Noun

children pl. (irregular plural of child)

1. More than one son or daughter, or none. Offspring.

   Do you have children?

   Yes, I have three children.

   No, I have no children.

2. More than one young person, or none.

   There are no children absent from classes today

3. Members of a tribe.

   The children of Israel

4. (figuratively) Things or abstractions derived from or caused by something.

   Poverty, disease, and despair are the children of war.

   • 1991, Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie (title)

Synonyms

• (more than one son or daughter): kids (people, goats), offspring, spawn (fish), litter (dogs, etc)
• (more than one young person): boys and girls, brats
• (members of a tribe): kinfolk, clan
• (figurative derivation): product

A child (plural: children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority. "Child" may also describe a relationship with a parent or authority figure, or signify group membership in a clan, tribe, or religion; it can also signify being strongly affected by a specific time, place, or circumstance, as in "a child of nature" or "a child of the Sixties."

Definitions

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as "every human being below the age of 18 years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier." Biologically, a child is anyone in the developmental stage of childhood, between infancy and adulthood.

Attitudes toward children

Social attitudes toward children differ around the world in various cultures. These attitudes have changed over time and in different historical periods. A 1988 study on European attitudes toward the centrality of children found Italy was more child-centric and the Netherlands less child-centric, with other countries (Austria, Great Britain, Ireland, and West Germany) falling in between.

Quotes regarding children.

See also: Childhood

Contents

• 1 Sourced
  • 1.1 Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 See also
• 4 External links

Sourced

• "You can't raise a child in a vacuum. All that carpet dust will clog up the kid's lungs."
  • Jacob M. Appel, American playwright, Arborophilia (2005)

• "In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's." --George Eliot, Silas Marner (Chapter 14, 1861)

• "Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults." --Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (1973) Emotions

• "Children hallow small things. A child is a priest of the ordinary, fulfilling a sacred office that absolutely no one else can fill. The simplest gesture, the ephemeral movement, the commonest object all become precious beyond words when touched, noticed, lived by one's own dear child." -- Mike Mason, The Mystery of Children (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 2001), p. 27

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Thu Jun 11 05:08:42 2009