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 had great mentors in my parents who always sought to understand the world around them. And they would push me to really think things through.
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.
You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.
Teaching's hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.
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