Child Maturity Quotes

One can tell a child everything, anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters.

Each kid has a different level of expertise and some of them are very raw and inexperienced and some are incredibly mature and experienced. So you just have to go with what they are rather than have some abstract technique that you're going to try to apply to them.

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.

When I see kids standing next to their mothers at book signings, clutching a copy of 'Forever,' I know what's coming. They'll say to me, 'How old do I have to be to read this?' hoping I'll give them permission. But I can't do that.

It is only reasonable to allow the administration of affairs to mothers before their children reach the age prescribed by law at which they themselves can be responsible. But that father would have reared them ill who could not hope that in their maturity they would have more wisdom and competence than his wife.

I'm a firm believer and always have been that there aren't all that many things that you should not express to children in an age-appropriate manner, and as a parent, that is your job - to be discerning as to whether or not your child can handle the information, provided you have the ability to express yourself in that age-appropriate way.

My son is 21. He'll be 22 if I let him.

The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children's adaptive capacity.

Kids under, I'd say, 14 are still maturing; they are still growing. They are still understanding themselves. To hit them with something like 'Roots,' to hit them with this particular period of time, it's important to discuss the matters beyond the program itself.

My dad's like, If your mom and I are having sex and we videotape it and she falls out of bed funny, can I win ten-thousand dollars?

Who would know but ten years ago that kids would be texting each other all the time, that that would be one of their main forms of communication. And so many times, these kids know more about the technology than their parents. And so many times, we're putting kids in very adult situations and expecting them to behave like they're 40 years old.

Kids are different from adults. They are not as developed as far as brain science, controlling impulses, and maturity, and fall prey to all kinds of pressures.

My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now somehow. They've gotten ahead of me somehow. But they're very patient with me.

When given age-appropriate challenges, children tend to take them very seriously; in fact, the more obvious the risk is, the more cautiously a child will proceed.

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

Preschoolers sound much brighter and more knowledgeable than they really are, which is why so many parents and grandparents are sosure their progeny are gifted and super-bright. Because children's questions sound so mature and sophisticated, we are tempted to answer them at a level of abstraction far beyond the child's level of comprehension. That is a temptation we should resist.

Would I buy a cell phone for my 12-year-old?... No. I should have closer control over my child than that. He really shouldn't be in places where he needs to contact me by cell.

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.

People always accuse us of being overprotective with Beyonce. But I was the mother saying, 'You gonna go hang out? You gonna go to this party?' She was always just so durn easy, so durn mature.