We’ve educated children to think that spontaneity is inappropriate. Children are willing to expose themselves to experiences. We aren’t. Grownups always say they protect their children, but they’re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can’t protect children. They know everything.
It means caring for one another in our families: husbands and wives first protect one another, and then, as parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time, protect their parents.
We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.
~My instinct is to protect my children from pain. But adversity is often the thing that gives us character and backbone. It's always been a struggle for me to back off and let my children go through difficult experiences.~
As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.
I know it's become a cliche of sorts, but, nonetheless, it is true. This is the only planet we and our children and children's children will call home. We can't afford to lose this home because we didn't protect it.
If we continue...to consume the world until there's no more to consume, then there's going to come a day, sure as hell, when our children or their children or their children's children are going to look back on us - on you and me - and say to themselves, "My God, what kind of monsters were these people?"
I really have a deep sense of caring about the air that we breathe and the water that we drink. I want to be able to say that I was trying to protect that. And I also care deeply about children. My children, all children. And I care deeply about giving back.
When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, Let all children come unto me.
Parents who've not had an education themselves find it hard to explain to their children what a decent education involves, and I completely understand that. Parents themselves need to be educated by schools about what sort of education they should expect for their children. I do think there's a heavy responsibility of the school.
Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.
I have always admired organizations that help children grow and learn, and organizations that protect and shelter children when no one else does. And I wanted to draw attention to these organizations and recognize the contributions they were making to the country and to our children in particular.
But when we have families, when we have children, this gives us a purpose for being, to protect our children, to avoid going to jail because if I'm in jail, who looks after my children, who's there for my wife?.
But when we have families, when we have children, this gives us a purpose for being, to protect our children, to avoid going to jail because if I'm in jail, who looks after my children, who's there for my wife?
People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.
It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.