A lot of children can go back and look at their childhood and find reasons why it wasn't perfect. But why whine about something no one can fix? You deal with it.
Wordsworth was right when he said that we trail clouds of glory as we come into the world, that we are born with a divine sense of perception. As we grow older, the world closes in on us, and we gradually lose the freshness of viewpoint that we had as children. That is why I think children should get to know this country while they are young.
I've always been drawn to and fascinated by physical and psychological change.
If I'm able to make pictures of children that are so real, as you follow the children over the years in any given book, and in subsequent books they get older and older and grow up, perhaps there might be something cautionary in that visual example.
Every child is going to grow up. You can see it happen in the books: They get older and older and belong to themselves to a greater and greater extent.
Food can fill our stomachs but never our souls.
Posessions can fill our houses but never our hearts.
Sex can fill our nights but never our hunger for love.
Children can fill our days but never our identities.
Jesus wants us to know only He can fill us and truly satisfy us.
Childhood doesn't have to be perfect, and children don't have to be beautiful. From a bit of grit may grow a pearl, and if pearl production doesn't materialise, the outcome will still be preferable to the shallowness of vanity.
No one sane would let a first-century dentist fill their children's teeth. Why then do we allow first-century theologians to fill our children's minds?
Nothing in Nature's sober found,
But an eternal Health goes round.
Fill up the Bowl then, fill it high--
Fill all the Glasses there; for why
Should every Creature Drink but I?
Why, Man of Morals, tell me why?
My parents never understood why I didn't want to be a doctor or lawyer. They're Cuban immigrants who wanted to give their children the American dream, and, to them, that was more of what 'the dream' entailed.
As children, we have vivid imaginations. We stay up late waiting for Santa Claus, dream of becoming president, and have ideas that defy physics. Then something happens. As we grow older, we start editing our imagination.
The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.
I grew up loving cars. It was completely and utterly, without a doubt, my childhood dream. Whether your childhood dream progresses or changes, you turn into a man and you probably shouldn't still have that same dream.
I'm really confident. I had a perfect childhood. I had perfect parents and grandparents. They just love me, simply. So I have no fears.
We dream of the perfect wave, the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect love, and when we get there, we dream of something else, and the journey goes on.
Young children learn in a different manner from that of older children and adults, yet we can teach them many things if we adapt our materials and mode of instruction to their level of ability. But we miseducate young children when we assume that their learning abilities are comparable to those of older children and that they can be taught with materials and with the same instructional procedures appropriate to school-age children.
Do not feed children on a maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature. Let their souls drink in all that is pure and sweet. Rear them, if possible, amid pleasant surroundings ... Let nature teach them the lessons of good and proper living, combined with an abundance of well-balanced nourishment. Those children will grow to be the best men and women. Put the best in them by contact with the best outside. They will absorb it as a plant absorbs the sunshine and the dew.
All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.