Quotes About Parenting

It is not sufficient for fathers to send their children to church, Sunday school, Christian camp, or private Christian school. You must read the Bible to your children yourself. Obviously, our children must see some correspondence between the Bible and our lives. But even as we work out our own Christian growth, we must read God's Word to and with our children.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

A parent always tries to protect his child's world from the harsh reality of adulthood. - Busch

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

In the name of love, we give our kids ? indulgence rather than consequences; ? instant rather than delayed gratification; ? laxness rather than discipline; ? dependence rather than independence; ? and entitlement rather than responsibility.

we parents give our kids things instead of time, spoiling them as we add fuel to the entitlement flame.

Also, don't allow naps to run so late (past 4:00 P.M., perhaps) that they will interfere with falling asleep at night.

At any point, if she stopped crying or subsided to mild whimpering between checks, they were not to go back in:

If later in the night Betsy woke up and began crying hard again, they would restart the same pattern as at bedtime, waiting for three minutes, then five minutes, and working back up to ten minutes.

If Betsy was still asleep at 7:00 A.M., they would get her up no matter how much she'd been awake during the night.

Eventually he will simply find it preferable to go back to sleep than to cry for fifteen or twenty minutes knowing he won't be rewarded with rocking, holding, or nursing. At the same time, he is learning to fall asleep, and feel comfortable, alone in the crib or bed.

By three or four months of age they will be getting most of their sleep at night, usually including an unbroken stretch of five to nine hours.

If instead you allow the times of your child's feedings, playtimes, baths, and other activities to change constantly, chances are his sleep will become irregular as well.

It is equally important to help our children maintain consistent schedules through infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

By age two, your child should still sleep about nine to ten hours at night, with a one- to two-hour nap after lunch—about eleven and a half hours total.

So don't let your two- or three-year-old decide what time he should go to bed—many would wait until they were so sleepy they could not stay awake any longer. Before long his schedule would be disrupted, becoming inconsistent and unpredictable

So if you are beginning to address a sleep problem in your child, be sure to set up a firm schedule and stick to it rigorously for several weeks after your child has begun sleeping well again.

If you can figure out why your child is sleeping poorly and make the necessary changes, he should be sleeping well much sooner—usually within a few days, two weeks at the most.

In particular, there should be no sneaking about. Sneaking away from a child at night does not foster trust, and a sense of trust is important for good sleep.

Each time you go to your child, spend no more than one or two minutes with him. Remember, your job is to reassure him (and yourself), not necessarily to help him stop crying, and certainly not to help him fall asleep: the goal is for him to learn to fall asleep on his own.

If your child wakes during the night, restart the schedule with the minimum waiting time for that night and work up to the maximum again from there.

Use the same waiting schedule for naps, but if your child has not fallen asleep after half an hour, or if he is awake again and calling or crying vigorously after even a short period of sleep, end that nap time.

Society takes enormous trouble over who is allowed to adopt a child, but none about who is allowed to produce one. This has led the psychologist David Lykken to suggest that parents should have to get a licence before child-bearing, or otherwise risk the danger that their child will be taken away for adoption.