How ignonimous it is to be a child. To be so small that you can be picked up, to be moved about at the whim of others. To be fed or not to be fed. To be cleaned or left dirty. Made happy or left to cry. It’s surely so ultimate an indignity that it’s not surprising that some of us never really recover from it. For it is surely one of the basic fears of personkind that we should be treated as things and not as persons. Manipulated, pushed around by impersonal forces, treated as of no account by the powerful and more superior. Each one of us may be a tiny atom in an enormous universe, but we need the illusion that we count-that our individuality demands attention. To be able to be totally disregarded as a person is a kind of death in life that we are compelled to fight with all of our strength.

~Anthony Storr (from The World of Children)