Quotes About Parenting

With two little boys in diapers, I had to keep it simple if I were going to have a life at all.

Changing diapers is one of the most leveling things that has ever happened to me.

Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.

When I'm in San Diego, it's carpools and making dinner and getting the kids to bed. It's real life.

Maybe it's becoming a mum and beginning a family. I feel like a different kind of confidence is starting to come.

I've always been way closer to my mom. I'm close to my dad, but they're totally different kinds of relationships.

I can easily tap into the feeling of being a mother and the feeling of, you always want what's best for your kids. And that's where most parents come from.

My mom did this really cool thing: when 'Pulp Fiction' came out on video, she made, like, a 'mommy edit.' She took two VCRs and dubbed 'Pulp Fiction' from one tape to the next and edited out all the parts she thought were unsuitable for a kid. It was basically, like, the opening and ending credits.

I listen to parenting books on tape.

I couldn't reconcile being a progressive feminist with being the mother of a male: advocating for policies that discriminated against him and targeted him simply for his sex, advocating an ideology that was a direct contradiction to my role as a mother to protect and nurture my child.

There's plenty to read about keeping your sanity while raising children, but it's all common-sense stuff about task division and taking breaks and the relentlessly repeated magic of date night with your spouse. What's missing is some 'tude.

How do you make your kids read more? It needs to be presented as a joy and a privilege to get to do it, and the kids should get to see you as a parent reading for your own pleasure. It's not something you send your kids off to do, 'Go into your room and read for 15 minutes or else.' It becomes a task then.

Explaining to my children, especially my daughter, that I will be dressed as a woman, and will be playing a eunuch was a tough task.

The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?'

I've had jobs that allow me the flexibility to achieve work-life balance, to be there when one of the kids sinks a jump shot or for the parent-teacher meetings. I can move tasks around. If I don't get something done at the office at 4:30 in the afternoon, I can go back to it at 10:00 in the evening.

I've tasted the dirt side. I've tasted being broke. I've been in the dumps, I've lived in motels as a kid. I want a different opportunity for my children. I never want them to see those things.

What you can say, what French parents say to their kids is, 'You don't have to eat everything, honey, you just have to taste it.' And it's that tasting little by little by little that gets kids more familiar with the food and more comfortable with it and more likely to eat it the next time.

One of my sons has a tattoo on his ankle that was meant to be Africa but looks like Australia, one of my sons mumbles, and one of my sons is a gay man. I'll be honest, there's been loads of nights when me and my wife have sat up and worried and worried and worried, 'What are we going to do if he doesn't stop mumbling?'

I think I wish I had never spanked my children, but I have. And they remember every instance like they tattooed it on their palms. I think it's a terrible lesson, to use physical punishment to make a point about not behaving, not being kind to their siblings, to other people. I mean that's just absurd. But I've lost it, I understand it.

If we're having a tough day, we'll bring the babies on, and suddenly, these crew guys who have, like, tattoos all over their necks are cooing and fawning.

Time has taught me that parents do the best they can with the light they are seeing with. That is what we all do.

I have a daughter who has taught me a lot along the way.

I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.

My parents taught me everything and set me up for life. I owe to them all the things I'm passionate about: music, art, the people I love, my career and family life, the fact that I have children and the way that I raise them.