Parenting & Family Quote by Kathe Kollwitz

“Look at life with the eyes of a child” lands differently when it comes from Kathe Kollwitz, an artist whose work is practically a ledger of adult grief. Kollwitz wasn’t selling innocence as a lifestyle brand; she was interrogating what gets sanded down as we learn to survive. In her drawings and prints - gaunt mothers, clenched hands, bodies made heavy by hunger and war - she returns obsessively to a kind of primal perception: the child’s ability to see need without euphemism.

The intent isn’t to romanticize childhood but to reclaim its brutal clarity. Children don’t have the polite vocabulary of distance; they react. They stare. They ask the question that makes adults shift in their seats. Kollwitz’s subtext is a critique of trained numbness: the way society teaches people to look away from poverty, to aestheticize suffering, to translate catastrophe into “necessary losses.” The child’s gaze becomes an ethical demand, not a soft-focus filter.

Context matters. Living through Imperial Germany, World War I (and the death of her son Peter), political upheaval, and the rise of Nazism, Kollwitz watched modernity industrialize not only labor but death. In that world, “eyes of a child” reads like a refusal: refuse cynicism, refuse bureaucratic language, refuse the comforting lie that horror is normal. It’s also a statement about art itself. Her best images don’t explain; they witness. The child’s eye, here, is the artist’s tool - direct, unsparing, and still capable of tenderness.