Quotes About Parenting

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist.

Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children's sports in history.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching?

They said he used to cackle and bark in his crib after dark. They said he walked at two months and sat staring at the moon whenever it shone. Those were things that people said. His parents were always worried about him. An only child, they noticed his flaws quickly. They thought he was blind until the doctor told them it was just a vacuous stare.

Child-rearing is not some special part of life, set aside for some temporary purpose and put aside at a certain age. It is the principal business of life, the search for the condition that is naturally promised for us by the fact of our life. And we must do it by ourselves, one by one.

Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.

Paying bills is hard, and dealing with a teen makes life even harder.

I didn't know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

Un figlio scopre sempre le debolezze dei propri genitori. Le percepisce prima ancora delle parole, come una prima e ultima lezione. La debolezza può essere l'unica lezione dei genitori destinata a durare nel tempo. (p. 247)

My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him — or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves — us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.

I further believe that a free and loving God would create things that continue to recreate themselves, exactly as all parents desire for their children.

It's not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who wanted anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

I know," Peter said, zipping Will's jacket. The little boy, who had apparently had his throat zipped into his zipper at some point, always put his mittened hand beneath his chin to prevent it from happening again. Sully

Enduring what couldn't be cured, she supposed, was what people meant by being adult, though it was ironic that so few of them—including her parents—had mastered the skill themselves.

Why can't grown-ups just give me stuff, let me do what I like and then go away A LOT?

Betsy: Do you have daddy issues, Warren? Warren: Dad was supportive, intelligent, read to me as a kid, left me a trillion dollars. It's hard to complain.

I've met plenty of embarrassing parents, but Kronos, the evil Titan Lord who wanted to destroy Western Civilization? Not the kind of dad you invited to school for Career Day.

Um, dad? I called How's it going? Percy! Annabeth whispered. We're in a hurry!

I guessed his name was Face of Horror. I wondered how long it had taken his mom to think of that. Bob? No. Sam? No. How about Face of Horror?

Julius told me how much you'd grown, but I couldn't believe it. Carter, I bet you're shaving—" "Mom." "—and dating girls—" "Mom!" Have you ever noticed how parents can go from the most wonderful people in the world to totally embarrassing in three seconds?