Bruno Bettelheim Quotes

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

When you watch a lot of movies as a kid, the stories do shape a little bit how you view the world.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Children who are read to learn two things: First, that reading is worthwhile, and second, that they are worthwhile.

One of my favorite things to do with my children is to read to them.

It's an important thing for children to be able to make up their own words.

Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.

Inspiring children through play and creativity is crucial to early development, and no company has done more in that space over many generations than Mattel.

A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child's life.

A child's own story is a dream, but a good story is a dream that is true for more than one child.

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world--what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

I usually make up stories for my kids.I like to tell them stories and make up any kind of crazy to involve them in characters. The kind of fairytales I don't like are the ones with happy endings, where there's just good and evil and things are perfect. I think when there's a good story for children it has a moral tale, so that's what I try to teach my kids.

Television deprives children of their imaginations.

I hope that when children read my stories that they evoke images for children. I four stories can help children use their own imaginations and lead them to act the stories out or to embark on related research, they will learn more and learn to love reading more.

Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.

So many things that you can ask children hopefully pique their interest and they can design and think for themselves. Having children draw and illustrate what they saw in their minds' eyes during the story is a tremendous teaching aid.