The first years of life are not just important; they are more crucial to shaping children than any other time. Even before they speak, children are extremely sensitive to the messages adults send them.
Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization the Against Malaria Foundation which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets to protect children. And we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria. Fortunately more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement effective altruism.
I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.
That was a judicious mother who said, "I obey my children for the first year of their lives, but ever after I expect them to obey me.
That is very important to me, to make fertility mainstream so everyone understands it. If you want to have your miracle child, there are options: adoption, surrogacy, fertility procedures. It is also sadly very expensive, and not all insurance companies cover it.
You cannot teach a child any more than you can grow a plant. All you can do is on the negative side - you can only help. It is a manifestation from within; it develops its own nature - you can only take away obstructions.
My grandparents never understood why my mother Noreen chose such exotic names for her children: Damon and me. My granny insisted on calling my brother Dermot - a good Irish name - until she died; I was just known as wee one.
Jesus specialized in menial tasks that everyone else tried to avoid: washing feet, helping children, fixing breakfast, and serving lepers. Nothing was beneath him, because he came to serve.
And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
Elderly gentlemen, gentle in all respects, kind to animals, beloved by children, and fond of music, are found in lonely corners of the downs, hacking at sandpits or tussocks of grass, and muttering in a blind, ungovernable fury elaborate maledictions which could not be extracted from them by robbery or murder. Men who would face torture without a word become blasphemous at the short fourteenth. It is clear that the game of golf may well be included in that category of intolerable provocations which may legally excuse or mitigate behavior not otherwise excusable.
God loved us, and to prove it to us became human in order to become our brother in the flesh. He became poor, the poorest of the poor, in order to be able to include us all as his brothers (and sisters). He became a little child in order to be like children, even born, children from the slums. God has loved us and has given us all that he is and has. The Father gave the Son, the Son gave his very self, the Holy Spirit became our habitual sanctifier. . . . How grateful I should be to this kind Savior!
Children have an uncanny memory for what parents say, but don't do.
In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrarty, most offenders had been charged with andor convicted of from one to three victims. In the interviews I have done, they have admitted to roughly 10 to 1,250 victims. What was truly frightening was that all the offenders had been reported before by children, and the reports had been ignored.
When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it's not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work.
People find it a great blessing if their child left behind a child.
Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.
My darling, you are indisposed! You must remain abed for the next eight months. Little Buford - " "I am NOT naming our child Buford.
California belongs to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo Drive. But California in the sense of the West. The old West where Manifest Destiny was an almost palpable notion that was somehow tied to the land and the climate and one's own family-an unspoken belief that was passed down to children in stories and sayings.
Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.