What's done to children, they will do to society.
Interpretation
Children's experiences shape their future actions and impact society.
This quote by Karl A. Menninger emphasizes the profound influence that childhood experiences have on individuals, suggesting that the way children are treated will ultimately reflect in their behavior toward society as adults. It serves as a reminder that nurturing and educating children positively can lead to a more compassionate and productive society.
In practice
During a community meeting discussing educational reforms, I quoted Menninger to emphasize the importance of investing in child welfare.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
I believe that in the pursuit of education, individual desire is more influential than institution, and personal faith more forceful than faculty.
A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.
It's not good enough to give it tender, loving care, to supply it with breakfast foods, to buy it expensive educations. Those things don't mean anything unless this generation has a future. And we're not sure that it does.
I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.
Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.
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