The Absorbent Mind

by Maria Montessori

This attachment is not affection. It is something which has fear in it. The child is timid and always wants to remain near someone, the mother preferably. He is not happy to go out, but would always like to remain at home isolated from the world. Everything in the world that should make him happy frightens him, he feels repugnance from new experiences. The environment instead of proving attractive, as it should to a being in course of development, is repellent. And if a child, from the very first infancy feels repulsion towards this environment, which ought to be its means of development, certainly this child will not develop normally. He will not be the child who conquers, who is destined to take the whole of his environment and incarnate it in himself. He will do so, but with difficulty and incompletely. He is the very picture of the saying ‘To live is to suffer,’ To do something is, to him, to go against his own nature. Even respiration seems to be hard. People of this sort require much more sleep and rest; even digestion seems to be difficult. So you see what sort of life this type of child prepares for himself in the future, for these characters are things not only of the present, but also of the future.