Kids need to encounter kids like themselves - kids who can sometimes be crabby and fresh and rebellious, kids who talk back and disobey, tell fibs and get into trouble, and are nonetheless still likable and redeemable.
Interpretation
Children benefit from interacting with peers who share similar behaviors and challenges.
This quote emphasizes the importance of children interacting with peers who reflect their own behaviors, including positive and negative traits. By encountering others who may be difficult or rebellious, children learn to understand social dynamics, develop empathy, and realize that everyone is capable of growth and redemption, which contributes to their emotional and social development.
In practice
In a parenting workshop discussing the importance of peer interaction for emotional growth.
The need to become a separate self is as urgent as the yearning to merge forever. And as long as we, not our mother, initiate parting, and as long as our mother remains reliably there, it seems possible to risk, and even to revel in, standing alone.
Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it.
Starting after 60, I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to write a book of poems on the 70s. It's going to be all moans and groans and complaints, and what is there to laugh about?' But I found plenty to laugh about.
Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and the skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality - a reality which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.
To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.
I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.
No matter how long you play the guitar, there's always something else to learn.
I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.
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