Jean Liedloff Quotes About Elders

• It is our genetic nature as a species to believe as young children that our parents and elders are right. We watch them to see what's what. Later on we can judge for ourselves and rebel if need be, but when we're just months old, or a year or two, and a parent looks at us with impatience, or disgust, or disdain, or just leaves us there to cry and doesn't answer us even though we're longing to be embraced and nurtured, we assume that something must be wrong with us. Unfortunately, at that age it's impossible to think there might be something wrong with them.

  Jean Liedloff

  Children, Self Esteem, Believe

  "An Interview with Jean Liedloff" by Chris Mercogliano, www.continuum-concept.org.

• 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.

  Jean Liedloff

  Children, People, Trying

  Jean Liedloff (1985). “The Continuum Concept: Allowing Human Nature to Work Successfully”, p.15, Da Capo Press

• Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly.

  Jean Liedloff

  Real, Selfish, Fall

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