Quotes About Parenting

Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it's an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.

Most parents' goal is to launch their children into the world with all the tools they need to make it on their own.

I was a truly loving mom, but I didn't have the tools to do the job.

There are benefits to adopting a toddler. They can tell you what's wrong. And - everything we did with our daughter was a first. Her first tooth fairy. Santa.

The funny thing about children is that, whichever room we're in, that's where they'll be. If I'm in the bath, they'll want to be in there too, playing with the toothbrush pot or brushing my hair.

Mom was a school teacher, and she had to be at work at 7:30 every morning. So Dad was in charge of us three kids around the breakfast table. He always made it creative: he did the bananas with the smiley face and the eyes with peanut butter on top, made us drink grapefruit every morning even though we had to do it holding our noses.

As a father, safety is always a top of mind issue for me.

When I come home from work, if I just played a really good game and I'm on top of the world, I think changing a diaper will humble me pretty quickly. On days when I struggle, I'll come home and I'll realize that it's not the end of the world.

There's a natural separation that kids have to go through with their parents, but then when you put that on top of actually having a career, it gets even more painful.

I'm not a great man to my children. I'm just 'Pop.' The more involved I am with my kids, it keeps my head flat on top.

It is often said that fathers can often find it hard to talk about their own feelings so there's no wonder they struggle to speak to their son or daughter about the topic.

I've learnt an enormous amount from my children. Mostly that my agenda isn't the most important thing in the world. For a while, I was trying to squeeze them into my life. And it was such torment! It makes you realise how selfish you are.

How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.

A lot of mums are torn between their work and missing out on important milestones in their children's lives.

I don't know how my mom put up with us. We'd walk around school in torn jeans, put on this punk-rock image and sing ballads everywhere we went.

When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn't that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we're going to Moscow. We're going to Italy. We're going to Toronto. We're going to New York.

When I feel like I'm not doing what I am supposed to as a mother, I will torture myself. I don't know how to deal with it. I find some consolation in the fact that all mommies feel it. If there was a way to cure mommy guilt, I would bottle it and be a bazillionaire.

When you have girl children they torture you!

When you have girl children, they torture you! If at any moment of the day I ever think I'm remotely cool at all, which is hardly ever, I have two daughters who make sure that never happens. They say, 'Mom, you didn't really wear that?' And I say, 'Yes, and pretty much everyone saw it.'

We're not co-sleeping. I'm all for what people want to do in their home, but I need my bed. I'm a terrible sleeper... I toss and turn and flip, and it would just be a disaster if there were a baby there. And I think it's important for a kid to have their own space.

Definitely for me, my personality, having children was a definite sea change. I found it very, very hard to balance show business and being a dad. The narcissism of show business and the complete, total focus of it was very difficult.

When my children were young, I was very cocky. I thought I could maintain total control.

So, the total number of hours spent on the stuff you have to do to take care of a family, working and caring for stuff at home, the total number of hours is actually about the same for mothers and fathers.

If you have a child, you're improvising with rules all day long, and some of them are total lies.