Angela: Would you like kids?
Beverly: No I don’t think I would really. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like kids because I do. But, let me put it to you this way, I wouldn’t like to actually have to have them. I mean, did you have your kids in hospital, Sue? Yeah, you see, to me having to go into hospital would like being ill. And I couldn’t stand that. And I know it sounds horrible but having to do all that breast feeding and changing nappies would actually make me heave. I don’t honestly think I’ve got that motherly instinct in me. Play for Today: Abigail’s Party ***** written & directed Mike Leigh, starring Alison Steadman, BBC 1997
Grow up as good revolutionaries. Che Guevara
The United States has some of the best programs and laws in the world to protect its children but, as Unicef has pointed out the US also has one of the highest rates of the industrialized countries for poverty and hunger among children and also for child mortality. A recent story in the Washington Post noted that ‘despite this time of record prosperity, one in every six American children is poor; one in three children of colour. No other developed country has anything approaching US child poverty rates’. Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2001
In the United States child poverty has reached record levels with over sixteen million children now affected. One in twelve Americans are now jobless. Foodbanks and homeless shelters are facing unprecedented demand. America’s Poor Kids, BBC 2013
The homeless Kaylie fears is already a reality for one and a half million children across the US. ibid.
What is a normal childhood? We weren’t rich, we were pretty middle-class. My dad survived from job to job; with him taking care of so many relatives, he couldn’t save any money. Charlie Sheen
Children need models rather than critics. Joseph Joubert
If you want a free society, teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all, encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves. Jonathan Sacks
The New Freedom Commission is a federal program to mandate the bogus screening and compulsory medication of children from infancy through eighteen years of age in this country through the use of completely inappropriate screening techniques. Any child who deviates from the prescribed feeling and thought pattern that is allowed to have them will be compulsorily medicated, even over the objection of their parents, with dangerous, unproven and untested psychiatric medications to control their thoughts, their behaviours and to impede their emotional development. This is a federally mandated program. Dr Rima Laibow, cited One Nation Under Siege
These bitter sorrows of childhood! When sorrow is new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss p28
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself. Gore Vidal, cited Gore Vidal: United States of Amnesia, 2013
Really, George, it’s about time you gave up thinking you’re as good as a boy. The Comic Strip Presents ... Five Go Mad in Dorset starring Peter Richardson & Adrian Edmonson & Dawn French & Jennifer Saunders & Robbie Coltrane et al, Dick at table, Channel 4 1982
I say, this is a jolly wizard lunch, Anne. You really are going to make someone a great little wife one day. ibid. Dick
Ham and turkey sandwiches, bags of lettuces, hard boiled eggs, heaps of tomato and lashings of ginger beer. ibid. Anne
George: Serves him right for being nouveau riche.
Anne: And Jewish. ibid.
[Timmy’s wagging tail seen sticking out of girls’ tent] George: Oh, Timmy. You’re so licky!
Anne: You shouldn’t let him do that, George. It’s not hygienic.
George: But we like it, don’t we, Timmy? ibid.
Blah blah blah stolen plans. Blah blah blah missing scientists. Blah blah blah blah blah blah atom bomb ... Blah blah blah third world war ... ibid. villain
Dick: That’s pretty smart for a girl. ibid.
Perhaps there’s a secret way in. There always has been in our previous adventures. ibid. Dick
She’s an unrelenting nymphomaniac and I’m a screaming homosexual. ibid. Uncle Quentin
In unaired rooms, mothers and fathers sew by day and by night. Those in the home sweatshop must work cheaper than those in the factory sweatshops ... And the children are called in from play to drive and drudge beside their elders ... All the year in New York and in other cities you may watch children radiating to and from such pitiful homes. Nearly any hour on the East Side of New York City you can see them – pallid boy or spindling girl – their faces dulled, their backs bent under a heavy load of garments piled on head and shoulders, the muscles of the whole frame in a long strain ... Is it not a cruel civilization that allows little hearts and little shoulders to strain under these grown-up responsibilities, while in the same city, a pet cur is jeweled and pampered and aired on a fine lady’s velvet lap on the beautiful boulevards? Edwin Markham, Cosmopolitan magazine January 1907
The blessings of having children – but the anxieties and trouble not to say sorrow are quite as great as the blessings. Queen Victoria
Children should be seen and not heard. Early 15th century proverb
If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. G K Chesterton, A Defence of Baby-Worship
We did love our children, did we not, my dear. The Borgias s1e9: Nobody, Rodrigo to wife et al, Showtime 2011
At least half the kids wouldn’t have lived till they were ten. Professor Mary Beard, Meet the Romans III: Behind Closed Doors, BBC 2012
Schools: only for the well off and only for the boys. ibid.
Perhaps most disturbing is the suggestion that ADHD is nothing more than the invention of pharmaceutical companies who have used clinical trials to create a disease that can be treated with their drugs. Mail on Sunday article 27th November 2007, ‘The Scandal of Kiddy Coke’
Egocentrism in so far as it means confusion of the ego and the external world, and egocentrism in so far as it means lack of cooperation, constitute one and the same phenomenon. So long as the child does not dissociate his ego from the suggestions coming from the physical and from the social world, he cannot cooperate, for in order to cooperate one must be conscious of one’s ego and situate it in relation to thought in general. And in order to become conscious of one’s ego, it is necessary to liberate oneself from the thought and will of others. The coercion exercised by the adult or the older child is therefore inseparable from the unconscious egocentrism of the very young child. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child 1932 ch2
Provided the patient, whether a boy or a girl, is capable of understanding what is proposed, and of expressing his or her own wishes, I see no good reason for holding that he or she lacks the capacity to express tham validly and effectively and to authorise the medical man to make the examination or give the treatment he advises. Lord Fraser, Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech AHA [1986] AC 112, [1985] 3 ALL ER 402
All over the United Kingdom parents are being separated from their sick children. More children than ever are being treated for serious mental illness. But cuts to services mean in some places the right treatment is just not available. Kids in Crisis, Channel 4 2015
Three-quarters of all mental illness begins in childhood. ibid.
In less than fifty years children have become prized consumers, with British and American kids worth seven hundred billion pounds a year. Jacques Peretti, The Men Who Made Us Spend III, BBC 2014
Children were targeted increasingly aggressively. ibid.
Michael: When I said that I wanted to have kids and you said that you wanted me to have a vasectomy, what did I do? And then, when you said that you might want to have kids and I wasn't so sure? Who had the vasectomy reversed? And then when you said you definitely didn’t wanna have kids? Who had it reversed back? Snip snap snip snap snip snap! I did! You have no idea the physical toll that three vasectomies have on a person! And I bought this condo to fill with children!
Jan: I am so sorry that I don't wanna bring kids into this screwed up world.
Michael: I am sorry too.
Jan: But look if you wanna have kids, then fine! You win! Let’s have a fucking kid!
Michael: Do you mean it? You wanna have a kid?
Jan: I hate my life. The Office US s4e13: Dinner Party, NBC 2007