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Erich Fromm Quotes about Children

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Love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.

Love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.

Erich Fromm
Children, Love You, Love Is
Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.34, Open Road Media

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

Erich Fromm
Mom, Mother, Children
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The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

Erich Fromm
Children, Fighting, Neurosis
Erich Fromm (1947). “Man for Himself”

Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.

Erich Fromm
Children, Opposites, Growth

Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: 'I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.'

Erich Fromm
Children, Blessing, Men
Erich Fromm (1963). “War Within Man: A Psychological Enquiry Into the Roots of Destructiveness”

Today it is not alive. What, then, is this experience of humanism? With the above survey I have tried to show you that the experience of humanism is that — as Terence expressed it — “Nothing human is alien to me”; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and I am the saint. I am the child and I am the adult. I am the man who lived a hundred thousand years ago and I am the man who, provided we don't destroy the human race, will live hundred thousand years from now.

Erich Fromm
Children, Men, Years
"On Being Human".

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

Erich Fromm
Children, Character, Parent
Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.618, Open Road Media

What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.

Erich Fromm
Children, Attitude, Creative

In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation.

Erich Fromm
Mother, Children, Two
Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.61, Open Road Media

Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.

Erich Fromm
Education, Children, Learning

The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

Erich Fromm
Mother, Children, Attitude
Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.48, Open Road Media

The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving" mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.

Erich Fromm
Mother, Children, Long
Erich Fromm (2000). “The Art of Loving: The Centennial Edition”, p.47, A&C Black

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