Bruno Bettelheim Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because--despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content--these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Anxious Thoughts, Giving

• You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Good Life, Believe

• Play permits the child to resolve in symbolic form unsolved problems of the past and to cope directly or symbolically with present concerns. It is also his most significant tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Past, Play

• What children learn from punishment is that might makes right. When they are old and strong enough, they will try to get their ownback; thus many children punish their parents by acting in ways distressing to them.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Strong, Children, Punishment

• Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Art, Children, Creative

• This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence -- but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Life, Motivational, Encouraging

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales”, Vintage

• The parent must not give in to his desire to try to create the child he would like to have, but rather help the child to develop--in his own good time--to the fullest, into what he wishes to be and can be, in line with his natural endowment and as the consequence of his unique life in history.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Unique, Giving

• The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Inspirational, Children, Stories

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales”, Knopf

• Not only is our love for our children sometimes tinged with annoyance, discouragement, and disappointment, the same is true for the love our children feel for us.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Love, Children, Disappointment

  Bruno Bettelheim (1988). “A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-rearing”, Vintage

• From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world--what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Play, Understanding

• Whoever influences the child's life ought to try to give him a positive view of himself and of his world. The child's future happiness and his ability to cope with life and relate to others will depend on it.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Views, Giving

• To be told that our child's behavior is "normal" offers little solace when our feelings are badly hurt, or when we worry that hisactions are harmful at the moment or may be injurious to his future. It does not help me as a parent nor lessen my worries when my child drives carelessly, even dangerously, if I am told that this is "normal" behavior for children of his age. I'd much prefer him to deviate from the norm and be a cautious driver!

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Hurt, Children, Worry

• As Anna Freud remarked, the toddler who wanders off into some other aisle, feels lost, and screams anxiously for his mother neversays "I got lost," but accusingly says "You lost me!" It is a rare mother who agrees that she lost him! she expects her child to stay with her; in her experience it is the child who has lost track of the mother, while in the child's experience it is the mother who has lost track of him. Each view is entirely correct from the perspective of the individual who holds it .

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Mother, Children, Views

• The good enough mother, owing to her deep empathy with her infant, reflects in her face his feelings; this is why he sees himselfin her face as if in a mirror and finds himself as he sees himself in her. The not good enough mother fails to reflect the infant's feelings in her face because she is too preoccupied with her own concerns, such as her worries over whether she is doing right by her child, her anxiety that she might fail him.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Mother, Children, Mirrors

• The good enough parent, in addition to being convinced that whatever his child does, he does it because at that moment he is convinced this is the best he can do, will also ask himself: "What in the world would make me act as my child acts at this moment? And if I felt forced to act this way, what would make me feel better about it?

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Feel Better, Parent

• The question for the child is not Do I want to be good? but Whom do I want to be like?

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Want, Be Good

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales”, Vintage

• A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child's life.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Lying, Thinking

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales”, Knopf

• The child knows only that he engages in play because it is enjoyable. He isn't aware of his need to play--a need which has its source in the pressure of unsolved problems. Nor does he know that his pleasure in playing comes from a deep sense of well-being that is the direct result of feeling in control of things, in contrast to the rest of his life, which is managed by his parents or other adults.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Play, Parent

• Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Ideas, Parent

• The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Book, Offering

• Plato--who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to "real" people and everyday events--knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Education, Plato, Children

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales”, Knopf

• To be a good enough parent one must be able to feel secure in one's parenthood, and one's relation to one's child...The security of the parent about being a parent will eventually become the source of the child's feeling secure about himself.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Parent, Feelings

• Although we like to think of young children's lives as free of troubles, they are in fact filled with disappointment and frustration. Children wish for so much, but can arrange so little of their own lives, which are so often dominated by adults without sympathy for the children's priorities. That is why children have a much greater need for daydreams than adults do. And because their lives have been relatively limited they have a greater need for material from which to form daydreams.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Disappointment, Children, Thinking

  Bruno Bettelheim (1991). “Freud's Vienna and Other Essays”, Vintage

• Among the most valuable but least appreciated experiences parenthood can provide are the opportunities it offers for exploring, reliving, and resolving one's own childhood problems in the context of one's relation to one's child.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Opportunity, Childhood

• The goal in raising one's child is to enable him, first, to discover who he wants to be, and then to become a person who can be satisfied with himself and his way of life. Eventually he ought to be able to do in his life whatever seems important, desirable, and worthwhile to him to do; to develop relations with other people that are constructive, satisfying, mutually enriching; and to bear up well under the stresses and hardships he will unavoidably encounter during his life.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Growing Up, Stress

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