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Margaret Mead Quotes about Children

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Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Margaret Mead
Education, Teacher, Children
Margaret Mead (1973). “Coming of Age in Samoa”

the people of one nation alone cannot save their own children; each holds the responsibility for the others' children.

Margaret Mead
Children, Responsibility, People

Every act of motherhood contains a dual intent, as the mother holds the child close and prepares it to move way from her, as she supports the child and stands it firmly on its own feet, and as she guards it against danger and sends it out across the yard, down by the stream, and across the traffic-crowded highway. Unless a mother can do both - gather her child close and turn her child out toward the world - she will fail in her purpose.

Margaret Mead
Mother, Children, Moving

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

Margaret Mead
Children, Believe, Successful

where families suffer from disasters that are preventable, this is a measure of a whole nation's neglect. A society imperils its own future when, out of negligence or contempt, it overlooks the need of children to be reared in a family ... or when, in the midst of plenty, some families cannot give their children adequate food and shelter, safe activity and rest, and an opportunity to grow into full adulthood as people who can care for and cherish other human beings like themselves.

Margaret Mead
Family, Children, Opportunity

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

Margaret Mead
Children, Growing Up, Adults
Attributed to Margaret Mead in Anita E. Woolfolk "Educational Psychology" (p. 212), 1980.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Margaret Mead
Inspirational, Children, Future
"The Energy Crisis - Why Our World Will Never Again Be the Same". Margaret Mead, "Redbook", 1974, later quoted in Hugh Nash "Progress As If Survival Mattered: A Handbook For A Conserver Society" (p. 166), 1977.

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

Margaret Mead
Sex, Children, Acceptance
Margaret Mead (1972). “Twentieth century faith: hope and survival”

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

Margaret Mead
Children, Teaching, Simple
Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

Margaret Mead
Children, Past, People

Our human situation no longer permits us to make armed dichotomies between those who are good and those who are evil, those who are right and those who are wrong. The first blow dealt to the enemy's children will sign the death warrant of our own.

Margaret Mead
Children, Blow, Evil
Margaret Mead (1964). “Continuities in Cultural Evolution”, p.323, Transaction Publishers

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves

Margaret Mead
Children, Insight, Recognizing

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.

Margaret Mead
Children, Women, School
Attributed to Margaret Mead in Andrew L. Zehner "How They Work In Indiana: Business-Education Partnerships" (p. 3), 1994.

In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world

Margaret Mead
Children, Growing Up, Life Changing
MARGARET MEAD (1959). “PEOPLE AND PLACES”

Everybody's suffering is mine but not everybody's murdering ... I do not distinguish for one moment whether my child is in danger or a child in central Asia. But I will not accept responsibility for what other people do because I happen to belong to that nation or that race or that religion. I do not believe in guilt by association.

Margaret Mead
Children, Believe, Responsibility

Of course we need children! Adults need children in their lives to listen to and care for, to keep their imagination fresh and their hearts young and to make the future a reality for which they are willing to work.

Margaret Mead
Children, Heart, Reality

No skill, no special apti­tude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.

Margaret Mead
Sex, Children, Thinking
"Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies". Book by Margaret Mead, 1935.

We must have...a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust.

Margaret Mead
Children, Adults, Groups

I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child.

Margaret Mead
Children, Eye, Intelligent

Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, 'Go to sleep by yourselves.' And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.

Margaret Mead
Children, Sleep, Independent
"Growing Old in America". Grace Hechinger, Family Circle Magazine, July 25, 1977.

Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.

Margaret Mead
Children, Educational, Learning

If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

Margaret Mead
Motivational, Teacher, Children

The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.

Margaret Mead
Funny, Trust, Children

Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions. In addition to their shared memories of childhood and of their relationship to each other's children, they share memories of the same home, the same homemaking style, and the same small prejudices about housekeeping that carry the echoes of their mother's voice.

Margaret Mead
Mother, Children, Growing Up

What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.

Margaret Mead
Husband, Children, Romantic Love
Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1979). “Margaret Mead, some personal views”, Angus & Robertson