Quotes About Parenting

My parents paid me small amounts for cleaning my room or cleaning the dishes and stuff, but I never really had a real job before I started on my professional tennis career.

The kids know what I'm doing when I exercise, and that's powerful. So don't just tell your kids to go play outside. Take a moment off your computer, put on your tennis shoes, hop outside and help them start their game and run off some energy.

In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.

At the end of the day, we get to be parents, greeting our lovely, crazy children and talking about their day, making sure they brush their teeth, so all the tension from our day is tabled... until the next.

The source of so much of my anxiety in life and the tensions in my relationship is my anxiety about my kid. It's all very abstract and unfounded and ungrounded.

There is a huge tension in trying to write with small children because they demand your attention and your time with a fierceness that can be matched by nothing else, but if you are successful in writing while you have small children, I actually think that your writing is likely to be deeper than it was before.

If I feel like I've done a great job during an interview with the president of the United States live in the Oval Office, it doesn't give me a tenth of the good feeling of going to the school play and making eye contact with my kids as they're onstage delivering their lines. Nothing compares with that moment of connection.

My parents had a strong impact on who I am today. My mother and dad both encouraged us to think about the long term - where you wanted to be - to think about education, to think about what is right and what is wrong, and to do things that will help you in the long run.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

My dad made a huge impact on me in terms of right and wrong.

Being a dad is like - there's nothing more important. So the exploration of that in stories, with parents and fathers and brothers, siblings, I just think that you're always in the terrain of love, whether it's absence of love or the giving of love or the desire for love.

My son was about five or six months old, and he was ill, and I was sent to New York to interview three people back to back. I got home, and I saw my baby. He had been very ill, and he was on three kinds of antibiotics. I'd been away for eight days. I looked at him and thought, 'What am I doing? I'm a terrible mother and a terrible journalist.'

Parents, you know, can be terrible.

Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.

I'm terribly prone to anxiety. I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children.

I wasn't terribly sociable. I had two or three friends at school. I drew things, played with Lego. My parents left me free to do whatever made me happy.

I believe that we should, on biblical grounds, tell all parents of mentally disabled children that God loves their children, regrets terribly that they are disabled, and will, when they die, carry them gently into a heavenly life where every person is forever whole.

I remember trying to be funny, and both of my parents were terribly funny. My father was also very dignified, but my mother was an absolute ding-a-ling, a ripper.

My kids completely understand that I may be on a huge show or in a big movie, but most of the time, they are not terribly impressed.

I remember my daughter coming back from school one day and saying that the teacher had asked anybody whose parents were divorced to put their hands up. I felt angry but also guilty. And you feel sort of terribly responsible in that sort of situation.

My children are terrific babies.

We all want our children to be terrific, but you can't force a child into being what you want it to be.

My father is not that comfortable with children, but he's a terrific father for an adult.