Children's Understanding Quotes

My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.

The justice of it seems to children correct and right - I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children's ability to know what is a story and what isn't.

Well, our children do know what this industry is about, but they have a good grip on who they are.

There's some things that you wouldn't tackle in a children's book because it would be beyond, not the mental capabilities, but the experience of someone under the age of say ten or eleven to encompass. But that field is smaller than you might think. They can easily cope with death and things like that; they know about it and it's a subject that often preoccupies them.

Kids cannot follow stories. They don't know what the hell is going on in a cartoon. They like to see funny visual things happening.

Children are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

Kids not only understand [a dark story] but appreciate it … Because in the real world there's fear, and dark things happen no matter how young you are. People lose parents, people lose friends … There's darkness in the world. So I think when kids are talked to in that way, they appreciate it. They're not being given some candy-coated, 'Oh, this is a world where there are no stakes.' I think that actually insults their intelligence.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

'Sesame Street's' genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things - death, divorce, danger - in terms that children understand and accept.

Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.

I never want to make a child worried or afraid, and I don't think I do. My pictures are born from the belief that children are far more capable and aware of social complexities than we give them credit for.