Childhood Norms Quotes

When I was a kid, we called every teacher, every parent - anyone over the age of 20, it seemed - 'Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so.'

If you want your children to relate to the culture you live in, if you want to train them outside of the general system, you have to tell your children that ordinary children tend to say things like 'I can run faster than you; I can draw better than you; I know things you don't know'. You have to tell them what normal children are like. Normal children are messed up and you have to tell them about that. But if you instruct your child in high correlation with the physical world, they won't be able to relate with normal children. Normal means mixed up as I use the word.

Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.

Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it’s pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side.

When you are 16 you are supposed to be doing cool things, like sneaking alcohol, not living in Disney World and doing skits about mice.

Just as the archetype of the supermom--the woman who can do it all--minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the"superkid" minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older.

The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.

A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.

It was surreal to step out of my own existence and see how most American children experience things.

If you're one of the Disney kids, it's like you have to talk about having a promise ring, you know?

You're children. Don't you want a home, a family?" "With, like, vitamin-fortified cereal and educational television?

It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.

As someone who went to school in the '70s and '80s, I can't say that I noticed much of a 'medals for all' culture myself.