Quotes & Sayings About Children's Brains

Self-regulation can be taught to many kids who cycle between frantic activity and immobility. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, all kids need to learn self-awareness, self-regulation, and communication as part of their core curriculum. Just as we teach history and geography, we need to teach children how their brains and bodies work. For adults and children alike, being in control of ourselves requires becoming familiar with our inner world and accurately identifying what scares, upsets, or delights us. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations. — Alison Gopnik

Education should train the child to use his brains, to make for himself a place in the world and maintain his rights even when it seems that society would shove him into the scrap-heap. — Helen Keller

Parents raise children then grow old, and their children forget the things their old parents did for them, because their brains don't remember before they grew selfish.
There are buildings all over the world full of old people sitting around looking out of windows, full of hate for their selfish sons and daughters.
And meanwhile, the selfish sons and daughters look out of their windows at their children playing and think how wonderful their unbreakable bond of love is between them and their children. — Craig Stone

I think that a lot of the drive to have overachieving children is defensive - the idea of making sure your child is fully armed against all the other kids, whose parents are busy packing their little brains with facts so they can claw their way into the Ivy League over the broken bodies of their classmates. While — John Scalzi

Work is the greatest means of education. To train children to work, to work systematically, to love work, and to put their brains into work, may be called the end and aim of schools. In education, no work should be done for the sake of the thing done, but for the sake of the growing mind. — Francis Wayland Parker

We'd be really screwed if we had to start our life over again as children with our brains right now, because I think we lose the plasticity and flexibility. — Paul Bloom

Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation. — Jill Bolte Taylor

The children's hobbies aren't only the children's hobbies - the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They started to symbolize other things compensating for or reinforcing the parents' own failures. — Fredrik Backman

Neuroscience is now a very important research area in biology. We are now understanding a lot more about brains in babies, as well as children and adults. — Robert Winston

Girls shouldn't throw away their lives. They have the opportunity to not have 25 children - to make something of themselves, and use their brains and creativity. I'm just thrilled about that. — Pam Ferris

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly. — Mem Fox

As children develop, their brains "mirror" their parent's brain. In other words, the parent's own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child's brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. — Daniel J. Siegel

My mother used to say when we were children, 'When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.' Power is a stick in the hand, and I have never heard of anybody who wielded a very big stick of power whose brains did not run out the other end. As a nation, our brains are running out the other end of our power right now. — Jane Jacobs

Children who plan their own schedules and evaluate their own work build up their brains and learn to take more responsibility. — Bruce Feiler

We now know that the way to help a child develop optimally is to help create connections in her brain - her whole brain - that develop skills that lead to better relationships, better mental health, and more meaningful lives. You could call it brain sculpting, or brain nourishing, or brain building. Whatever phrase you prefer, the point is crucial, and thrilling: as a result of the words we use and the actions we take, children's brains will actually change, and be built, as they undergo new experiences. — Daniel J. Siegel

children's hobbies aren't only the children's hobbies - the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. — Fredrik Backman

Awake

Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and
choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.
A vast radiant beach
in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it's quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the woolly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us.
Choose, they croon, the Ancient Ones
The time has come again
Choose now, they croon,
Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake
Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
Come with us
Everything is broken up and dances. — The Doors

... no person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people. — Louisa May Alcott

Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water. — Alison Gopnik

Modern education is premised strongly on materialistic values. It is vital that when educating our children's brains that we do not neglect to educate their hearts, a key element of which has to be the nurturing of our compassionate nature. — Dalai Lama

Left to their own devices, women would stop having sex after they have children. There's no evolutionary need for it. Our brains know it, our body knows it. Who feels sexy during the slog of motherhood, the middle-aged fat roll and the flattening butt? — Maria Semple

You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other until it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Love isn't brains, children, it's blood
blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it. — Joss Whedon

All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children. — George MacDonald

Bear this research in mind when you listen to those who argue that our nation cannot afford to implement comprehensive early education programs for disadvantaged children and their families. If we as a village decide not to help families develop their children's brains, then at least let us admit that we are acting not on the evidence but according to a different agenda. And let us acknowledge that we are not using all the tools at our disposal to better the lives of our children. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

You know what we can be like: see a guy and think he's cute one minute, the next minute our brains have us married with kids, the following minute we see him having an extramarital affair. By the time someone says, 'I'd like you to meet Cecil,' we shout, 'You're late again with the child support!' — Cynthia Heimel

If I had had a daughter, I always knew what I would tell her. First of all, I would try to counter all outdated stereotypical claptrap that girls are commonly told about their sex--that women are valued far more for their sexual characteristics than their character and brains--and encourage her to be a truly independent person. Only knowing who she is herself will she be able to find find her own life's work and make good decisions in choosing a partner and having children. — Doris Anderson

A statement: children who watch violent TV programmes tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programmes? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children's programmes now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school? — Carl Sagan

The status quo and the media is doing everything it can to fry children's brains and make them grow up maladjusted. — Julie Christie

In fact, our brains are most active, and hungriest, in the first few years of life. Even as adults, our brains use a lot of energy: when you just sit still, about 20 percent of your calories go to your brain. One-year-olds use much more than that, and by four, fully 66 percent of calories go to the brain, more than at any other period of development. In fact, the physical growth of children slows down in early childhood to compensate for the explosive activity of their brains. — Alison Gopnik

He was the most perfectly formed man she'd ever imagined. He was movie stars, men in underwear commercials, guys at the gym, the construction worker in the red T-shirt who'd whistled at her but she'd pretended she hadn't heard; he was the men in three-piece suits whose brains were as sexy as their bodies; he was lazy, indolent seventeen-year-old boys whose muscles bulged out of their clothes, rodeo stars, and those smooth-cheeked, eyeglassed men who held their children tenderly. He was all of them. — Jude Deveraux

As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be naked - pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses - all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing - bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn't even know we shared a womb. — Douglas Coupland

Obviously, our children, who have been playing with their computers since the age of five or six, don't have quite the same brain as those who were brought up on wooden or metal toys, whose brains are certainly atrophied by comparison. — Claude Vorilhon

Twas the day before Thanksgiving
And all through the trees,
The fall leaves were spinning
Aloft in the breeze.

Eight children had boarded
Their school bus with grins
In hopes that a field trip
Soon would begin.

They sang as they rode
Through autumn terrains,
While visions of drumsticks
Danced in their brains. — Dav Pilkey

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! — Allen Ginsberg

Effective discipline means that we're not only stopping a bad behavior or promoting a good one, but also teaching skills and nurturing the connections in our children's brains that will help them make better decisions and handle themselves well in the future. — Daniel J. Siegel

Let the children be able to Read so they can develop their brains early. — Amaka Oguejiofo

At the beginning of World War II, a Nazi officer is forced to share a compartment on a crowded train with a Jew and his family. After ignoring them for a while he says contemptuously, "You Jews are supposed to be so clever; where does this so called intelligence come from?"

"It is from our diet," says the Jew, " we eat a lot of raw fish heads." Upon which he opens his basket and saying "Lunch time!" proceeds to hand out fish heads to his wife and children. The Nazi, getting excited says "Wait a minute, I want some!"

"Okay," says the Jew "I will sell you six for twenty-five dollars."

The Nazi accepts and begins to chew. He almost throws up, but the children shout encouragment, "Suck out the brains, suck out the brains!" The Nazi is on his fourth head when he says to the Jew, "Is not twenty-five dollars a lot of money to pay for six fish heads, that are usually thrown out as garbage?"

"See," says the Jew, "It's working already! — Osho

Women are indoctrinated from infancy about beauty. We feel we must be Superwoman and have it all: beauty, brains, a good work ethic, great with children, a good cook. The list is long, isn't it? I think it's particularly hard for women to accept the unconditional love God offers. We are so used to being held to such a high standard - and failing - that we feel we can never measure up. What a blessing when we realize that we don't have to. God loves us, warts and all. We are safe in his arms. Safe to tell him our dreams, our fears, our failings. Safe to relax in his unconditional love. — Colleen Coble

It is vital that when educating our children's brains that we do not neglect to educate their hearts. — Dalai Lama

Like our physical bodies, our memory becomes out of shape. As children, we are constantly learning new experiences, but by the time we reach our 20s, we start to lead a more sedentary life both mentally and physically. Our lives become routine, and we stop challenging our brains, and our memory starts to suffer. — Tony Buzan

Go home.' Montag fixed his eyes upon her, quietly. 'Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozens of abortions you've had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it? Go home, go home!' he yelled. — Ray Bradbury

Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years
about twelve of them
to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood. — E.L. Konigsburg

He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains, of the children of this world, but a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory. And their names are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will. — Mark Twain

An old fisherman heard all this and shook his head. "This is what happens to those who don't get married," he said. "All they want to do is save the world, by hook or by crook. The sperm rises to their heads and attacks their brains. For God's sake, all of you: get married, let your forces loose on women and have children in order to calm yourselves! — Nikos Kazantzakis

used today are wreaking havoc on all of us, particularly on young children whose brains, immune systems, reproductive systems, and lungs are growing rapidly. "We have abundant — Alan Bell

I am convinced that not only do children need children's books to fine-tune their brains, but our civilization needs them if we are not going to unplug ourselves from our collective past. — E.L. Konigsburg

You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. It is an honor to be in that sacred space in some children's brains. — Daniel Handler

Air pollution is terrible for our children. Every single scientist, every single doctor will tell you the same thing: Air pollution damages our children's brains, their hearts, and their lungs. — Julianne Moore

You can take a pile of rocks and use them to build a house, or you can take the same pile and start a war. Tell children not to throw rocks, make rules against picking up rocks, and then make them mad. Keep projecting what not to do and you make the thought in their brains of what can and will be done. — Charles Manson

As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two. — Steven Pinker

Some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. — Robin Marantz Henig

She was fairly good at any kind of housework not demanding brains. Nobody could say why some of Ossian Popham's gifts of mind and conversation had not descended to his children, but though the son was not really stupid at practical work, Lallie Joy was in a perpetual state of coma. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

She was a librarian, dammit.
She knew books. She used the Dewey Decimal System. She taught the children to search with their eyes and their brains. They were encouraged to ask Moira for help, rather than punch titles into a screen. Moira believed all children needed to live through that awkward, precarious moment when they had to disrupt the silence of the library and approach the librarian. It built character. — Fern Brady

If I set my stones, my mum would be an opal, all swirly colours and clashy statements. I would put her at the north point of my stone compass and be grateful to her for my brains, and the fact that I stand up for myself. I'd be grateful to her for the ease with which I laugh, although I wish she'd rein in her own guffaws sometimes because really, who needs to be that loud? I was grateful that she didn't hover over me like some parents who couldn't seem to let their (nearly adult) children out of their sight without keeping constant telephone contact. He'll, I was even grateful that she had strict house rules that were a pain in the arse, because we both knew it would be much easier if she said yes, but she did no because she really believed no was the right answer. — Gabrielle Williams

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth. — W. Somerset Maugham

We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children. — Patricia Sun

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once. — Diana Wynne Jones

Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted - and their knowledge deepened - by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all. — Matthew Syed

Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely impressive. — Charlotte Bronte

Sadly, history shows us that people literally scrambled their children's brains with heavy exposure to screens at young ages. Developing primate brains are wired to interact with others in a real environment, learning the enormous range of human behaviours from copying the people they love and trust, not staring mindlessly at images. — EXO Books

Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that "animals try to spread their genes." That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes "try" to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe. — Steven Pinker

With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort. — Richard Dawkins

Children are like the zombies I once saw in a film at Dad's. We have to do as we're told and obey like our brains have got eaten. — Kate Hamer

As for the military advantage of such a bombardment, I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasure the brains with which they were spattered. I have seen a janitor's wife come out of her cellar and douse the sullied pavement with a bucket of water, and I am still unable to understand what part these humble slaughterhouse accidents play in warfare. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce. — Tom Robbins

Don't you make fun of me or my children! Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop. — Jeannette Walls