Childhood Independence Quotes

I don't really think kids care much these days - they just tell you to f*** off.

I literally didn't know my father. My mother had been a secretary, and after she and my father split, she went back to work for an advertising executive. So my older brother and I were "latch-door kids." We went home for lunch and after school by ourselves.

Adults forget that kids are their own best censors.

Even as a baby I quickly learned to crawl out of my crib. ... They'd put up barriers but I learned how to go over them.

It's important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful. Good parents are the hardest to get rid of.

As tough as it was for us with my father gone, my mother and sister were always pushing me. They even let me go to Brazil by myself when I was 13 to train with Sao Paulo for four months.

I've been sailing from the age of 2, and apparently, when I was 4, I told my dad, 'I know how to do this; you don't have to come with me anymore.'

One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.

Guard your children's free time - from you.

It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

...since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college.

I would leave school every day and walk to my grandparents' house under the El because everyone worked. I was 6 and walking home alone from school. It was a different city and a different time.

I'm an only child, so I never had sisters to tell me what I should like based on my gender. I liked what the boys were doing and thought: 'Why let them have all the fun?'

Growing up I had amazing parents who really let me be creative and free. I was the youngest of three by six years, the child who was the outsider and observer. When I went off to Boston to act, I was very young - 10. And my parents didn't fear that. They had the respect to let me make my choices.

If someone has a boy who gets to age 18 without something [a bone] being fractured, that kid has been overly controlled.

I never helped my kids. I was working too hard. My kids had to be responsible for themselves.

I remember my son wanted to go to bed with his cowboy boots on, and we had this fight for like an hour. Then I realized that the only good reason I had for him not to do it is because I didn't want him to. There was really no other reason. And finally I said, "OK, fine." It was a great victory for me, because I realized it doesn't really matter.

Never argue with a six-year-old who shaves.

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.

The children whom nobody leads by the hand are the children who know they are children.

To put me through school my morn had to work, so I was a latchkey kid.

Did you get Mom a birthday present?" Helen asked. "Yes," Gansey replied. "Myself." "The gift that keeps on giving." "I don't think that minor children are required to get gifts for their parents. I'm a dependent. That's the definition of dependent, is it not?" "You, a dependent!" his sister said, and laughed. "You haven't been a dependent since you were four. You went straight from kindergarten to old man with a studio apartment.

My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working. I had five sisters and a brother. They didn't care what I got up to.

My parents, stupidly, always let me go downtown. This was pre-pager, even. It made me adventurous. I think it makes you tough.

Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.