Louise J. Kaplan Quotes

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

Inside every child is an 'emotional rani's waiting to be filled with love. When a child really feels loved, he will develop normally but when the love tank is empty, the child will misbehave. Much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the cravings of an empty 'love tank

Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies -- however one may describe it.

Children in day care get the short end of the emotional stick.

Children require affection. That's very important.

It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child.

Much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the cravings of an empty LOVE TANK.

You know that your toddler needed love and approval but he often seemed not to care whether he got it or not and never seemed to know how to earn it. Your pre-school child is positively asking you to tell him what does and does not earn approval, so he is ready to learn any social refinement of being human which you will teach him....He knows now that he wants your love and he has learned how to ask for it.

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection

The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.

Someone once told me that children are like heroin. You always want more. Yet first-borns are special because you'll never have your first child again.

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Elie Wiesel says that the greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference. If that is true, then the opposite is also true: that the greatest love we can show our children is the attention we pay them, the time we take for them. Maybe we serve children the best simply by noticing them.

Parents who spoil their children out of 'love' should realize that they are performing acts of child abuse. Although there are no laws against such abuse--no man-made laws anyway--this spiritual mistreatment may result in as much long-term personal and social damage as the worst physical abuse.

Being touched and caressed, being massaged, is food for the infant; food as necessary as minerals, vitamins, and proteins. Deprived of this food, the name of which is love, Babies would rather die. And often they do.

Children are like puppies: you have to keep them near you, and look after them, if you want their affection.

One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.

It would be very sad if children had no memories before those of school. What they need most is the love and attention of their mother.

Any form of corporal punishment or 'spanking' is a violent attack upon another human being's integrity. The effect remains with the victim forever and becomes an unforgiving part of his or hier personality--a massive frustration resulting in a hostility which will seek expression in later life in violent acts towards others. The sooner we understand that love and gentleness are the only kinds of called-far behavior towards children, the better. The child, especially, learns to become the kind of human being that he or she has experienced. This should be fully understood by all caregivers.

. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.

Testing children until they cry is a bad idea. It is an educational malpractice.

Before Kady was born, I didn't think having a kid would be such a big deal. My attitude was simple: Babies are nice, play with them, put them in the closet until the next time.

The world can be a hard place sometimes... You have to have heart. You have to be strong. Parents want their children to grow up to be strong. Not just any strong, mind you, but loving strong.

Government, obviously, cannot fill a child's emotional needs. Nor can it fill his spiritual and moral needs. Government is not a father or mother. Government has never raised a child, and it never will.