I’m having his child. Anna Karenina 2012 starring Keira Knightley & Jude Law & Aaron Taylor-Johnson & Kelly MacDonald & Ruth Wilson & Matthew MacFadyen & Alicia Vikander & Olivia Williams & Emily Watson & Michelle Dockery & Holliday Grainger et al, director Joe Wright
The children may yet be saved. The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s 1960 starring Joyce Grenfell & George Cole & Cecil Parker & Eric Barker & Thorley Walters & Irene Handl & Lloyd Lamble & Nicholas Phipps & John le Mesurier & Basil Dignam & Michael Ripper & Raymond Huntley & Liz Frazer & George Benson & Sid James et al, director Frank Launder, Shrink in court
Children go where they find sincerity and authenticity. Eric Cantona
The first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated, till it attain years of discretion. John Ruskin, Time and Tide, 1867
There’s a good chance they’re not his neither. When we were married I had this sort of friend. Well it was the only thing that kept me sane. Alan Bleasdale, Boys from the Blackstuff: Yosser’s Story, Maureen, BBC 1982
They want my kids now. They’ve got everything else. ibid.
She didn’t love me. She didn’t love the kids. I know you want to talk to me about the kids. I want to keep the kids. I want to keep the kids. ibid.
Send me away. Where they are. Let me be with them. ibid. Yosser to doctor
When a man love his kids, he loves them more than anything in the whole friggin’ world. And that’s a fact. Alan Bleasdale, Boys from the Black Stuff: George’s Last Ride, George at son’s gravestone
Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas ... Children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. Nicholas Humphrey, Amnesty Lecture Oxford 1997
It seemed as if they regarded their own children with a kind of contempt, as being only fit to grow up to be the servants of the children of such people as Rushton and Sweater. But it must be remembered that they had been taught self-contempt when they were children. In the so-called ‘Christian’ schools they attended then they were taught to ‘order themselves lowly and reverently towards their betters’, and they were now actually sending their own children to learn the same degrading lessons in their turn! They had a vast amount of consideration for their betters, and for the children of their betters, but very little for their own children, for each other, or for themselves. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
To allow one’s child to grow up to suffer it in turn was a callous, criminal cruelty. ibid.
The greater number of them were quite willing and content that their children should be made into beasts of burden of other people. As he looked down upon this little, frail figure trotting along by his side, Owen thought for the thousandth time that it would be better for the child to die now; he would never be fit to be a soldier in the ferocious Christian Battle of Life. ibid.
And then the starving, bootless, ragged, stupid wretches fell down and worshipped the System, and offered up their children as living sacrifices upon its altars. ibid.
For they not only refused to help or bring about a better state of things for their children, but they ridiculed and opposed and cursed and abused those who were trying to do it for them. (Poverty & Child) ibid.
96,687. More than one-third of the children of the working classes in London have some sort of mental or abnormal nervousness; rickets and mental dullness. The difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime that calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance upon those who are responsible for it. ibid.
The kindest thing I can say about my childhood is that I survived it. The Hurricane 1999 starring Denzel Washington & Vicellous Reon Shannon & Deborah Kara Unger & Live Schreiber & John Hannah & Dan Hedaya & Debbi Morgan & Clancy Brown & David Paymer & Harris Yulin & Rob Steiger & Vincent Pastore & Beatrice Winde et al, director Norman Jewison
Has there ever been another art so devoutly converted into a science as the art of parenting.
Over the recent decades, a vast and diverse flock of parenting experts has arisen. Stephen D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics
No-one is more susceptible to an expert’s fearmongering than a parent. Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. ibid.
The most radical shift in the conventional wisdom of parenting has been provoked by one simple question: how much do parents really matter? ibid.
How much can those eager parents actually accomplish for their children’s sake? ibid.
Harris argued, albeit gently, that parents are wrong to think they contribute so mightily to their child’s personality. This belief, she wrote, was a ‘cultural myth’. Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effects of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates. ibid.
Parents must matter, you tell yourself. Besides, even if peers exert so much influence on a child, isn’t it the parents who essentially choose a child’s peers? Isn’t that why parents agonize over the right neighbourhood, the right school, the right circle of friends? ibid.
In the late 1990s, the US Department of Education undertook a monumental project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study … The result is an incredibly rick set of data … Even when the parents’ income and education are controlled for, the black-white gap reappears within just two years of a child’s entering school. ibid.
A child who had a low birthweight tends to do poorly in school. ibid.
Books in the home equal higher test scores. ibid.
But it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent, it’s who you are. ibid.
So does the name you give your child affect his life? Or is it your life reflected in his name? In either case, what kind of signal does a child’s name send to the world – and most important, does it really matter? ibid.
The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved had gone. But I kept looking for her long after I left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see, and the wound wouldn’t heal. Lolita 1997 starring Dominique Swain & Jeremy Irons & Frank Langella & Suzanna Shepherd & Melanie Griffith et al, director Adrian Lyne
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. ibid.
Her legs, lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what I sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, dropping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious position, with a sibilant intake of breath came near my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the sceptre of my passion. ibid.
But the mimosa grove – the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since – until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. ibid.
… to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in dreams.
Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’. ibid.
… the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power. ibid.
We loved each other with a premature love marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve. ibid.
Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me for ever. Never grow up. ibid.