Mem Fox Children Quotations

Putting babies as young as two weeks into child care for the first year of their life, for 60 hours a week, will cause their brains damage,

I don't know why some people have children at all if they know that they can only take a few weeks off work.

I was the most Australian child ever in the world, even though my home was in Africa.

I have very little patience with children.

DO NOT attempt to bring up other people's children through your text.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.

If we are always reading aloud something that is more difficult than children can read themselves then when they come to that book later, or books like that, they will be able to read them - which is why even a fifth grade teacher, even a tenth grade teacher, should still be reading to children aloud. There is always something that is too intractable for kids to read on their own.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.