The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

by Bruce D. Perry

Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.

Children become resilient as a result of the patterns of stress and of nurturing that they experience early on in life,

The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well.

To develop a self, one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices; if the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have little way of knowing what you like and want.

what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.

She knew that you don’t interact with these children based on their age, but based on what they need, what they may have missed during “sensitive periods” of development.

But I do think that understanding ourselves as a social species, with a brain that evolved with certain unique capacities and weaknesses, a brain that becomes what it practices, will allow us at least to ask the right questions.