Adverse Childhood Quotes

I grew up in a little bit of a broken home.

If you're getting abandonment, if you're getting abuse as a child, if you're getting uncertainty when you're a child, unfortunately you tend to look for that in your life later on, and you think that's love.

What's so sad is when we're younger, if you have a bad parent, that is normal to you and that's what you think of as healthy.

I had a bad background just growing up as a child.

I definitely didn't want children, because my childhood was not a very happy time.

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'

Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life.

Me and my older brother were taken from my mother at the same time so we were pretty tight.

If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.

I remember having mice in the house and my father taking some newspaper and beating me because mice was running on me while I was asleep.

My childhood was rough, we were poor and my parents were alcoholics, but nobody was mean. I knew I was loved. We were on welfare, but I never felt abandoned or unloved.

I had a very rough and tumultuous childhood.

Severely deprived, neglectful or abusive environments must have negative effects on a great many aspects of development, including intelligence.

The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

Well, I had the most appalling childhood.

Since I didn't grow up going to school dances, etc., I didn't have the normal . . . I grew up in a very different way so a lot of the childish concerns or teenage concerns weren't my concerns. My concerns were survival.

I didn't have a happy childhood.

I was in the orphanage in New Orleans until I was almost a year old. I don't think I ever got held by my mama, so that was completely and utterly traumatic. I think it was trauma from the first breath, and I think I've spent my whole life trying to heal from that trauma. So it shaped my brain.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

Because of the life I've had, I'd grown up quicker than most people.

Maybe I didn't have the childhood people think you should have, but I still went through the ages; I was still a child.

I was powerless over my childhood but the coping strategies that I developed, to survive, all of which were creative and brilliant and got me through, as an adult those became my defects of character. Those became my shortcomings, control and all that kind of stuff... and that's my responsibility. I was a blameless child in what happened in the home; I take responsibility for my behaviors as an adult.

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

I don't really have childhood-type memories. I had to grow up very young.

We have a pandemic of childhood trauma.