Quotes About Parenting

I'm the father of two boys and two girls, so I'm more an emotional wreck than a mushball.

My mother was a master juggler. If you ask her, she'll say she was a wreck. There's plenty of screaming that went on in the house, but I think it was necessary just to be heard. There were eight children!

I try my best to keep the house looking clean, but honestly, with four kids, you can find plenty of messes. I don't have a special technique other than I can't focus when the house is a wreck, so cleaning is therapeutic for me. That works in my favor sometimes.

I'd probably be one of these terribly over-protective parents whose children become a neurotic wreck because they've never been exposed to real life.

I do think being a prissy tomboy helps me in raising a son in general. I wrestle with him, play ball, play in the sandbox with him. As a mom, you get bruises, scrapes on your knee.

Parents should watch what their children watch and not use TV as a babysitter. If a show is objectionable they should turn it OFF. They should write the president of the network and tell him they are never going to watch that program again and why.

With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.'

The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.

David Shire and I have been happily married for 21 years! We have a 12-year-old son. David is a genius. He writes the most magnificent music and he is a devoted and loving husband and father. I am so blessed!

A parentologist is a person who writes a book about parenting that is very clear about answers to, 'How am I supposed to raise my child?' Some of these well-intentioned people may be a bit too sure-footed on the sometimes slippery slope of parenting.

Every since my wife, Adri, got pregnant with our now-eight-month-old daughter, Alicia, I regularly get asked what my plans are for feeding her. How can someone who writes about food and tests recipes for a living meet the picky and precise needs of an infant without losing his mind?

My daughter writes and is the editor of her school magazine.

A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over.

A mother to a reckless, feckless, one-off of a child—but what child isn't?

But who could teach daughters how to fly? Parents were by definition earthbound, grub eaters, feet in their own coffins, by dint of being parents.

We don't go on having babies, that's quite apparent. We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it - we're slow learners, we women - we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. But men don't dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death. Ah we're slow learners, Nanny countered. But *they* can't learn at all.

There is a limit to what any farther can do.

You always said I could see the present," said Candle, when she could speak. "But I can see nothing about her—my own daughter." Liir smoothed his hand over her silky flank. "Maybe that's not so surprising. Maybe all parents are blindest to their own offspring.

One parent of a Rebel explained, "The best way to wrangle the Rebel child is to give the kid the information to make a decision, present the issue as a question that he alone can answer, and let him make a decision and act without telling you. Let him make a decision without an audience. Audiences = expectations. If he thinks you're not watching, he won't need to rebel against your expectations.

See the child you have," as the saying goes, "not the child you wish you had." In the end, I agreed with Michel de Montaigne: "The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.

For instance, studies show that when mothers listen without offering advice or criticism while their children explain solutions to problems, the children markedly improve their problem-solving ability.

Siblings Without Rivalry and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk.

See the child you have," as the saying goes, "not the child you wish you had.

Studies show that if you reward people for doing an activity, they often stop doing it for fun; being paid turns it into "work." Parents, for example, are warned not to reward children for reading—they're teaching kids to read for a reward, not for pleasure.