Quotes About Parenting

Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that's one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.

You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero's journey." -- Anne Lamott, "Twelve Truths I Learned from Writing to Life

fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue. Grape jelly was best, by Jar, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry, for instance—

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.

The AI told her not long ago that her Why? period might have been the shortest on record - because Mum and Dad answered every Why? in detail AND made sure she understood, so she wouldn't ask that particular Why? again. After a month Why? wasn't fun anymore, and she went on to other things.

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

Is your adult child out of the nest--and all you dreamed he would be? Affirm him over and over; enjoy him as your dear friend. Don't tell him what to do! Don't tell his spouse what to do! Those days are over.

Think about it: whether your child is tiny or college-age or anywhere in between, verbal put-downs are a subtle but very real form of child abuse.

Why is it so important to affirm a child? Because a child who is truly accepted by his parents and/or influencing adults can growing up learning to accept himself. Without a constant, debilitating sense of guilt and defeat, he will become at ease with himself. He'll be able to admit his own failures and weaknesses. He'll be able to forget himself and love others. He won't spend his energies worrying about what people think of him, and he won't spend his energies putting down others.

Did I love this child too much to do what I planned to do?

I wanted this child-this boy who was now two years older than when I'd found him-and yet I wanted everything else for him, and my soul was torn, just as my heart was torn.

You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?

You're only ever as happy as your least happy child?' 

You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child—whichever one is unhappy.

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years?

Sometimes Rebecca thought that the whole point of having lots of daughters was, the law of averages said at least one of them might behave right at any given time.

You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child—whichever one is unhappy. She

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years? Although Denny might not be okay, even now. Abby

You wake in the morning, you're feeling fine, but all at once you think, "Something's not right. Something's off somewhere; what is it?" And then you remember that it's your child—whichever one is unhappy. She circled the hall to close the door to

The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

Thinking time," their father called it. Their mother would shout at him and stamp her foot, or slap Willa in the face (such a stinging, shameful experience, being slapped in the face—so scary to the person's eyes), or shake Elaine like a Raggedy Ann

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years?

Sometimes it seemed to her that with all her fretting over Denny, she had let her other children slip through her fingers unnoticed. Not that she had neglected them, but she certainly hadn't screwed up her eyes and focused on them the way she had focused on Denny. And yet it was Denny who complained of feeling slighted!

She'd been so intent on not turning into her mother, she had gone and turned into her father.