Quotes on Child Development

It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.

The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.

A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.