Quotes & Sayings About Foster Child

I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father ... once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it. — David Foster Wallace

At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sort of subtle ways. Here's an example. Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly. — David Foster Wallace

The Imaginative Child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization — L. Frank Baum

The so-called mother of the child isn't the child's begetter, but only a sort of nursing soil for the new-sown seed. The man, the one on top, is the true parent, while she, a stranger, foster's a stranger's sprout. — Aeschylus

Like a child exploring the attic of an old house on a rainy day, discovering a trunk full of treasure and then calling all his brothers and sisters to share the find, Richard J. 'Foster has 'found' the spiritual disciplines that the modern world has stored away and forgot, and has excitedly called us to celebrate them. For they are, as he shows us, the instruments of joy, the way into mature Christian spirituality and abundant life. — Eugene H. Peterson

Children are my pet cause. I have a foster child in El Salvador, and whenever I'm home, I work for the Adam Walsh Foundation, which finds missing children. I also do some hospital visits and other things for the Make-a-Wish Foundation. — Jane Badler

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter's safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket's tall pile. The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl's face. They'd ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace. — David Foster Wallace

The one piece of advice I always give is this: become a foster parent because you want to help the child. Not because you expect the child to think of you as their mother or father. Or to love you for the rest of their lives. They might never love you. But you have to do the very best you can for them at all times, no matter what. Fostering is one of the few jobs where your ultimate goal is not to be needed anymore. — Rio Hogarty

Sometimes a child will get lucky and be placed with foster parents who are loving and supportive and who consider that child their own. But for many, that doesn't happen. Kids are moved around from home to home, to group home and institutions, until they are 18, when they are considered adults and the system is finished with them. — Rhea Perlman

I don't know why people think child actresses in particular are screwed up. I see kids everywhere who are totally bored. I've never been bored a day in my life. — Jodie Foster

Time is not a solid, linear thing, no matter how much man tries to pretend it is. Time has humored us, much like a parent does a child, bending this way and that, to make us think we have the upper hand, but make no mistake: we do not. There are levels and dimensions of time, unimaginable twists and nooks that our punny brains cannot even begin to understand. — Amy S. Foster

A star has died. Elsewhere in the cosmos, in an unremarkable corner of one galactic arm, a child was born. Such is the balance of existence. — Alan Dean Foster

Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenceless heart. You don't know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labour. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Everyone can love occasionally, even the wicked can. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he'd clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run's - not anymore, since now even the phrase Make A Difference had become a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used Make a Difference in a Child's Life and Making a Difference in Your Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the telephonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer Hotline number in the metro area. — David Foster Wallace

'Hannity' had a a guy on that said, 'I fathered 20 kids by 14 mothers.' That is s cultural issue which has demeaned our society and has caused our society dearly in terms of imprisonment. Who's going to be the fathers to those children? Who's going to pay child support? — Foster Friess

Attachment begins early but grows slowly. There are no shortcuts. Verbal guarantees of safety or nurturance carry no more weight than those for hair-replacement systems and miracle slicers. A therapist must prove trustworthy over time. Only consistent experiential demonstrations, in times of both quietude and turbulence, convince the child. Though all children love to be wined and dined, the safety, understanding, warmth, and containment of therapy are what foster trust and ultimately seduce the child patient. (41) — Richard Bromfield

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time. — John Keats

When a young child is taught that telling the truth will result in a good feeling, she has taken the first step toward realizing that truth has a spiritual quality. It isn't necessary to use punishment. If you foster the attitude of "tell the truth or you'll be in trouble," you have taught something spiritually false. A child who is tempted to lie is under the influence of fear; if truth gets associated with this fear, then the mind quite logically tries to get better at seeming to tell the truth. — Deepak Chopra

This is for the kids who know that the worst kind of fear isn't the thing that makes you scream, but the one that steals your voice and keeps you silent. — Abby Norman

Otherwise, there were no long goodbyes or emotional scenes. That isn't part of foster care. You just leave and you just die a little bit. Just a little bit because a little bit more of you understands that this is the way it's going to be. And you grow hard around the edges, just a little bit. Not in some big way, but just a little bit because you have to, because if you don't it only hurts worse the next time and a little bit more of you will die. And you don't want that because you know that if enough little bits of you die enough times, a part of you leaves. Do you know what I mean? You're still there, but a part of you leaves until you stand on the sidelines of life, simply watching, like a ghost that everyone can see and no one is bothered by. You become the saddest thing there is: a child of God who has given up. — John William Tuohy

Thus bound together, they sheltered the child from the cold, dark night, enveloping him in warmth. — Seth Adam Smith

I wanted, as all men do, to belong.
To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back. — Sherwood Anderson

It's not unusual, while waiting for somebody to kiss the frog and the real parents to come home, for a foster child to live in ten or twenty different houses. — Cris Beam

It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child. — David Foster Wallace

More broadly, we are going to have to examine the safety net programs to make sure they are poised to catch the families before they fall even more, especially in the areas of unemployment benefits, child care assistance, and foster care. — Richard Neal

I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point. — David Foster Wallace

Child actors going on to become adult actors never really works, apart from a few. Jodie Foster was the exception. — Mark Lester

My mom was always late. It drove me crazy as a child. So I'm always on time - or early. — Jodie Foster

Writing for children is important to me because I want children to develop the same love of books I had as a child. — Darlene Foster

That's why we discourage parents from forcing kids to express sorrow before they are sincerely sorry. Your child may simply be learning how to act on the outside in order to avoid consequences. Begin as early as you can to foster an authentic faith, which is an "inside out" experience. Do this by encouraging honest expressions of what is really going on in the heart. Desire authenticity over pretense; openness over secrecy; and honest conversation over what you wish to hear. Be a loving, safe person with whom your kids can share what is really going on in their hearts. Sometimes all that is needed for a heart to repent is the opportunity to safely express the truth. — Ellen M. Schuknecht

Adolescence is a tough one to be a child actor. — Jodie Foster

Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them? — Viktor E. Frankl

Did Mr. Poe write as a boy?
Dear me, yes. It was all he had, what with losing his mother as a toddling child and then being cast aside by his foster father. I think sometimes his pen was his only friend in the world — Lynn Cullen

I think it's important that when people are struggling, that you not run away from them if you love them. Kristen, I mean, I look at the room tonight, you know, Kristen Stewart and Claire Danes, Jennifer Lawrence, all these young women that I worked with who basically were child actors like I was a child actor. And then I feel very protective of them, because even though I think I have managed to get through the process relatively sanely, I have my scars, and I hope to be in some ways a member of their family that's out there protecting them. — Jodie Foster

I don't know what I would have done if they had hugged me. I probably would have frozen in place, become stiff. It took most of my life to overcome my distaste for physical contact and not to stiffen when I was touched, or flinch, twitch, fidget, and eventually figure out how to move away. I learned to accept being hugged by my children when they were infants. Their joy at seeing me enter a room was real and filled with true love and affection and it showed in their embraces. Like a convert, when I learned the joy and comfort of being hugged by and hugging those I loved, I became a regular practitioner. — John William Tuohy

Enforced maternity brings into the world wretched infants, whom their parents will be unable to support and who will become the victims of public care or 'child martyrs'. It must be pointed out that our society, so concerned to defend the rights of the embryo, shows no interest in the children once they are born; it prosecutes the abortionists instead of undertaking to reform that scandalous institution known as 'public assistance'; those responsible for entrusting the children to their torturers are allowed to go free; society closes its eyes to the frightful tyranny of brutes in children's asylums and private foster homes. — Simone De Beauvoir

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child's play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six. — David Foster Wallace

But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing ... How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose? — David Foster Wallace

There's nothing more important in this world than caring for a child. — Seth Adam Smith

Pleasant experiences don't make up for painful ones. No child, once painfully burned, would agree to be burned again, however enticing the reward. For all our talk and good intentions, there is much more stick than carrot in school, and while this remains so, children are going to adopt a strategy aimed above all else at staying out of trouble. How can we foster a joyous, alert, wholehearted participation in life if we build all our schooling around the holiness of getting 'right answers'? — John Holt

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster child, her inmate man,
Forget the glories he hath known
And that imperial palace whence he came. — William Wordsworth

There are so many crises in foster care - the original abuse, the shock and alarm when a child is removed, the courtroom fights, kids rebelling, bio parents panicking, foster parents molesting, relapses, rehabs, reabuse - that basic, low-level functioning begins to seem exemplary. These are the mediocre flatlands of child welfare, where if it's not a crisis it's not a problem. — Cris Beam

You guys might be surprised but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child. — Jodie Foster

Here, child, said Mae hastily Hide your eyes. Boys? Are you decent? What'd you put on to swim in? I got Winnie Foster in the house?
For goodness sake ma said Jesse emerging from the stairwell . You think were going to march around in our altogether with Winnie Foster in the house?
And Miles behind him sain we just jumped in with our clothes on too tired to shed them
It was true. They stood there side by side with their wet clothes plastered to their skins, little pools of water collecting at their feet. — Natalie Babbitt

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home. — Nikki Grimes

But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, no, search your soul, lovie
is the vampire so bad? — Richard Matheson

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships. — Jodie Foster

When parents matter more than peers, they can teach right and wrong in a meaningful way. They can prioritize attachments within the family over attachments with same-age peers. They can foster better relationships between their child and other adults. They can help their child develop a more robust and more authentic sense of self, grounded not in how many "likes" a photo gets on Instagram or Facebook but in the child's truest nature. They can educate desire, instilling a longing for higher and better things, in music, in the arts, and in one's own character. — Leonard Sax

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?"
Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child. — Jim Trelease

Most people don't understand how mighty the power of touch is, how mighty a kind word can be, how important a listening ear is, or how giving an honest compliment can move the child who has not known those things, only watched them from afar. As insignificant as they can be, they have the power to change a life. — John William Tuohy

All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in the suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader questions. It is hard to satisfy the curiosity of a child, and even harder to satisfy the curiosity of a scientist, and methods that meet curiosity with satisfaction are thus not apt to foster the development of the child into the scientist. I don't advocate turning all children into professional scientists, although I think there would be advantages if all adults retained something of the questioning attitude, if their curiosity were less easily satisfied by dogma, of whatever variety. — Marston Bates

And as she held me, I suddenly realized that my lifelong search for love and acceptance had finally ended in the arms of a foster parent. — Dave Pelzer

We know that the two most important things in a child's education are a good teacher and an involved parent. You don't foster those things with a bloated federal bureaucracy - you encourage them when you support choice and accountability. — Carly Fiorina

If every Christian family brought in a child who needed a family we would put the foster care system out of business. — Shane Claiborne

[That form of] eloquence, the foster-child of licence, which fools call liberty.
[Lat., Eloquentia, alumna licentiae, quam stulti libertatem vocabant.] — Tacitus

Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse. — Mary Garden

For all of you who have signed on the dotted line and adopted a foster child, I personally thank you on behalf of a nation. I know it was not an easy thing to do. — Marcia Sindone

...a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over. — David Foster Wallace

What makes a family is neither the absence of tragedy nor the ability to hide from misfortune, but the courage to overcome it and, from that broken past, write a new beginning. — Steve Pemberton

Still, Allen and the Greens are an example of foster care working exactly as it should: a foster home is meant to be only a temporary holding place while parents get the support they need to get back to being parents again. The foster family should provide the kind of bonding and love that the Greens gave Allen and then, wrenching as it is, let the child go. The biological parents may be imperfect - they may feed the kids inappropriate foods or leave the TV on too long - but as long as there's no abuse, a child belongs with his blood. — Cris Beam

As I presided over Massie's execution, I thought about the abuse and neglect he endured as a child in the foster care system. We failed to keep him safe, and our failure contributed to who he was as an adult. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kill him, what if we spent that money on other foster children so that we stop producing men like Massie in the first place? — Jeanne Woodford

He [David Foster Wallace] compares raising children to raising books, you should take pride in the work you do inside a family and not from how they make out in the world. "It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you," is what he says. — David Lipsky

Whenever Maeve would mention another foster case or needy child she'd heard about and say, What's another pound on an elephant? — James Patterson

Every child should at least grow up in family rather than without one. — Foster Friess

I hope to have a career like Jodie Foster, going from child to adult actress. — Evan Rachel Wood

The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independance we must first invite dependance; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness. — Gordon Neufeld

I saw the bruises, the burns, the cuts - I knew which ones had been done to you by someone you thought you could trust. Someone you thought loved you. I knew which ones you gave yourself. — Abby Norman

Lobbing hand grenades on the bride of Christ takes zero talent or effort. I also think this really ticks God off. My five-year-old child complains and whines when things aren't the way she wants them, but courageous men and women roll up their sleeves and get busy. I want to be an active participant in putting back together the broken pieces. — Mike Foster

The father of Ruth van Cleve's child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license. — David Foster Wallace

Being in a state referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involves gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually something straight ahead - a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are really not looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it - however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intent concentration. — David Foster Wallace

As a child psychiatrist, I knew too much about the statistics of foster care - less than one percent graduate college with a bachelor's degree, more than fifty percent of foster kids end up homeless after reaching eighteen, and most are dead by twenty-six. — Penny Reid

There are many children who need help, and anyone who wants to reach out and adopt a child from foster care or from a Russian orphanage should reach out and do it. — Melissa Fay Greene

In 1975, stay-at-home mothers spent an average of about eleven hours per week on primary child care (defined as routine caregiving and activities that foster a child's well-being, such as reading and fully focused play). Mothers employed outside the home in 1975 spent six hours doing these activities. Today, stay-at-home mothers spend about seventeen hours per week on primary child care, on average, while mothers who work outside the home spend about eleven hours. This means that an employed mother today spends about the same amount of time on primary child care activities as a nonemployed mother did in 1975. — Sheryl Sandberg

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise. — Noorilhuda

I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as - what I knew was that I worried a lot — David Foster Wallace

Large parties given to very young children ... foster the passions of vanity and envy, and produce a love of dress and display which is very repulsive in the character of a child. — Susanna Moodie

Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it. The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child. — David Foster Wallace

The first two ultimate rules of being a foster child that I had learned while at Aunt Mary's were never to become too attached to anyone and never to take someone's home for granted. — Dave Pelzer

a manual for how to build a mentally ill child — David Foster Wallace

You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don't know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you've never wept and want to, have a child. — David Foster Wallace

brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is 'Amy Foster's boy.' She calls him Johnny - which means Little John. "It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot in a — Joseph Conrad

I got kicked out of my first home for poking a wire hanger into an electrical outlet. My foster mom caught me, shrieked, and called the DCFS to come cart me away, because I was clearly suicidal and no one had told her that I was a child with 'special needs.'"
"Were you? Suicidal?"
"I was five."
"Still."
"No, I wasn't trying to off myself. I was curious. Little kids spend half their waking hours being warned not to do things. Don't run with scissors. Don't lick a flagpole in winter. Don't stick anything into electrical outlets. Those three little holes looked so mysterious. I had to know if they were as dangerous as everyone said."
"What happened?" A smile curled the corner of Conn's mouth, indicating he'd already guessed the answer - which wasn't exactly hard, given that I was standing right there in front of him, and not buried in an early grave with the tombstone Here Lies Darcy Jones, electrocuted orphan. — Marie Rutkoski

The idea is that Jodie Foster is with her child and she's going back to New York from Germany with her husband's body. She loses her child on a plane, and you think, 'How can that happen?' There's no record of her having brought a child onto the plane, and the captain is left wondering about whether she's telling the truth. You never really know if she's telling the truth or not. — Sean Bean

If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.
David Foster Wallace — David Lipsky

I hate the stereotype of the pitfalls of the child actor. There are so many amazing examples - Natalie Portman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jodie Foster, Drew Barrymore - of people who have made it through. — Jamie Bell

Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that day dreams with your eyes wide open are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it. — L. Frank Baum

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children's need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child's desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn't a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of — David Foster Wallace

Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I hit him for every single thing that was wrong in my life and kicked him in a fierce fury of madness as he sobbed and covered his face and screamed. I hit him because Walter hit me and I hit him because I hated my life and I hit him because I just wanted to go home and I hit him because I didn't know where home was. — John William Tuohy

I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

I love flying; I love aircraft, and you could say I've had a love affair with flight since I was a child. I travel a huge amount. I use airports, and as a pilot, I've flown in and out of airports thousands of times, so really, I have a fairly broad perspective. — Norman Foster

In Eudora Welty's masterful story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances. The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home. What Sister can't see, but we can, is that those two fowl are really a fatted calf. It may not be a grand feast by traditional standards, but it is a feast, as called for upon the return of the Prodigal Son, even if the son turns out to be a daughter. Like the brothers in the parable, Sister is irritated and envious that the child who left, and ostensibly used up her "share" of familial goodwill, is instantly welcomed, her sins so quickly forgiven. Then — Thomas C. Foster

In the same way that a small child cannot draw a bad picture so a child of God cannot offer a bad prayer. — Richard J. Foster

Overpopulation is the problem of the third and fourth World; over-consumption is the problem of the West. The average American child this year will consume as much of the world's resources as twenty children born in India. Deliberate and calculated waste is the central aspect of the American economy. We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air. — Richard J. Foster