Jaclyn

“I am not all knowing.
Therefore, I will not even attempt to be.
I need to be loved.
Therefore, I will be open to loving children.
I want to be more accepting of the child in me.
Therefore, I will with wonder and awe allow children to illuminate my world.
I know so little about the complex intricacies of childhood.
Therefore, I will allow children to teach me.
I learn my best from and am impacted most by my personal struggles.
Therefore, I will join with children in their struggles.
I sometimes need a refuge.
Therefore, I will provide a refuge for children.
I like it when I am fully accepted for the person I am.
Therefore, I will strive to experience and appreciate the person of the child.
I make mistakes. They are a declaration of the way I am - human and fallible.
Therefore, I will be tolerant of the humanness of children.
I react with emotional internalization and expression to my world of reality.
Therefore, I will relinquish the grasp I have on reality and try to enter the world as experienced by the child.
It feels good to be an authority, to provide answers.
Therefore, I will need to work hard to protect children from me!
I am more fully me when I feel safe.
Therefore I will be consistent in my interactions with children.
I am the only person who can live my life.
Therefore, I will not attempt to rule a child's life.
I have learned most of what I know from experiencing.
Therefore, I will allow children to experience.
The hope I experience and the will to live come from within me.
Therefore, I will recognize and confirm the child's will and selfhood.
I cannot make children's hurts and fears and frustrations and disappointments go away.
Therefore, I will soften the blow.
I experience fear when I am vulnerable.
Therefore, I will with kindness, gentleness, and tenderness touch the inner world of the vulnerable child.

- Principles for Relationships with Children”
― Garry L. Landreth, Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Where you go, I shall go; where you die, I shall die, and there will I be buried.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Cruel Beauty

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.

We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
― Desmond Tutu