Parenting & Family Quote by Rita Dove

Rita Dove’s line lands like a quiet indictment: the problem isn’t that kids lack imagination, it’s that adults engineer its disappearance. The verbs do the heavy lifting. “Have” is simple, almost tender; “gets beaten out of them” is stark, bodily, and deliberately ugly. Dove doesn’t romanticize childhood as a magical state. She frames talent and insight as ordinary possessions children arrive with, then points to a culture that treats those possessions like contraband.

The subtext is about schooling, but not just schools. “Beaten” implicates a whole ecosystem of correction: standardized metrics that reward compliance, adults who translate curiosity into “distraction,” families anxious about risk who train children to choose safety over voice. Insight is especially telling here; it’s not merely skill but perception, the ability to notice patterns, hypocrisy, emotional truth. That’s exactly what institutions often can’t tolerate because it questions the script.

As a poet, Dove is also talking about language itself. Children speak in metaphors without permission; they invent rules as they go. Poetry depends on that kind of alertness, the willingness to look stupid, to say the strange thing first. By casting the loss as violence rather than drift, Dove refuses the comforting story that creativity simply “fades.” It’s taken.

Context matters: Dove came of age as an African American woman in mid-century America, where “being correct” could be a survival tactic and “standing out” carried consequences. The quote reads as both artistic credo and cultural critique: we don’t just educate children; we domesticate them, then wonder why so many adults feel numb in their own lives.