Andrea Leadsom Quotes

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.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.

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.

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.

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

Early childhood education begins early, even before birth.

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.

Babies are smart. They can tell the difference between a responsive face and a blank face, wiped clean of emotion.

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.

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 human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

I do think, in general, children are so perceptive, and they watch and they get so much, and that's wonderful. And it's also difficult for them because they see so much, but they don't understand.

Children are extremely perceptive and absorb what goes on around them long before they can talk or even comprehend language. They are like finely tuned receivers that pick up much more than is merely said. They are receptive and attuned to every mood, feeling, and change that goes on in people around them.

Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you're neglecting that, you're basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

I was about two years old when I first started drawing recognizable characters.

One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults.

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.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.

The early development of the human brain is extremely important for setting the table, if you will, for potential future accomplishment.

At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we continue to grow our brains. That's why we need care from our parents.

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.

Soul development depends on attachment and bonding. Every brain and body is genetically wired to develop itself, but the full soul development of brain and body depends on each child receiving the care of between two and five completely bonded caregivers.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.