Child Centric Quotes

There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in - work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play… The part of me which was given up to work, which enabled my wife and child to live in the manner which they unthinkingly demanded, this part of me which kept the wheel turning - a completely fatuous, ego-centric notion! - was the least part of me. I gave nothing to the world in fulfilling the function of breadwinner; the world exacted its tribute of me, that was all.

I had never before considered that people near me might have problems that were not caused by me. I had been created to please people. If the people around me weren't happy, I must be doing something wrong. Lynn helped me see that I lacked the power to make other people feel anything.

Bob is talking about alternative people. Alternative beliefs and outlooks, alternative business and politics, alternative lifestyles and healthcare. alternative foods and fabrics, alternative child-rearing and schooling, alternative fuels and energies—alternative everything, basically, but not very alternative. These are alternatives within the established paradigm. not alternatives to it: a subherd running in parallel to the main body. Rather than detaching from their ego structures, alternative people merely reshape them along more heart-felt and self-centric lines, their multivarious goals and ideals reducing to personal happiness via the removal, avoidance and denial of unhappiness.

The act of making that designers find so satisfying is built into early childhood education, but as they grow, many children lose opportunities to create their own environment, bounded by a text-centric view of education and concerns for safety. Despite adults’ desire to create a safer, softer child-centric world, something got lost in translation. Jane Jacobs said, of the child in the designed-for-childhood environment: “Their homes and playgrounds, so orderly looking, so buffered from the muddled, messy intrusions of the great world, may accidentally be ideally planned for children to concentrate on television, but for too little else their hungry brains require.”9 Our built environment is making kids less healthy, less independent, and less imaginative. What those hungry brains require is freedom. Treating children as citizens, rather than as consumers, can break that pattern, creating a shared spatial economy centered on public education, recreation, and transportation safe and open for all.

editor and edited my first book in a wonderful way. For this book, however, time devoted to bringing up the children made a renewed editorial collaboration impossible. I hope the reader will not suffer unduly as a consequence! My children Christiana Dagmar and Eric James have watched me work on the book—indeed they could not avoid it as I often write at home. I hope they have been drawing the lesson that academic research can be really fun. Certainly, that is the lesson I drew from my father, Arthur von Hippel. He wrote his books in his study upstairs when I was a child and would often come down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. In transit, he would throw up his hands and say, to no one in particular, “Why do I choose to work on such difficult problems?” And then he would look deeply happy. Dad, I noticed the smile! Finally my warmest thanks to my MIT colleagues and students and also to MIT as an institution. MIT is a really inspiring place to work and learn from others. We all understand the requirements for good research and learning, and we all strive to contribute to a very supportive academic environment. And, of course, new people are always showing up with new and interesting ideas, so fun and learning are always being renewed! Democratizing Innovation 1  Introduction and Overview When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services—both firms and individual consumers—are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual

In modern psychological terms, a child is said to become ego-centric when he has learned to distinguish himself from the world he perceives. It is just this learned idea that we are separate from our environment that Zen says we need to unlearn.

I may be child-centric, but that doesn't make me anti-feminist. In an interview with Garage Magazine, Beyoncé (Queen Bae), who I can safely say is at the top of her profession as a singer and entertainer, said "Of everything that I've accomplished, my proudest moment hands down is when I gave birth to my daughter Blue." Cue the firestorm of criticism! On Mic.com, Jenny Kutner reacted, "Wouldn't it be refreshing for one of the most professionally accomplished women in the world to value her career accomplishments equally?" To which Elizabeth Kiefer on Refinery29 responded, "It would be, if that were the truth for whoever spoke that perfect sound bite of progressivism. Yet, it would be even more refreshing if we allowed women to choose their greatest moment without fear that they were being judged against some ever-moving metric of what it means to be a good feminist." To which I say "Amen".