Penelope Leach Quotations

For a small child there is no division between playing and learning; between the things he or she does 'just for fun' and things that are 'educational.' The child learns while living and any part of living that is enjoyable is also play.

Loving a baby is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give the more you get and the more you get the more you feel like giving.

The study does not mean that every child in a large nursery will become a monster,

A little is better than nothing, ... and you can be really involved with a child on the basis of the talking and playing and being there emotionally, even if you can't be there physically all the time.

Nevertheless, it shows a small but significant difference in a large group of children.

Kids haven't changed much, but parents seem increasingly unhappy with the child raising phase of their lives.

You know that your toddler needed love and approval but he often seemed not to care whether he got it or not and never seemed to know how to earn it. Your pre-school child is positively asking you to tell him what does and does not earn approval, so he is ready to learn any social refinement of being human which you will teach him....He knows now that he wants your love and he has learned how to ask for it.

A preschool child does not emerge from your toddler on a given date or birthday. He becomes a child when he ceases to be a wayward, confusing, unpredictable and often balky person-in-the- making, and becomes a comparatively cooperative, eager-and-easy-to-please real human being--at least 60 per cent of the time.

Your toddler will be "good" if he feels like doing what you happen to want him to do and does not happen to feel like doing anything you would dislike. With a little cleverness you can organize life as a whole, and issues in particular, so that you both want the same thing most of the time.

Two generations ago only a few unfortunate children ever saw anyone hit over the head with a brick, shot, rammed by a car, blown up, immolated, raped or tortured. Now all children, along with their elders, see such images every day of their lives and are expected to enjoy them. ... The seven-year-old who hides his eyes in the family cops-and-robbers drama is desensitized four years later to a point where he crunches potato chips through the latest video nasty.

Children do not need superhuman, perfect parents. They have always managed with good enough parents: the parents they happened to have.

Being "brave" means doing or facing something frightening. ... Being "fearless" means being without fear.

A baby who cannot relax can be helped to do so by a variety of constant rhythmical stimuli. it will work if the trouble is some kind of general and diffuse irritability or tenseness which is preventing a tired baby relaxing into sleep. The burring sound of a fan or heater works excellently. So does the sound of a car engine.

Grown-up people do very little and say a great deal.... Toddlers say very little and do a great deal.... With a toddler you cannot explain, you have to show. You cannot send, you have to take. You cannot control with words, you have to use your body.

Whatever you do to your child's body, you are doing to your child's mind too.

Your preschool child will chatter endlessly to you. If you half-listen and half-reply the whole conversation will seem, and become, tediously meaningless for both of you. but if you really listen and really answer, he will talk more and what he says will make more sense.

Guilt is the most destructive of all emotions. It mourns what has been while playing no part in what may be, now or in the future.

There is no way out of the experience except through it, because it is not really your experience at all but the baby's. Your body is the child's instrument of birth.