Louise J. Kaplan Quotes

Quotes about:

Adolescence Babies Childhood Children Energy Fathers Giving

For a woman ... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.

Louise J. Kaplan

Ambition, Emotional, Order

46 Copy quote
Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

Louise J. Kaplan

Teenager, Childhood, Adolescence

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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Normally an infant learns to use his mother as a "beacon of orientation" during the first five months of life. The mother's presence is like a fixed light that gives the child the security to move out safely to explore the world and then return safely to harbor.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Children, Moving

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Simon & Schuster

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It is a human circumstance that when we are born we have not yet come into existence. We are lured into our special human existence by a mothering presence that gratifies our innate urges to be suckled, held, rocked, caressed. But that same gratifying presence puts limits on desire and rations satisfaction. In this sense the mother is also the first lawgiver.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Special, Desire

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents--these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures--are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals.

Louise J. Kaplan

Teacher, Real, Avid

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The invisible bond that gives the baby rein to discover his place in the world also brings the creeping baby back to home base....In this way he recharges himself. He refuels on the loving energies that flow to him from his mother. Then he's off for another foray of adventure and exploration.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Baby, Home

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Fathers represent another way of looking at life - the possibility of an alternative dialogue.

Louise J. Kaplan

Father, Alternatives, Way

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

Louise J. Kaplan

Powerful, Struggle, Past

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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We humans, once we have become emotionally invested in a homeplace, a prized personal possession, or, especially, in another person, find it immensely difficult to give them up....Because they were made at a time of life when we were utterly dependent on them, the love attachments of infancy have inordinate power over us, more than any other emotional investment.

Louise J. Kaplan

Emotional, Attachment, Giving

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Hopefulness is the heartbeat of the relationship between a parent and child. Each time a child overcomes the next challenge of hislife, his triumph encourages new growth in his parents. In this sense a child is parent to his mother and father.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Children, Father

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.

Louise J. Kaplan

Strength, Time, Character

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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Fathers have a special excitement about them that babies find intriguing. At this time in his life an infant counts on his motherfor rootedness and anchoring. He can count on his father to be just different enough from a mother. Fathers embody a delicious mixture of familiarity and novelty. They are novel without being strange or frightening.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Baby, Father

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Simon & Schuster

7 Copy quote
Other people--grandparents, sisters and brothers, the mother's best friend, the next-door neighbor--get to be familiar to the baby. If the mother communicates her trust in these people, the baby will regard them as delicious novelties. Anybody the mother trusts whom the baby sees often enough partakes a bit of the presence of the mother.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Baby, Brother

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

7 Copy quote
Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dosed. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider.

Louise J. Kaplan

Children, Individuality, Deviance

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction--a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

Louise J. Kaplan

Future, Past, Law

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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During adolescence imagination is boundless. The urge toward self-perfection is at its peak. And with all their self- absorption and personalized dreams of glory, youth are in pursuit of something larger than personal passions, some values or ideals to which they might attach their imaginations.

Louise J. Kaplan

Dream, Passion, Self

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In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

Louise J. Kaplan

Children, Zambia, Childhood

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The toddler must say no in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says no to assert who she is not.

Louise J. Kaplan

Teenage, Order, Racist

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.

Louise J. Kaplan

Passion, Past, Issues

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Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

Louise J. Kaplan

Inspirational, Sympathy, Children

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination....Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.

Louise J. Kaplan

Inspiration, Animal, Imagination

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From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there--in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.

Louise J. Kaplan

Children, Eye, Listening Ear

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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We humans undergo two major growth spurts: one during infancy and another from eleven to twelve until fifteen or sixteen--pubescence. Between the two is a relatively quiescent growth period in which most of the body takes a rest from growing while the brain continues to mature. This period of life is general referred to as childhood or, sometimes, latency.

Louise J. Kaplan

Two, Childhood, Growth

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Paradoxically, the toddler's "No" is also a preliminary to his saying yes. It is a sign that he is getting ready to convert his mother's restrictions and prohibitions into the rules for behavior that will belong to him.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Saying Yes, Toddler

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

Louise J. Kaplan

Pride, Compassion, Elderly

4 Copy quote

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Born: November 18, 1929
Died: January 9, 2012
Occupation: Author
Cite this Page: Citation

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