Quotes About Parenting

We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

If you want your children to eat better, don't tell them what to do; eat better yourself.

Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.

The main reason to be suspicious of fruit as a food for children was that it was just so delicious.

We know that letting our children eat too many sweets makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don't want their child to get cavities. Yes despite their anxiety about sweets, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks and cereals which are sweets in all but name.

Boys eat better when their parents continue to expect them to eat vegetables and include them in home-cooked meals as they get older. Or - better still - get them to prepare the home-cooked meals themselves.

To give a child the things they love to eat bestows a heroic glow. Seeing a child fed reassures you that you have done your duty as a parent, like a mother bird ferrying worms to the nest.

Almost every parent wants the best for their child, but they are frequently too hung up on the indignities of the past to see the real problems in front of them or to separate a child's needs from their own urges.

Feeding children is an immense responsibility.

Force-feeding is a crime of passion, driven by a parent's desire to see a child eat; as with other crimes of passion, the perpetrator has lost sight of the loved one's autonomy.

Indulgence makes a child fat. Restriction makes a child fat and unhappy.

Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite.

The true objective is independence: for a child to reach the point where they can regulate their own intake of food and to choose the things that will do them good while giving them pleasure. Weaning them off milk is one thing. But the real task for a parent is to wean children off needing you.

Many parents, especially those who themselves struggle with their weight, believe that a child is incapable of self-control when it comes to eating.

Of all the foods that we could give a child a free rein over, cereal makes the least sense. Parents let children choose cereal but dictate which vegetables they eat; it should be the other way around.

Dear Bea—Can't make it today—sorry. Parent arriving lunch per. to ask why son got 35% on Midterm. Must answer him. How? Sylvia Dear Syl—Don't try. There's no communication; no one really listens. Every man is an island. Give him a container of coffee instead. Bea

everyone's father or mother or child

I'm not saying it will be easy to let my little girl go, and to know that I'm no longer the first man she'll turn to

When she was born, she looked so much like him that I can remember wondering if anyone would believe I had anything to do with the little miracle in my arms.

Right from the start Abigail used to moan and fidget as her hair was relaxed or braided or thermally reconditioned, but her dad was determined that his child wasn't going to embarrass him in public. That all stopped when Abigail turned eleven and calmly announced that she had ChildLine on speed?dial and the next person who came near her with a hair extension, chemical straightener, or, God forbid, a hot comb, was going to end up explaining their actions to Social Services.

He said it was wife's idea to name their daughter after him but I didn't believe him. Could have been worse, I decided. It could have been Nigella.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

There is nothing worse that a thirteen-year-old boy. You're embarrassed by your parents, and you're trying to find your independance because, deep inside, you are so dependent on your mom.

Many parents aren't all that accustomed to being patient and present for their kids anymore, if only because they're simply not given the opportunity to be patient and present. Jobs get in the way. School gets in the way. After-school activities get in the way. As I have learned—as I am still learning—patience and presence are muscles that must be developed and exercised regularly.