Quotes About Parenting

The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up.

Perhaps nowhere is the selfless, sacrificial love of God more clearly displayed than when someone takes on the task of raising and loving a child who is not biologically theirs. They didn't have to take the job, they had a choice, but they chose to set aside their fears and accept the calling to be a stepparent, foster parent, or adoptive parent.

This is the thing: He isn't calling about his exam. I don't want to know that, but I do. He's calling to be reassured about something he can't put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don't imagine that. Children have stages; he'll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn't see. What was I supposed to say to Margaret? That I see it in him?

There's something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they're doing, who can only experiment.

holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went. Without knowing what it was, I'd felt that tension in his little groping arms and fitful legs, the discomfort of the foreknowledge

He's in that larva stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child's body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching.

I knew Michael had to be right about the argument that would come later because Mom didn't say anything about us being gone or even ask where we'd been. In the kitchen, Dad had the extra cheerfulness he got with us when Mom was angry at him. He let us each drop a lobster in the boiling water. He had to hold Alec so he'd be high enough not to get his hand splashed. Their black antennae whipped back and forth against the sides of the pot before disappearing.

With children, everything's already happening and then over with. It happens while you're trying to keep up and gone by the time you arrive at a view of things.

I know you're not thirsty. That's bullshit. Stop lying. Lie the fuck down, my darling, and sleep.

All the kids from daycare are in dreamland. The froggie has made his last leap. Hell no you can't go to the bathroom. You know where you can go? The f**k to sleep.

All the kids from day care are in dreamland. The froggie has made his last leap. Hell no, you can't go to the bathroom. You know where you can go? The fuck to sleep.

The cats nestle close to their kittens, The lambs have lain down with the sheep. You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear. Please go the fuck to sleep.

Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start.

It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy.

Why would a vampire create a younger vampire if there was a possibility the young one might end up destroying the old one?' Stephin stared. 'If you can explain to me how this is different from parenting in general I might know how to answer that.

But perhaps exoneration via the complex and poorly understood root of genetics is missing the broader point that maybe we shouldn't abuse children.

I mean, I look at my dad. He was twenty when he started having a family, and he was always the coolest dad. He did everything for his kids, and he never made us feel like he was pressured. I know that it must be a great feeling to be a guy like that.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn't want them to lose friends. He is his family's hero.

We know that children whose parents read them bedtime stories do better than those whose parents do not.

Art exhibitions would be less censored if they were rated, G or NC-17, like movies. People in general see galleries and museums as family-appropriate excursions. Censorship is a provided system which caters to lazy parenting, which is publicly-funded and socially accepted.

Give information. What we like about giving information is that, in a sense, you're giving the child a gift he can use forever. For the rest of his life he'll need to know that "milk turns sour when it's not refrigerated

The time for empathy is when a child wants you to know how he feels.

To help everyone better understand the difference between giving equally with measured amounts, and giving uniquely, in terms of each child's legitimate needs, I handed out the following illustrations:

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