Susie LaBelle

“Some teachers may interpret students' emotional and social deficits as a lack of respect or manners, but it is more accurate and helpful to understand that the students come to school with a narrower range of appropriate emotional responses than we expect.”
― Eric Jensen, Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids' Brains and What Schools Can Do About It

“To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a *place*, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“Neuroplasticity is now thought to include emotional/motivational as well as cognitive circuits. This would mean that a child’s habits of motivation and attitudes toward learning don’t all come with the package, but are physically formed in the brain by experience.”
― Jane M. Healy, Endangered Minds: Why Children Dont Think And What We Can Do About I

“Motherhood seems to be a no-win battle: however you decide to do (or not do) it, someone’s going to be criticizing you. You went to too great lengths trying to conceive. You didn’t go to great enough lengths. You had the baby too young. You should have kept the baby even though you were young. You shouldn’t have waited so long to try and have a baby. You’re a too involved mother. You’re not involved enough because you let your child play on the playground alone. It never ends. It strikes me that while all this judgment goes on, the options available to women become fewer and fewer. I’m not even (just) talking about the right to choose—across the U.S., women have less access to birth control, health care, reproductive education, and post-partum support. So we give women less information about their bodies and reproduction, less control over their bodies, and less support during and after pregnancy—and then we criticize them fiercely for whatever they end up doing. This”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere