Penelope Leach Quotes

#1. 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.

Penelope Leach

#2. Twenty Inches and Eight pounds of infant can, and undoubtedly sometimes will, reduce two or more intelligent, competent, organized adults to anxious, exhausted incompetent jellies.

Penelope Leach

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

Penelope Leach

#4. 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.

Penelope Leach

#5. 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.

Penelope Leach

#6. 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.

Penelope Leach

#7. 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.

Penelope Leach

#8. 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.

Penelope Leach

#9. 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.

Penelope Leach

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

Penelope Leach

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

Penelope Leach

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

Penelope Leach