Pearl S. Buck Quotes

If we keep on ignoring and leaving children to their own devices at home, they become latchkey kids, and trust me, the consequences of that are not good.

My brother and sister were much older. They were planned. I was not planned for. I was called the mistake, amongst other things.

There are teachers in the United States who cry in the daytime because they see a child or children who haven't eaten properly, children who haven't used soap in so long.

Thinking about the heartbreaking number of young children around the world who think they are unwanted and are uncared for can easily keep you awake at night.

We perhaps protect our pets better than our children.

Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.

You know . . . a lot of kids at school hate their parents. Some of them got hit. And some of them got caught in the middle of wrong lives. Some of them were trophies for their parents to show the neighbors like ribbons or gold stars. And some of them just wanted to drink in peace.

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch.

I did criminal defense work part-time, and that paid the bills for representing abused and neglected children... and for defending in juvenile court those kids the 'child protective system' had missed when it had the chance.

You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian.

The courts don't remove children from their home because the child underperformed at school or required extra long walks or a game of basketball in order to blow off the steam all 5-year-olds have. It's because the parents were unfit, not the kids.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

The kids get cheated out of a lot of times with their dad. They were good about it.

The proper care and rearing of a child is integral to their development. It breaks my heart to know that some children's futures are being destroyed within their own homes.

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.

Cruelty to children is the thing I can least bear in the world.

I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.

I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.

My first failure was to be born a child not wanted by his father or mother, as they parted shortly after I was born.

Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child's tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It's not funny and it's not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn't the least bit funny.

My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen.

His mother should have thrown him out and kept the stork.

Our poor children are suffering every day for want of necessities of life…All this is for the love of strong drink.