Alfred Adler Quotes

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

The underlying message of the Lancet article is that if you want to understand aggressive behaviour in children, look to the social and emotional environment in which they are growing up, and the values they bring to the viewing experience.

The three-year-old who lies about taking a cookie isn't really a liar after all. He simply can't control his impulses. He then convinces himself of a new truth and, eager for your approval, reports the version that he knows will make you happy.

Children should be kept as normal as possible. At a very young age, they are not even aware of the happenings around them. You need to do whatever you can to grow them normally.

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?

Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

What happens when corn and wheat prices rise is that we see real increases in malnutrition and under-nutrition. And when children are malnourished, their brain development actually slows down and is affected. So this is not just a short-term impact.

Anyone who is interested in the psychology of children will have observed that whereas one child will resist temptation or seduction, another will easily yield to it. There are children who will hardly oppose any resistance to the invitation of an unknown person to follow him; others who react in an opposite way in the same circumstances.

Kids still can be said to live in their own little world. Even if their parents are helicoptering around them, assigning play dates and so forth, I think they're still living in some sense of their own little perceptual worlds.

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.

I think you're a good person or a todd by the age of eight.

Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it - is a fully shared and objective one.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence.

If you tell children they are bad, that's what they believe they are and that's probably what they will become.

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.

Children at certain ages have distinct actions, and boys at certain ages have a particular way of acting too.

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

There's increasing evidence on both sides of the Atlantic that when babies, beginning in the first or even the second year of life, spend long hours in childcare centers and maybe even with child minders, that as they go to school they're more likely to be more aggressive and disobedient than are other children.… that seems to be the case even when they've been, if you would, in better quality or good quality nurseries and child minder settings.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school. The acquisitions he has made are such that we can say the child who enters school at three is an old man.

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.