Penelope Leach
Penelope J. Leach (born Penelope Jane Balchin, 19 November 1937 Hampstead, London) is a British psychologist who writes extensively on parenting issues from a child development perspective.
Leach is best known for her book Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, published in 1977, which has sold over two million copies to date. Leach notes in the introduction to that book: "Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to put things right or make the best of those that are wrong."
Read more about Penelope Leach: Early Career, Current Projects, Criticism, Family
Famous quotes by penelope leach:
“Our day you will find that you have stopped regarding your baby as a totally unpredictable and therefore rather alarming novelty, and have begun instead to think of him as a person with tastes, preferences and characteristics of his own. When that happens you will know that he has moved on from being a ‘newborn’ and has got himself settled into life.”
—Penelope Leach (20th century)
“Your toddler will be ‘good’ if he feels like doing what you happen to want him to do and does not happen to feel like doing anything you would dislike. With a little cleverness you can organize life as a whole, and issues in particular, so that you both want the same thing most of the time.”
—Penelope Leach (20th century)
“In order to become spoiled ... a child has to be able to want things as well as need them. He has to be able to see himself as a being who is separate from everyone else.... A baby is none of these things. He feels a need and he expresses it. He is not intellectually capable of working out involved plans and ideas like ‘Can I make her give me...?’ ‘If I make enough fuss he will...?’ ‘They let me do ... yesterday and I want to do it again today so I’ll....’”
—Penelope Leach (20th century)
“A preschool child does not emerge from your toddler on a given date or birthday. He becomes a child when he ceases to be a wayward, confusing, unpredictable and often balky person-in-the- making, and becomes a comparatively cooperative, eager-and-easy-to-please real human being—at least 60 per cent of the time.”
—Penelope Leach (20th century)
“It is not [the toddler’s] job yet to consider other people’s feelings, he has to come to terms with his own first. If he hits you and you hit him back to ‘show him what it feels like,’ you will have given a lesson he is not ready to learn. He will wail as if hitting was a totally new idea to him. He makes no connections between what he did to you and what you then did to him; between your feelings and his own.”
—Penelope Leach (20th century)