Child Independence Quotes & Sayings

A child cannot tolerate a mother's anger. She either splits from the relationship, or she becomes terrified. Neither alternative promotes freedom and individuality. Independence, as we mentioned above, needs to be fostered, not attacked by mother. She has the power to send one of two messages: "Your individuality is loved," or "Your individuality is my enemy, and I will destroy it." A child cannot stand up to that kind of attack and develop in the way that she needs to. — Henry Cloud

The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother
both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child's history is never finished. — Terri E Apter

If the Declaration of Independence states our creed, there can be no right to abortion, since it means denying the most fundamental right of all to the unborn child, the right to life. — Alan Keyes

What we need is a world full of miracles, like the miracle of seeing the young child seeking work and independence, and manifesting a wealth of enthusiasm and love. — Maria Montessori

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent's own independence. — Rosamunde Pilcher

What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love. The ability to roll back the tide of evil. Essentially, I lose my kingdom and get his. I move from being an independent player to a dependent lover. I move from being an orphan to a child of God. — Paul E. Miller

But when his parents consciously or unconsciously exploit him for their own ends or pleasure, or hate or reject him, so that he cannot be sure of minimal support when he tries out his new independence, the child will cling to the parents and will use his capacity for independence only in the forms of negativity and stubbornness. If, when he first begins tentatively to say "No," his parents beat him down rather than love and encourage him, he thereafter will say "No" not as a form of true independent strength but as a mere rebellion. — Rollo May

We don't want to have a child that has many illnesses, and that will pass away after a few months. A child must have a good environment, and parents that will take care of it.
[...] It [a Kurdish state] must be a part of stability in this area. — Fuad Hussein

The child must be given activities that encourage independence, and he must not be served by others in acts he can learn to perform himself. — Paula Polk Lillard

And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respect, without conflict and without resentment. It is the hardest lesson to learn that the goal of parenthood is not to reign forever but to abdicate gracefully at the right time. — Sydney J. Harris

The introduction to horrors so young impressed on me just how helpless and vulnerable I was. Parents are supposed to empower their children to live without them but in my family, I wasn't given permission to be my own person. I thought I needed them to live and then they abandoned me. It's no wonder I felt so unempowered well into my adult years. — Christina Enevoldsen

Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child — Miguel Syjuco

These are often the children of overbearing narcissistic parents who cannot tolerate the teenager's growing need for separateness and threaten the child with psychological or actual abandonment as a punishment for exercising independence. The child considers the risks and decides prematurely to do what is expected, becoming a doctor. . .without first engaging in a journey of self-discovery. When the parents' or culture's roles and values are adopted wholesale and without examination, the process of establishing a personal identity is short-circuited. Some of these individuals rework this struggle more successfully later in life, while others are never free from the narcissistic web and only feel good when they are pleasing someone other than themselves. — Sandy Hotchkiss

Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence - — John Taylor Gatto

I cherished her individuality, that spark of independence no child should lose to life's restrictions and parameters. — Truddi Chase

'Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France. — Claire Denis

3. The child is allowed to experience and express ordinary impulses, such as jealousy, rage, sexuality and defiance, because the parents have not disowned these feelings in themselves. 4. The child does not have to please the parent and can develop his own needs at his own developmental pace. 5. The child can depend on and use his parents because they are separate from him. 6. The parents' independence and good boundaries allow the child to separate self and object representation. 7. Because the child is allowed to display ambivalent feelings, he can learn to regard himself and the caregiver as "both good and bad," rather than splitting off certain parts as good and certain parts as bad. 8. The beginning of true object love is possible because the parents love the child as a separate object. — John Bradshaw

Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot
a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life
of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence. — Zick Rubin

Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins. — Sydney J. Harris

When you intervene on behalf of your child, your child becomes the victim. You're expressing the message 'You're incapable, you're not sturdy enough to resolve this yourself, you need me to come in and take care of this for you.'" You are, in essence, disempowering your child. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind. — Maria Montessori

Do you know the greatest gift a parent can give to a child?" she asked, looking around the room. No one answered. "Independence. To allow them go out into the world and make their own decisions, travel their own paths. — Michael Scott

The child's conquests of independence are the basic steps in what is called his 'natural development'. — Maria Montessori

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns. — Henry Adams

The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so. — Timothy Keller

Maybe children just want whatever it is they don't get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence
so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive. — Laura Moriarty

I think a common misperception about attuning and tending to a child's needs so constantly is that they don't grow in their independence, but I think that the opposite is true. — Alanis Morissette

She knew well the history of which they spoke because her father had been a part of it. When the military overseers of Pakistan had refused to allow the winning party in Bangladesh - then East Pakistan - to form a government, her father had put down his textbooks, left the university, and joined the fight. Hundreds of thousands, millions of deaths later, Bangladesh had its independence. His stories had made a deep impact on on Asma as a child. She had resolved to be as brave, only to learn that as a woman she wasn't expected to be. — Amy Waldman

Besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child. — Bryce Courtenay

Except when he has regressive tendencies, the child's nature is to aim directly and energetically at functional independence. — Maria Montessori

Since being quite young, I've had a very strong sense of independence and survival. As a child, I was on my own two feet emotionally. — Lena Headey

When a child reaches adolescence, there is very apt to be a conflict between parents and child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The opinions they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret. — Bertrand Russell

In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also. — Bryce Courtenay

We must remember when we speak of the "negativism" of the toddler that this is also the child who is intoxicated with the discoveries of the second year, a joyful child who is firmly bound to his parents and his new-found world through ties of love. The so-called negativism is one of the aspects of this development, but under ordinary circumstances it does not become anarchy. It's a kind of declaration of independence, but there is no intention to unseat the government. — Selma Fraiberg

Any child who is self-sufficient , who can ties his shoes, dress or undress himself, reflects in his joy and sense of achievement the image of human dignity which is derived from a sense of independence. — Maria Montessori

Abortion is defended today as a means of ensuring the equality and independence of women, and as a solution to the problems of single parenting, child abuse, and the feminization of poverty. — Robert Casey

Under the urge of nature and according to the laws of development, though not understood by the adult, the child is obliged to be serious about two fundamental things ... the first is the love of activity ... The second fundamental thing is independence. — Maria Montessori

In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad's room. What are we training them for? It's independence, because that's what being empowered is all about. — Sheena Iyengar

One real danger in love relationships is that most people secretly believe that they must control the love object in order to feel safe in loving and being loved. The cause of this is simple - children are made to feel that they must "give themselves up" if they are to be loved. Thus, for most humans the act of surrender has meant the loss of autonomy or worse - loss of one's own mind.
Surrender is neither control nor morbid dependency and cannot be made contingent upon giving away one's "soul"; nonetheless, the person surrendering opens completely to the moment, and runs the risk of being deeply hurt. Sadly, in our society this is not uncommon and frequently serves to harden or embitter a person toward life in general. Or, on the other had being deeply hurt in the act of surrender can lead to angry and painful "cries for help." When this occurs there is an insatiable and wrathful desire to be cared for as a child is cared for and the horrid fear of loss of independence. — Christopher S. Hyatt

We must clearly understand that when we give the child freedom and independence, we are giving freedom to a worker already braced for action, who cannot live without working and being active. — Maria Montessori

What skill am I teaching my child to develop independence? — Rebecca Branstetter

It may be underfunded and at times mismanaged, but the [Endangered Species] Act is an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. The Endangered Species Act is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing-the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but its available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary-and as American-as the Declaration of Independence. — Joe Roman

Love-based parenting elevates the importance of the relationship to the highest position. No homework assignment, no chore, and no social etiquette is ever more important than the parent-child relationship. Maintaining connectedness and attunement, thereby sustaining the balance of love of self and love of child, is the primal outcome of every interaction the parent has with the child. When this is achieved, the other less significant items will take care of themselves. The ultimate challenge in reaching this goal is that children both want and need autonomy (independence), yet they are biologically engineered to be in relationships and to belong (dependence). This clash between the two is compounded by American culture where there is a powerful emphasis on the individual rather than — Heather T. Forbes

The child's conquest of independence begins with his first introduction to life. While he is developing, he perfects himself and overcomes every obstacle that he finds in his path. A vital force is active within him, and this guides his efforts towards their goal. It is a force called the 'horme', by Sir Percy Nunn. — Maria Montessori

The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in. — Graham Greene