Stella Chess Quotes

Today's fathers and mothers
with only the American dream for guidance
extend and overextend themselves, physically, emotionally,and financially, during the best years of their lives to ensure that their children will grow up prepared to do better and go further than they did.

A child is nothing like a racing car ... Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certainirreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant ... Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.

Many children grow through adolescence with no ripples whatever and land smoothly and predictably in the adult world with both feet on the ground. Some who have stumbled and bumbled through childhood suddenly burst into bloom. Most shake, steady themselves, zigzag, fight, retreat, pick up, take new bearings, and finally find their own true balance.

Life begins at six
at least in the minds of six-year-olds ... In kindergarten you are the baby. In first grade you put down the baby ... Every first grader knows in some osmotic way that this is real life ... First grade is the first step on the way to a place in the grown-up world.

Women's childhood relationships with their fathers are important to them all their lives. Regardless of age or status, women who seem clearest about their goals and most satisfied with their lives and personal and family relationships usually remember that their fathers enjoyed them and were actively interested in their development.

Young people of high school age can actually feel themselves changing. Progress is almost tangible. It's exciting. It stimulates more progress. Nevertheless, growth is not constant and smooth. Erik Erikson quotes an aphorism to describe the formless forming of it. I ain't what I ought to be. I ain't what I'm going to be, but I'm not what I was.

Parents' ability to survive a child's unabating needs, wants, and demands ... varies enormously. Some people can give and give ... Whether children are good or bad, brilliant or just about normal, enormously popular or born loners, they keep their cool and say just the right thing at all times ... even when they are miserable themselves, inexhaustible springs of emotional energy, reserved just for children, keep flowing unabated.

Fathers are still considered the most important "doers" in our culture, and in most families they are that. Girls see them as thefamily authorities on careers, and so fathers' encouragement and counsel is important to them. When fathers don't take their daughters' achievements and plans seriously, girls sometimes have trouble taking themselves seriously.

There is a parallel between the twos and the tens. Tens are trying to test their abilities again, sizing up and experimenting to discover how to fit in. They don't mean everything they do and say. They are just testing ... Take a good deal of your daughter's behavior with a grain of salt. Try to handle the really outrageous as matter-of-factly as you would a mistake in grammar or spelling.

Even today ... experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years ... Children don't need parents' full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.

You can read the best experts on child care. You can listen to those who have been there. You can take a whole childbirth and child-care course without missing a lesson. But you won't really know a thing about yourselves and each other as parents, or your baby as a child, until you have her in your arms. That's the moment when the lifelong process of bringing up a child into the fold of the family begins.

Remember ... that each child is a separate person, yours forever, but never fully yours. She can never be all you wished or wanted,or all you know she could be. But she will be a better human being if you can let her be herself.

That a good fit between parental handling and child temperament is vital to help children adapt to the imperatives of their society is a crucial concept that can be applied to other cultures.