I spend a lot of free time — in California and when I’m traveling — visiting children’s hospitals. It makes me so happy to be able to brighten those kids’ day by just showing up and talking with them, listening to what they have to say and making them feel better. It’s so sad for children to have to get sick. More than anyone else, kids don’t deserve that. They often can’t even understand what’s wrong with them. It makes my heart twist. When I’m with them, I just want to hug them and make it all better for them. Sometimes sick children will visit me at home or in my hotel rooms on the road. A parent will get in touch with me and ask if their child can visit with me for a few minutes. Sometimes when I’m with them I feel like I understand better what my mother must have gone through with her polio. Life is too precious and too short not to reach out and touch the people we can. You know, when I was going

Love as a force contributory to disease.

Love is a serious mental illness

المرض لا يمحو الحب.

Love is a serious mental disease.

Today our approaches to children are fragmented and partial. Those who care for well children know little of children who are sick. The deep knowledge that comes from the intensive attempt to cure is separated from the knowledge of those whose main task is to teach.

عندما تمرض استدع طبيباً لكن الأهم من ذلك هو استدعاء من يحبونك لأنه ما من دواء أكثر أهمية من الحب أدع من يستطيع أن يحيطك بالجمال الموسيقى والشعر فحالة الاحتفال الحقيقة هي الأقدر على شفائك

When infants aren't held, they can become sick, even die. It's universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.

The children face problems such as violence, abuse, suicide etc. that medicine can not heal. It will never help these children psychologically and be his support ...? Even when they are in difficulty, in principle they do not speak with adults, or confide about their true intentions. However, expect some serious messages from adults. I will continue to send messages through manga. Children avoid them what force or what they want to impose anything. That is why I will continue to look for those things that [...] inspire their hearts.

You may truly love your child, but unless she feels it — she will not feel loved.

If the child is unwell, attention must be turned to the state of the mother’s health. Administering drugs to the child is as good as murdering it, for the child with its delicate constitution, easily succumbs to their poisonous effects. Hence the medicine should be administered to the mother, so that its beneficial properties may be transmitted to the child through her milk. If the child suffers, as it often does, from cough or loose bowels, there is no cause for alarm; we should wait for a day or so, and try to get at the root of the trouble, and then remove it. Making fuss over it and falling into a panic only makes matters worse. ... The use of shoes prevents the free circulation of blood and the development of hardy feet and legs. Dressing the child in silk or lace cloths, with cap and coat, and ornaments, is a barbarous practice. Our attempt to enhance by such ridiculous means the beauty that Nature has given, only bespeaks our vanity and ignorance. (Part II, Chapter IX, Care of the Child)

Nothing works well if a child’s love needs are not met. Only the child who feels genuinely loved and cared for can do her best. You may truly love your child, but unless she feels it — unless you speak the love language that communicates to her your love — she will not feel loved. Filling the

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behaviour. The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief or the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation – and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship – is its charity. Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don’t accuse them of being mean or self-pitying; we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that hunger, a tricky digestive tract or a lack of sleep may have on mood. How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships – if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.

Children are well one minute and very sick the next. So you have much less time than you have with adults.