Robin Grille > Quotes

“The prolonged and total immobilization of babies24 in tight swaddling bandages, a practice long abandoned throughout Western civilization, has persisted into modern times in the Balkans, with the predictable deleterious affects of withdrawal, passivity, and late walking.”
― Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World

“Children are not adults-in-the-making; they are not clay to be molded. They are children, and that is that. Our task is to wonder at them, to learn about ourselves through our relationships with them. It is also important to remind ourselves that children are not “them”—they are “us.” We have felt what they feel, yearned for what they yearn for—and if we are honest with ourselves… we still do. So,”
― Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World

“Rather than imposing “good” values through punishment and reward, and rather than enforcing blind obedience, the helping mode parent fosters the child’s autonomy and self-regulation.”
― Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World

“Since withdrawal is the only psychological defence available to the baby at this time, shocks experienced here can lead to a demeanour of remoteness or aloofness. Some of these babies may grow to be day-dreamers, under stress they might feel depersonalized or unreal. Others grow to be overly passive, compliant and obedient. The movement is away from contact with others, taking refuge in excessive intellectualisation; a state of analytical detachment from life, or a tendency to reverie.”
― Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World

“The adult becomes uneasy in the unpredictable world of feelings and emotion, and therefore over-emphasizes the “reasonable,” the “rational,” the “logical”—or the “abstract” and the “philosophical.”
― Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World

“In my own therapy, I have re-experienced some of the intense terror, followed by elation and relief that surrounded the event of my birth. I have also remembered the all-encompassing adoration I felt for my mother as a baby. Although I cannot easily re-capture such intense, early-life feelings in my relatively armoured adult body, the memories are not altogether irretrievable.”
― Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World

“Perhaps the most significant departure from previous modes involves a better psychological differentiation between parent and child. In other words, helping mode parents have learned to distinguish more clearly between the child’s need, and the adult’s wishes. Many of the socializing mode practices were done ostensibly “for the child’s own good,” when it was really the adult’s need being served. We convinced ourselves, for instance, that it was for the child’s own good that we spanked them, dispatched them to regimented, rote learning and competition-based education, or forced them into rigid feeding and sleeping routines.”
― Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World