A Quote by Walter Dean Myers
I am very much interested in getting parents to read to children, and trying to get people mentoring children. If I can do both I'll be happy.
Related Quotes
It struck me that when we read picture books to children, we parents, and people as a whole, do not appear in them very much, and that they are more constructed to be a world of children and animals.
So many organizations have a mentoring arm, but they don't really do it. Their idea of mentoring a kid is giving them general advice. But what they need to do is read with children.
From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.
You must learn to look at people who are angry with you straight in the eye without getting angry back. When children see their parents treating them this way, they then recognize the parents' authority. It speaks louder than words. Their new respect for the parents is as good for them as it is for the parents. It never works to demand respect of children. It must be given willingly as a result of strength of good character in the parents, which is manifested by their non-reaction to stress in the children.
I am concerned that my children will grow up sheltered from the public. I am concerned that the children get to experience childhood and youth in their time without constant monitoring. It has been very important for both the Crown Prince and myself.
The best and most popular novelists do not, as a rule, have children in their books at all, and this is wise. Parents are about the only people who are interested in children, and they merely in their own ones.
My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.
When both my parents were unwell I was in that situation that will be very familiar to many women. I had young children in one part of the country, and elderly unwell parents in another. I was in a constant state of guilt. Was I there enough for my mother? Was I there enough for my children?
It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.
Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters.
Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their children's minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.
I would say I am viewed as the oldest teenager in my family because they say I never grow old. I mean, I am stern in my own way - I am not one to let children run over me - but I am very, very good with children, and I can usually get what I want out of them.
I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.
Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.
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