BENJAMIN SPOCK

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

You know more than you think you do.

In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.

Perhaps a child who is fussed over gets a feeling of destiny; he thinks he is in the world for something important, and it gives him drive and confidence.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.

The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.

I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.

When women are encouraged to be competitive, too many of them become disagreeable.

Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.

There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother's age.

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?

I'm not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.

I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.

Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be.

What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all.

Attitudes about the rearing and education of children vary between two extremes. One, which might be labeled “authoritarian” or “coercive,” rests on an assumption that children are by nature irresponsible and lazy, and will do their schoolwork only if they are penalized for a poor performance. The opposite view might be labeled “progressive” or “democratic.” It rests on the assumption that children who are brought up with love, trust, and clear but kind leadership are eager to grow up and be like their parents, eager to explore, learn, master skills, and take on responsibility; they need guidance but not sternness or punishment.

Teachers and parents who incline toward the authoritarian attitude are scornful of “frills.” They consider lecturing, memorization, recitation, and grading to be the basics, as they remember them from their own school days. They believe in withholding promotion form children who have not satisfactorily completed the year’s work in all subjects, despite the evidence that when children are made to repeat a grade, they do not do as well in the following years as similar children who were promoted. To authoritarians, education is not a means to help each child to mature but a series of hurdles over which everyone, of no matter what capability, must jump. A policy of withholding promotion means ignoring the fundamental and complex question of why the children failed and what needs to be done to correct that problem.

People have said, You've turned your back on pediatrics. I said, No. It took me until I was in my 60s to realize that politics was a part of pediatrics.

We all end up at least somewhat like our parents, especially in the way we deal with our children.

As a peace activist, I am dismayed by the encouragement of aggressiveness and violence by television, movies, and war toys.

A surprising number of scientific advances have been made and masterpieces of art created by individuals just on the threshold of adulthood.

Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.