erecting filters to prevent a child’s world from being deluged with adult information, pressures, and concerns. We’ll learn the value of not sharing, of the freedom they gain when they’re not privy to our fears, drives, ambitions, and the very fast pace of our lives.

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don’t act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literar

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”

“Yes, but look what happens to kids!” Life is life with or without the illusion of control. Children feel the pain of life. Pain and suffering are not the same thing. Suffering happens when we are taught to believe that what is happening to us is wrong and a mistake, and we should have prevented it. We learn to think of life as reward and punishmen

Children, before they are squashed by cynicism, are natural visionaries. They can tell you clearly and firmly what the world should be like. There should be no war, no pollution, no cruelty, no starving children. There should be music, fun, beauty, and lots and lots of nature. People should be trustworthy and grownups should not work so hard. It’s

The problem is that so many of us lost access to our broccoli when we were children. When we listened to our intuition when we were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished. God forbid you should have your own opinions or perceptions—better to have head lice.