Quotes About Parenting

I admit that at times my prayer for my children is nothing more than vocalized unbelief aimed at God.

At the deepest level of what we do as parents, we should hear the heartbeat of a loving, grace-giving Father who freely adopts rebels and transforms them into loving sons and daughters.

We're very comfortable thinking, good parenting in, good children out.

Because we don't know the state of our children's souls, and because they might simply want to please us by praying to be saved, we must continue to give them the Law and encourage them to ask God for faith to believe that He is as good as He says He is.

Every faithful parent must give their children guidance, direction, rules, and commands. What we are saying is that these things are not to be the primary theme of our teaching. The primary theme is to be Jesus Christ and the work he's already done.

Like us, our children crave the blessed benediction: "You are good!" But the Bible says that because we are not good, those words no longer apply to us. We're not good.

Even though our children cannot and will not obey God's law, we need to teach it to them again and again. And when they tell us that they can't love God or others in this way, we are not to argue with them. We are to agree with them and tell them of their need for a Savior.

Some parents live more like reclusive monks than like first-century Christians who were famous for their love for and service within their cities, cities that in many cases were more overtly wicked than cities found in modern-day America.

Our children's salvation is not dependent on the strength of our faith or the shrewdness of our answers.

Our goal as parents should not be to create a bunch of good kids, but rather to have them see how dead they are and that there is only life in the work of Jesus Christ.

The world tells us that our children's success depends upon our success. The world knows nothing of God's ability to use our failures as means to bless. "What is impossible with men is possible with God" (Luke 18:27).

We can treat our children fairly, for example, but if our hearts are warring toward them while we're doing it, they won't think they're being treated fairly at all. In fact, they'll respond to us as if they weren't being treated fairly.

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

Ma vision de l'avenir est si précise que, si j'avais des enfants, je les étranglerais sur l'heure.

Children turn, and must turn, against their parents, and the parents can do nothing about it, for they are subject to a law which decrees the relations among all the living: i.e., that each engenders his own enemy.

It's a funny thing - when I'm crazed with work, spending time with my children relaxes me. Yet, at the end of a long weekend with them, the very thing I need to relax is a little work and time away from them!

"Maternity," it has been said, "is a matter of fact, paternity is a matter of opinion."

When you have a child, you get a surge of ambition, or a surge of hormonal urgency, to get something done, something worthy of your new station in life.

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

There was a candor about him I noticed in people whose parents had given them something unconditional and absolute growing up.

A lot of mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves.

What I've realized is that life doesn't count for much unless you're willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Any fool can have a child. That doesn't make you a father. It's the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.

The parent-child connection was as deep and wide as the ocean, as mysterious as heaven, as impossible to explain as love.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, few parents expose their children to those works in the original these days, and some of their reasons make sense. Who wants children growing up with the idea that stepmothers are wicked, ugly people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and princesses are all white? At the same time, I worry about children who grow up thinking that every story has a happy ending and no one gets permanently hurt along the way.