Kenneth J Saltman

Worldwide, 80 percent of casualties in military excursions are civilian, occurring in the poorest parts of the world, which... also have the greatest youth populations and the smallest economies.

Julie Weber

Capitalism is happily at war with children. Worldwide, nearly 250 million children are presently working (some estimate it as high as 400 million)... Children in the southern region of India work sixteen hours a day, six days a week for a meager $1.30 a week salary.

Peter Mclaren and Ramin Farahmandpur

Talk to your kids! If you said more words to him than, "Mommy be back," he might now something.

Chris Rock

Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them. 

If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

Parents need a genuine choice whether to stay at home and take care of their children, adequate child support so that parents take responsibility for supporting their kids, adequate jobs that pay well so people can care for their kids, and good child care in case the parents want to go to work. Parenting is important and work is important and support for children is important. - 1993 interview, Psychology Today 

We must do more to stop this senseless violence. We can't just talk about it and then do nothing until the next shooting when we will profess shock again. We must act now to get to the root causes of the problem: the easy availability of guns to too many of our children; the manufacturing and selling of non-sporting firearms; the absence of effective gun control measures including licensing; the lack of parental responsibility and moral guidance about the respect for life; the absence of hope among young people who see violence as the way to solve disputes and an epidemic of family and media violence that leave children thinking violence is the way to solve problems.... It is a senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to fail to protect children instead of guns -- and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence. We don't have a child problem in America we have an adult problem. Adult hypocrisy got us here, it is now up to responsible adults to take a range of concrete steps to stop these preventable child tragedies. -- statement, 2000, after a school shooting in Mount Morris Township, Michigan

The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction? That's a government subsidy of families, yet we resent putting money directly into public housing. We take our deduction for dependent care yet resent putting money directly into child care. Common sense and necessity are beginning to erode old notions of the private invasion of family life, because so many families are in trouble. - 1993 interview, Psychology Today 

Maria Elderman

The biggest pressure is fitting in. It's real hard when you try to be your own person. You are really influenced by your friends. You want to dress like them. You want to be like them. It's hard to find your own individuality. Especially at Beverly Hills High School.

Everyone is really judgmental, very clique-y.  There's pressure to have a car when you turn sixteen and to have everything your friends have. If you saw the parking lot at Beverly High. There are BMWs, Jeeps, Range Rovers--you know, fifty-thousand-dollar cars driven by sixteen-year-olds. For me, not always growing up in Beverly Hills and stuff, I felt like I didn't fit in.

"Mijanou" (An 18-year-old high school student, quoted in Lauren Greenfield's _Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood_ [2004], "Mijanou")

I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?

Eve Merriam 1916-92, in Peacemaking: Day by Day (1989)

Teenagers have no monopoly [on adolescent behavior], except insofar as we are in fact a teenager society--a society that likes to play "chicken," not with fast cars, but with ballistic missiles.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
_Katallagete, Summer 1966_, "Events and Pseudo-
Events: Letter to a Southern Churchman"

Child abuse killed me from the inside out.

Even the best orphanage is nothing more than a good prison for children.

Roger Dean Kiser
Chicken Soup for the Soul Books

Put simply, when a child is impelled to try to control the behavior of an adult, it is not because the child wants to succeed, but because the child needs to be certain that the adult knows what he or she is doing. Furthermore, the child cannot resist such testing until the adult stands firm and the child can have that certainty. No child would dream of trying to take over the initiative from an adult unless that child receives a clear message that such action is expected — not wanted, but expected! Moreover, once the child feels he has attained control, he becomes confused and frightened and must go to any extreme to compel the adult to take the leadership back where it belongs.

Jean Liedloff, Mothering magazine, Winter 1994

You know--we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "My God, my God--" I said to myself, "it's the Children's Crusade."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five [1969], Chapter Five