We're good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in the eyes, we tend to drop the ball - at a time they most need a loving consistent community of adults, be it parents, aunts, uncles, or others.
Interpretation
As children grow, they require continued support and guidance from adults, which is often lacking.
In this quote, Laurie Halse Anderson highlights the importance of maintaining a nurturing and supportive environment for adolescents who are transitioning into adulthood. While society often invests energy in early childhood education and care, once children reach a certain height—symbolizing their physical and psychological growth—adults frequently neglect to provide the same level of guidance and emotional support. This can lead to significant gaps in their development, underscoring the need for a loving and consistent community of adults to foster healthy growth during the challenging teenage years.
In practice
This quote would be powerful in a parenting workshop discussing the importance of ongoing support during teenage years.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
I had to learn to not be so hard. And I had a wife and, at that time, a partner when Samori was born, and for most of Samori's life, a partner, who, for whatever reason, did not have to learn that and was very tender and very, very soft with him.
No parent should have their child die before he or she does.
I don't feel like I'm a perfect mom, and then there are times at work where I feel like maybe I wasn't perfect here because of constraints on my time. But having the sum of both of those things going on in my life makes me a better mom at the end of the day, and I think gives me really important perspectives in the workplace as well.
Standing in support of children is something we should all be able to get behind, regardless of party affiliation.
[About gorillas] You take these fine, regal animals. How many (human) fathers have the same sense of paternity? How many human mothers are more caring? The family structure is unbelievably strong.
Everybody's social life in Jordan revolves around family.
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