Peter Pan

When I was a little girl, I remember carrying my orange UNICEF carton with me as I went Trick-or-Treating.

As a kid, I was making a building with blocks in our playroom. I didn’t have enough. So I asked my younger brother Robert if I could borrow some of his. He said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I used all of my blocks, then all of his blocks, and when I was done I had a great building, which I then glued together. Robert never did get those blocks back.

Children had rather be making of Tools and Instruments of Play; Shaping, Drawing, Framing, and Building, &c. than getting some Rules of Propriety of Speech by Heart: And those also would follow with more Judgment, and less Trouble and Time.

The more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury.

[Postpartum depression] is something that’s completely uncontrollable. It’s really painful and it’s really scary and women need a lot of support.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

I was born on a plantation, and things weren’t so good. We didn’t have any money. I never thought of the word ‘poor’ ’til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you’re not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

The streets and woods around my house were a perfect setting for fake mischief. I would spend all afternoon pretending I had run away and had to live on my own. I would bring Toll House cookies and a sweatshirt and try to make a fire. I would sneak out side my house at dusk with a pair binoculars and search the streets for murderers. I created scenarios in my head that I always managed to escape from kidnap fantasies where I would wriggle free from the ropes.