childhood vulnerability Quotes

Compared to other animals, we humans enter the world remarkably weak and helpless. We remain relatively weak for many years before we can truly operate on our own.

Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.

Every year, more than 1 million children are left motherless and vulnerable because of maternal deaths, and children who have lost their mothers are up to 10 times more likely to die prematurely than those who have not.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.

Pity the poor infant. Born perfect into the world from imperfect parents.

English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.

Every child is so helpless - just to survive he has to be political, he has to accept whatsoever the parents are saying.

It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

I was sort of a sissy as a little kid.

A child has little defense against the sight of a parent laid low. Parents, like the earth beneath our feet and the sun above our heads, are immutable objects, eternal and reliable. If one should fall, who might vouch the sun itself won't fall, burning, into the sea?

It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live.

When you're young, you don't have much sense. You don't have any reasoning power. You don't have any ability to take a blow, an insult, a hurt in the right way. There is no way a child can do that. All a child can do is feel the pang of it, the heartache of it.

A lot of fairy tales are thinly disguised hostility raps against parents. Kids know that they can't make it on their own, that if they were left alone, they would die.

As a kid, you're so at the mercy of the people around you, the people raising you, your environment.

Children would die of terror if they knew the folly and ignorance of their caretakers.

I was pretty awkward when I was young, but I was never afraid of putting myself out there. I would say stupid things but then they would laugh at me and possibly find it endearing.

Mark the babe not long accustomed to this breathing world; One that hath barely learned to shape a smile, though yet irrational of soul, to grasp with tiny finger - to let fall a tear; And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves, To stretch his limbs, becoming, as might seem. The outward functions of intelligent man.

I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.

In fact, a child is not even considered a human being.

I think you lose your innocence when you have kids, because the world suddenly becomes a much more dangerous place.

I was born in an odd spot and was a very sensitive kid. My feelings could get hurt so easily because I always wanted to be loved, I wanted to be touched, I wanted to touch somebody. I wanted everybody to love me, so I think I was louder than I should have been. I was just trying to get attention. I always felt like I was somebody special, maybe it's because I needed to be somebody special.

Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.

the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.