Parenting & Family Quote by Bell Hooks

In a culture that treats loneliness like a defect to be fixed, bell hooks reframes it as a skill to be taught. The sentence moves with the care of someone watching a social problem take root early: children are trained to perform constant availability, to equate attention with worth, to fear the blank space where no one is watching. hooks isn’t romanticizing isolation; she’s insisting on a practice of quiet that builds an internal life sturdy enough to withstand the world’s noise.

The phrasing matters. “Make children feel” is a challenge to the adult habit of issuing rules instead of shaping emotional permission. She’s talking about pedagogy in the deepest sense: how families, schools, and communities script what’s safe to feel. “There are times” adds nuance and boundaries. This isn’t the neoliberal fantasy of self-reliance where everyone copes alone; it’s a rhythmic understanding of intimacy and solitude, connection and retreat. The goal is “to be able to accept their aloneness,” not to flee it with distraction.

Read in hooks’s wider context - her work on love as an ethic, on domination masquerading as care, on the ways capitalism and patriarchy colonize desire - the subtext sharpens. Teaching kids to tolerate quiet is a form of resistance against systems that profit from their restlessness and insecurity. It’s also a gentler politics: if you can sit with yourself, you’re less likely to demand that others carry your unprocessed fear.