C. Everett Koop Quotations

When a child shows up for school, and is not physically and mentally ready to learn, he or she never catches up.

Make your kids go out and play. Kids ought to grow up the way you and I grew up and we grew up fifty years apart or maybe more. But we did the same things. Now who's out playing in the afternoon? Nobody.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a doctor. The doctors I knew as a very young child must have helped to plant the desire in me, when I was as young as five or six. One homeopathic physician, Dr. Justice Gage Wright, was a great model.

There are all kinds of things you can do to marry literacy with health.

The health care industry can play a great role in this by being aware of the fact that these children form perhaps the most neglected group of people in the country, largely because it is hard to find them.

Polls that have been taken by kindergarten, first- and second-grade teachers indicate that 30 percent of the kids have been deprived in some way so that they are physically unable to keep up with the class.

My experience with the Junior League, when I worked in Philadelphia for four years in reference to children's things, is that whenever they were asked they responded. They always responded with sincerity, and they did a good job.

There have been some good studies done in California with Hispanic parents where in the course of a year, they have changed their entire nutritional intake for the better. The kid becomes, in a sense, the bridge between the educational process and the home.

I'd like to say let your kids go out and play. Then I'd say you're not going to do that are you? Make your kids go out and play.

The thing that reinforces my belief about that is having worked the last four years with the Safe Kids Campaign on a national basis. I am so amazed at what these little kids do in keeping their parents alerted to what they are there for.