is very different than the way in which I work with adults. I never tell the children the actual truth of the thing that I want them to act. Although children are really into play and play acting, and this is a major part of their existence, they never actually find the playing or acting of adults credible.

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.

If you watch young children play, you will notice that they create games, characters, situations, whole worlds in which they immerse themselves with intense concentration.

In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

The development of a child is guaranteed in his curiosity to discover the cause behind each and every incident.

Play is as necessary to the perfect development of a child as sunshine is to the perfect development of a plant.

Children that play outside develop better problem solving skills and have a stronger ability to work within a group.

All children want to do is play in worlds they create and project on their external world. If allowed to do that, they are constantly building new neural structures for creating internal worlds and projecting them on their external world. And they build up an enormous self-esteem and feeling of power over the external world through their own capacities.

I play with children so that I can learn from them.

There is a good deal of excellent research on child's play. It has shown conclusively that through play, with the freedom of action it allows and the stressless environment in which it occurs, children discover, relate to and define themselves and their world. ...It is, therefore, paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play.

You can do anything with children if you only play with them.

The child knows only that he engages in play because it is enjoyable. He isn't aware of his need to play--a need which has its source in the pressure of unsolved problems. Nor does he know that his pleasure in playing comes from a deep sense of well-being that is the direct result of feeling in control of things, in contrast to the rest of his life, which is managed by his parents or other adults.

Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotiona l development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

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.

All children are sweet at five. But at twelve they begin to get silly.

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.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

The sports of children satisfy the child.

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie".

If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.