Previous Quotes of the Month for 2018
January
"If controlling another human being is the goal of parenting, then force is necessary. Fear, intimidation, threats, power-plays, and physical pain are the means of control. But if growing healthy humans is the goal, then building trust relationships, encouraging, guiding, leading, teaching, and communicating are the tools for success."
- L. R. Knost,
The Problem with Punishment
February
"The first five years have so much to do with how the next eighty turn out."
- Bill Gates, Sr.
March
"Imagine that you had omnipotent powers and were faced with the problem of how to get young humans and other young animals to practice the skills they must develop to survive and thrive in their local conditions of life. How might you solve that problem? It is hard to imagine a more effective solution than that of building into their brains a mechanism that makes them want to practice those very skills and that rewards such practice with the experience of joy. That, indeed, is the mechanism that natural selection has built, and we refer to the resultant behaviour as play."
- Peter Gray,
Free to Learn
April
"At the root of every tantrum and power struggle are unmet needs."
- Marshall Rosenberg
May
"Play is not a respite from learning. Play is learning."
- Katie Hurley
July
"Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul."
- Friedrich Froebel
August
"If the emotions are free, the intellect will look after itself."
- A. S. Neill,
The Free Child
September
"If you trust play, you will not have to control your child's development... Play will raise the child in ways you can never imagine."
- Vince Gowmon
October
"Fun is nature's reward for learning."
- William Glasser, M.D.
November
"We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model ... to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish."
- Sir Ken Robinson
More Quotes of the MonthDecember
"I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it."
- Rose Kennedy