Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Pearl S. BuckRead
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Emotional security for children comes from a strong familial connection, not just from parents.
In this quote, Pearl S. Buck emphasizes the importance of a broader family unit for the emotional well-being of young people. She argues that children require a sense of belonging that extends beyond just their parents, needing connections to a community of relatives who provide diverse interactions and support, thus fostering a deeper sense of security and identity that is critical for their development.
Themes
Emotional SecurityFamilyBelongingChildrenConnections
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about community values, one might reference this quote to highlight the role of the extended family.
More from Pearl S. Buck
All quotes →You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.
Pearl S. BuckRead
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.
Pearl S. BuckRead
To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Pearl S. BuckRead
Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
Pearl S. BuckRead
God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular.
Pearl S. BuckRead
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