Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.
Thomas Szasz
The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U.S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things.
Frank Zappa
The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.
Erich Fromm
Today is such a joyous day for me because we have children and we are dealing with children, most of them are born-realised, they are of a very special category, I've told you many a times. But we spoil them because we were not born-realised, so we don't know how to handle these special children, we spoil them. Not only we spoil them but we interfere with the school, we interfere with this, as if we are the wisest parents. Because we are SYogis we have to be much more sensible than other parents. How can you interfere with any school anywhere? But in SYoga you will! It is because there is no wisdom and no understanding of what is good and benevolent for your child. If you love your child then you must think of its benevolence. You must learn from the experience what happens to children if they are left like that. You cannot spoil your child, you cannot. Because its a special category of children they are. They are not children who can become vagabonds, they cannot become thieves. So you'll make them something funny they are neither here not there, they are born realised and they have to be channelised properly to achieve their complete manifestation of their spirit. So the possessiveness, and the stupid attachment to children must be given-up. There is no force on you , if you want to destroy your child you can destroy. But in an advice. If you are Ganeshas you would have understood it, I don't have to explain so much. What is good for your child, because we have to have beautiful children. They are born beautiful children, I tell you, if they are spoiled is because of you, you have spoiled them. You have ruined them. You are responsible. I know of many of so many children, they are very very sweet, I have conference with them also, and I find them much more congenial, I have a much better report that I can have with you: They never argue, never, they never say no, and they have very good information about all of you. [Shri Ganesha Puja in Cabella 15.9.91]
Mataji Nirmala Srivastava
One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make—when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again—still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child.
Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them.Randall Jarrell
Just look at the scores of thousands of housing tracts in this country, where only parents and children live. Think of the impact on these children who will grow up without close proximity to grandparents. There are certain things that a grandmammy or a granddaddy can do for a child that no one else can. It's sort of like Stardust — the relationship between grandparents and children. The lack of this for many children has to have a negative impact on society. The edges of these children are a little sharper for the lack of it. … I tell young people to go to the oldest members of their family and get as much oral history as possible. Many grandparents carry three or four generations of history in their heads but don't talk about it because they have been ignored. And when the young person starts doing this, the old are warmed to the cockles of their souls and will tell a grandchild everything they can muster.
Alex Haley
Szasz, Thomas
Szczesny, Stefan
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