David Elkind Quotes

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

For lack of a few pinches of ordinary iodised table salt in the diet of a third world pregnant mother, a child can lose up to ten IQ (Intelligence Quotient) points.

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

The real truth about children is they don't speak the language very well. They're physically uncoordinated. And they are ignorant of our elaborate ideas about right and wrong.

As Anna Freud remarked, the toddler who wanders off into some other aisle, feels lost, and screams anxiously for his mother neversays "I got lost," but accusingly says "You lost me!" It is a rare mother who agrees that she lost him! she expects her child to stay with her; in her experience it is the child who has lost track of the mother, while in the child's experience it is the mother who has lost track of him. Each view is entirely correct from the perspective of the individual who holds it .

In the first year of a child's life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their lives we want them to sit down and be quiet.

But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.

Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".

Everyone thinks their baby is a genius. People find it delightfully refreshing when I tell them, My baby? Totally average. Like, 100 percent average.

In any event, parents never underestimated the abilities of their own children. Quite the reverse. Sometimes it was well nigh impossible for a teacher to convince the proud father or mother that their beloved offspring was a complete nitwit.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

In praising or loving a child, we love and praise not that which is, but that which we hope for.

And Grandmother Hall really imagines that she can raise Eleanor and her two brothers differently than these children were raised. And if she is very strict and everything is very regimented and ordered and disciplined, that they will become the perfect children who her own children did not become.

Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.

Reading with children is an enormous gift to them. It's a great honor to invite children to read with adults.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ‘em. No... you had the right answer this afternoon, but the wrong reasons. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it. Hotheadedness isn’t.

The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech

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".

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.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.