What's done to children, they will do to society.
Interpretation
Children's experiences shape their future actions and impact society.
This quote by Karl A. Menninger emphasizes the profound influence that childhood experiences have on individuals, suggesting that the way children are treated will ultimately reflect in their behavior toward society as adults. It serves as a reminder that nurturing and educating children positively can lead to a more compassionate and productive society.
In practice
During a community meeting discussing educational reforms, I quoted Menninger to emphasize the importance of investing in child welfare.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
Let us treat them [children], therefore, with all the kindness which we would wish to help to develop in them.
There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children
Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.
Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start
When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page.
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