empathizing with children Quotes

It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.

We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children; we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours; and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.

If you're a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are, "When I was your age ..." You were never their age. You were older in the womb.

I was able to draw a lot from my own childhood, my friends' childhoods as well and my daughters' friends who are like my children as well. They multiply all the time. So you can have everything and say I can get all this done and then late at night one of your kids have a freak out about school or an assignment you end up staying up til 3 in morning helping them through it. Or somebody gets sick or has a crisis.

I became very aware of how important it is to connect with children - possibly for the children, if they're in the mood for that - but certainly for the adults.

She studied my face for a long minute. "Are you going to help my mom?" It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers--or any answer at all?

When I met Akira Kurosawa in Japan, one question he asked me was, "How did you actually make the children act the way they do? I do have children in my films but I find that I reduce and reduce their presence until I have to get rid of them because there's no way that I can direct them." My own thought is that one is very grand, like an emperor on a horse, and it's very hard for a child to relate to that. In order to be able to cooperate with a child, you have to come down to below their level in order to communicate with them.

It's not always easy for a father to understand the interests and ways of his son. It seems the songs of our children may be in keys we've never tried. The melody of each generation emerges from all that's gone before. Each one of us contributes in some unique way to the composition of life.