Food for Thought

These quotes came from the late Jim Greenman. He was a Head Start teacher and director, author, and parent educator, who valued children’s vital need for play spaces:

“It is a strange time. We live in an age when our children may know far more about bizarre people we care nothing about or a cartoon world than the workings of their own back yard – that marvelous ecosystem teeming with life. They may know more about, or rather have more information on, exotic zoo animals and farm animals than the snails, squirrels, birds, worms, and bugs that live outside their windows.”


“Young children are perpetual tourists without much life experience, truly strangers in a strange land. They are developing their minds and bodies at such a rate that they are literally new people with each sunrise. Their backlog of life experience is so slight that each day, each new place, each old place, brings surprises. Their courage rises and falls like the tides.”