13 Quotes by Jean Liedloff

A baby's cry is precisely as serious as it sounds.

Permissiveness constantly deprives children of the examples of adult-centred life where they can find the place they seek in a natural hierarchy of greater and lesser experience, and where their desirable actions are accepted and their undesirable actions rejected, while they themselves are always accepted. Children need to see that they are assumed to be wed intentioned, naturally social people who are trying to do the right thing and want a reliable reaction from their elders to guide them.

We take it for granted that life is hard and feel lucky to have whatever happiness we get. We do not look upon happiness as a birthright, nor do we expect it to be more than peace or contentment. Real joy, the state in which the Yequana spend much of their lives, is exceedingly rare among us.

Children need to see that they are assumed to be well-intentioned, naturally social people who are trying to do the right thing and who want reliable reactions from their elders to guide them.

A baby’s cry is precisely as serious as it sounds.

Pain and illness, the deaths of those one loves, and discomforts and disappointments mar the happy norm, but they do not alter the fact that happiness is the norm, nor affect the tendency of the continuum to restore it, to heal it, after any disturbance.

Nobody’s born rotten. You just don’t have bad kids. It’s not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad.

It’s perfectly clear that the millions of babies, who are crying at this very moment, want unanimously to be next to a live body. Do you really think they’re all wrong? Theirs is the voice of nature. This is the clear, pure voice of nature, without intellectual interference.

I would be ashamed to admit to the Indians that, where I come from, the women do not feel themselves capable of raising children until they read the instructions written in a book by a strange man.