Quotes About Parenting

The best thing a man can do for his children is love their mother.

I was a wonderful parent before I had children.

Let us be different in our homes. Let us realize that, along with food, shelter, and clothing, we have another obligation to our children, and that is to affirm their "rightness." The whole world will tell them what's wrong with them—loud and often. Our job is to let our children know what's right about them.

Children don't need to have their feelings agreed with; they need to have them acknowledged.

It's important to make a distinction between allowing feelings and allowing actions," I replied. "We permit children to express all their feelings. We don't permit them to hurt each other. Our job is to show them how to express their anger without doing damage.

It's a bittersweet road we parents travel. We start with total commitment to a small, helpless human being. Over the years we worry, plan, comfort, and try to understand. We give our love, our labor, our knowledge, and our experience—so that one day he or she will have the inner strength and confidence to leave us.

Parents don't usually give this kind of response, because they fear that by giving a name to the feeling they'll make it worse. Just the opposite is true. The child who hears the words for what she is experiencing is deeply comforted. Someone has acknowledged her inner experience.

It's also not helpful when parents respond with more intensity than the child feels.

Finally, are most of my moments with my child spent asking her to "do things?" Or am I taking out some time to be alone with her—just to "be together"?

I was a wonderful parent before I had children. I was an expert on why everyone else was having problems with theirs. Then I had three of my own.

The passion and excitement you feel about a child's achievement should be saved for a moment when just the two of you are together. It's too much for the other siblings to have to listen to.

Children often experience praise of a brother or sister as a put-down of themselves. They automatically translate, 'Your brother is so considerate' into 'Mom thinks I'm not.' It's a good idea to save our enthusiastic comments for the ear of the deserving child.

When we give children advice or instant solutions, we deprive them of the experience that comes from wrestling with their own problems.

The more you try to push a child's unhappy feelings away, the more he becomes stuck in them. The more comfortable you can accept the bad feelings, the easier it is for kids to leg go of them.

When I get Kylie back, I'm not letting her walk anywhere by herself until she's fifty," Rachel mutters, knowing this is a pitiful horse/ barn-door statement.

Are we going to do this?" "We have to." "We don't have to. We could go to the police." "They'll kill her if we go to the police. The woman who has her is a monster. I heard it in her voice. We're the worst parents in America. You know those people who overdose in the front seats of their cars? We're dumber than that.

Your body is a longbow carved from hickory, her father said. Your body is a blade sharpened by tears, her mother said.

There isn't anything a parent won't do for her child. There is no limit on love.

I would look back on my parents' generosity and understand it one day. There isn't anything a parent won't do for her child. There is no limit on love.

Elizabeth chuckled. Sometimes seeing a kid suffer the indignity of having to work gave parents a secret joy.

Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart therefrom.

after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

You can't predict the outcome. You can't raise a child and then tell them what to think.

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. In its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor's complexity and sadness - and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love.