David Elkind
David Elkind
David Elkindis a Jewish-American child psychologist and author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth11 March 1931
CountryUnited States of America
college education good people
We have so many good colleges. If you're honest, it's not the education they get as much as the connections, the people they meet. And that's where a lot of it's at.
concepts learned learning possible skills teaches
Learning teaches us what is known, play makes it possible for new things to be learned. There are many concepts and skills that can only be learned through play.
children education learn skills social
Play is a very important part, ... Kindergarten education play is a way in which children learn. And children learn a lot of social skills through those things.
certainly college economic human values weighed
It's certainly part of the same group-think. They're doing the same thing -- branding -- with universities. We see economic values being weighed much more heavily than human values.
burned starting
It's all very misguided. They're starting too early, and getting burned out.
commitment abuse nuclear
We now recognize that abuse and neglect may be as frequent in nuclear families as love, protection, and commitment are in nonnuclear families.
love maturity satisfaction
Sigmund Freud was once asked to describe the characteristics of maturity, and he replied: lieben un arbeiten ("loving and working"). The mature adult is one who can love and allow himself or herself to be loved and who can work productively, meaningfully, and with satisfaction.
encouragement children teaching
Certainly parents play a crucial role in the lives of individuals who are intellectually gifted or creatively talented. But this role is not one of active instruction, of teaching children skills,... rather, it is support and encouragement parents give children and the intellectual climate that they create in the home which seem to be the critical factors.
children grandparent temptation
Preschoolers sound much brighter and more knowledgeable than they really are, which is why so many parents and grandparents are sosure their progeny are gifted and super-bright. Because children's questions sound so mature and sophisticated, we are tempted to answer them at a level of abstraction far beyond the child's level of comprehension. That is a temptation we should resist.
children believe responsibility
Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.
children perspective parent
If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one's own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.
children good-life work
Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-classparents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement--a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.
children writing age-difference
The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.
education children past
So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.