David Elkind Quotes

• Play is not only our creative drive; it's a fundamental mode of learning.

  David Elkind

  Play, Creative, Fundamentals

  52 Copy quote

• Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotiona l development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

  David Elkind

  Children, Independent, Self

  37 Copy quote

• Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do math. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.

  David Elkind

  Encouraging, Education, Baby

  David Elkind (1987). “Miseducation: preschoolers at risk”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

  63 Copy quote

• When we are polite to children, we show in the most simple and direct way possible that we value them as people and care about their feelings.

  David Elkind

  Children, Simple, People

  David Elkind (1981). “The hurried child: growing up too fast too soon”, Addison Wesley Publishing Company

  18 Copy quote

• Certainly, young children can begin to practice making letters and numbers and solving problems, but this should be done without workbooks. Young children need to learn initiative, autonomy, industry, and competence before they learn that answers can be right or wrong.

  David Elkind

  Children, Practice, Numbers

  David Elkind (1987). “Miseducation: preschoolers at risk”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

  25 Copy quote

• Children in the 21st (century) have been transformed from net producers of their own toy and play culture, to net consumers of play culture imposed by adults.

  David Elkind

  Children, Play, Toys

  25 Copy quote

• Learning to read and write makes little sense if you don't understand what you're reading and writing about. While we may have forgotten, most of our early learning came not from being explicitly taught but from experiencing. Kids aren't born knowing hard and soft, sweet and sour, red and green. When the child experiences those things, s/he transforms them into psychological understandings. When kids play with other kids, they learn about others and about themselves. Learning the basics of our physical and social reality is what early childhood is all about.

  David Elkind

  Sweet, Children, Reading

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  6 Copy quote

• It makes little sense to spend a month teaching decimal fractions to fourth-grade pupils when they can be taught in a week, and better understood and retained, by sixth-grade students. Child-centeredness does not mean lack of rigor or standards; it does mean finding the best match between curricula and children's developing interests and abilities.

  David Elkind

  Children, Teaching, Mean

  David Elkind (1995). “TIES THAT STRESS”, p.131, Harvard University Press

  16 Copy quote

• Taking the child's point of view demands good will, time, and effort on the part of parents. The child is the clear beneficiary. Parents who make the effort to understand their children's point of view are likely to treat children fairly and in an age-appropriate manner.

  David Elkind

  Children, Views, Effort

  David Elkind (2009). “Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance”, p.108, Harvard University Press

  13 Copy quote

• The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at anearly age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.

  David Elkind

  Children, Past, Support

  David Elkind (1993). “Images of the Young Child: Collected Essays on Development and Education”, National Assn for the Education

  18 Copy quote

• Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

  David Elkind

  Inspirational, Teenager, Choices

  David Elkind (1994). “Parenting Your Teenager”

  25 Copy quote

• So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.

  David Elkind

  Education, Children, Past

  7 Copy quote

• Young children learn in a different manner from that of older children and adults, yet we can teach them many things if we adapt our materials and mode of instruction to their level of ability. But we miseducate young children when we assume that their learning abilities are comparable to those of older children and that they can be taught with materials and with the same instructional procedures appropriate to school-age children.

  David Elkind

  Children, School, Childhood

  David Elkind (1987). “Miseducation: preschoolers at risk”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

  21 Copy quote

• Sigmund Freud was once asked to describe the characteristics of maturity, and he replied: lieben un arbeiten ("loving and working"). The mature adult is one who can love and allow himself or herself to be loved and who can work productively, meaningfully, and with satisfaction.

  David Elkind

  Love, Maturity, Adults

  David Elkind (2009). “The Hurried Child, 25th anniversary edition”, p.19, Da Capo Press

  12 Copy quote

• We see these adolescents mourning for a lost childhood.

  David Elkind

  Mourning, Childhood, Lost

  7 Copy quote

• If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one's own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.

  David Elkind

  Children, Perspective, Parent

  David Elkind (2009). “The Hurried Child, 25th anniversary edition”, p.26, Da Capo Press

  10 Copy quote

• Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children academics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.

  David Elkind

  Sports, Children, Real

  David Elkind (1987). “Miseducation: preschoolers at risk”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

  7 Copy quote

• In leading-edge companies like Google and Apple, workers are given much freedom and opportunity to play. They know that's an important component of creating new and better products. I believe that at whatever level of work, cashier at a supermarket, janitor at an airport, aide in a cubicle, the addition of a playful attitude makes the job better and the work more enjoyable. A cashier or janitor who smiles and is friendly gets a better response than a surly one.

  David Elkind

  Attitude, Believe, Opportunity

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  7 Copy quote

• The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children's adaptive capacity.

  David Elkind

  Sports, Children, Taken

  9 Copy quote

• Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.

  David Elkind

  Children, Believe, Responsibility

  David Elkind (2009). “Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance”, p.119, Harvard University Press

  8 Copy quote

• If learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more children would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.

  David Elkind

  Education, Children, Simple

  David Elkind (2009). “The Hurried Child, 25th anniversary edition”, p.36, Da Capo Press

  7 Copy quote

• What we often take to be family values--the work ethic, honesty, clean living, marital fidelity, and individual responsibility--are in fact social, religious, or cultural values. To be sure, these values are transmitted by parents to their children and are familial in that sense. They do not, however, originate within the family. It is the value of close relationships with other family members, and the importance of these bonds relative to other needs.

  David Elkind

  Religious, Children, Honesty

  8 Copy quote

• Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-classparents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement--a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.

  David Elkind

  Good Life, Children, Work

  7 Copy quote

• The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.

  David Elkind

  Children, Writing, Ideas

  7 Copy quote

• I believe the important thing is to continue to create new experiences. That's why so many retired people travel. New experiences raise our consciousness and stimulate cognition. Retirement offers the opportunity to learn new things, and that is what keeps you young, at heart at least.

  David Elkind

  Retirement, Believe, Heart

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  4 Copy quote

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