John Bradshaw Quotes

One of the best investments we can make is to give our kids the ingredients they need to develop in the first five years of life.

The first years of life are not just important; they are more crucial to shaping children than any other time. Even before they speak, children are extremely sensitive to the messages adults send them.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

Everything you think about yourself, everything you believe about yourself, is because you learned it.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

You still have only one self and one identity. However, self, identity and personality are not things, they are not objects, and they certainly are not rigid. Instead, they are biological processes built within the brain from numerous interactive components, step by step, over a period of time.

I just happen to believe that what's at stake in the early child's development is so vital and so important, and I think it is founded in the main, in the broad cultural sense, on the relationship between the mother and child.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

Putting babies as young as two weeks into child care for the first year of their life, for 60 hours a week, will cause their brains damage.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

I don't think a name defines the core of who you are.

I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations. This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

We've got to understand that the ages of zero to three are the most formative years of a person's life, the time they learn the concept of reward and punishment and develop a conscience, and that 50 percent of all learned human response is learned in the first year of life.

I went to my local Sure Start centre, and they put me on a parenting course. I learned things that might seem simple - that it was important to hug and love your child, and read to them. This might seem obvious, but it wasn't to me at the time.

The period from conception to two is about the development of a baby's emotional capacities. Mum saying, 'Oh, darling, I love you,' and singing baby songs and pulling faces literally stimulates the synapses in the brain.

When you try to build an identity based on one idea, the easy part is to stick with the good things that you do.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

What is self-image? Who started talking about one? I rather fancy it was Madison Avenue.

The development of the child during the first three years after birth is unequaled in intensity and importance by any period that precedes or follows in the whole life of the child.

For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.

The first years of a child's life are too important for a child's future - their development, earnings, behavior, and health - for anyone to ignore.

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

A child in his earliest years, when he is only two or a little more, is capable of tremendous achievements simply through his unconscious power of absorption, though he is himself still immobile. After the age of three he is able to acquire a great number of concepts through his own efforts in exploring his surroundings. In this period he lays hold of things through his own activity and assimilates them into his mind.

Your capability is constant, but how much of it you use depends upon the identity you have for yourself.