Quotes About Parenting

Las vidas de nuestros hijos jamás deben ser dejadas al azar.

train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6).

never stop being a parent who deeply cares

But when our children are adults and making many decisions on their own without input from us, we see all the possible serious consequences of making the wrong ones. And we also see how we will be paying for those wrong decisions right along with them. When we observe life happening to our adult children in a challenging way, we want to help them. But how much is way overboard, and how little is not enough?

The kids who can calm themselves usually have warmer, more responsive mothers, while the moms of the angry kids are unpredictable in their behavior, and the moms of the detached kids are colder and dismissive.

Conventional wisdom held that coddling by mothers and other family members created clingy, overdependent youngsters who grew up into incompetent adults. Keeping an antiseptic rational distance was the proper way to rear children.

They find tending to a child unsatisfying and frustrating when it interferes with their personal interests and activities. Their complaints are not centered on a partner's lack of support—they dismiss their need for support most of the time—but rather on their own irritation and discomfort.

As long as you live under my roof, you'll do what I say! he shouted. Then I'll find another roof, I thought. You understand me? he said. Yes sir, I understand I said, and I did too. I understand that a new rooftop would do wonders for me.

fix it. But I know my impulse to tear open the closed, secret place in my daughter comes from a need to stave off my own fear. When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair.

As I looked at their faces, love filled me up. It was the wise and difficult love that reminds parents that all we can really do is be true to our own spiritual unfolding and trust that our examples will one day help them be true to theirs. For children have a guiding spiritual wisdom inside of them, too.

But her sweet-tooth daughter isn't as lucky. She drank falooda mixed with morphine.

He said he was raising his kids to believe in the will not the rules and that we would go to the Unitarian Church.

Whether adult children of toxic parents were beaten when little or left alone too much, sexually abused or treated like fools, overprotected or overburdened by guilt, they almost all suffer surprisingly similar symptoms: damaged self-esteem, leading to self-destructive behavior. In one way or another, they almost all feel worthless, unlovable, and inadequate.

Parents who feel good about themselves do not have to control their adult children. But [toxic parents] operate from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with their lives and a fear of abandonment. Their child's independence is like the loss of a limb to them. As the child grows older, it becomes ever more important for the parents to pull the strings that keep the child dependent. As long as toxic parents can make their son or daughter feel like a child, they can maintain control.

Many of the time-honored [parenting] techniques that have been passed down from generation to generation are, quite simply, bad advice masquerading as wisdom.

Like a chemical toxin, the emotional damage inflicted by these parents spreads throughout a child's being, and as the child grows, so does the pain.

Strange as it may seem, many people are still controlled by their parents after their deaths. The ghosts that haunt them may not be real in a supernatural sense, but they're very real in a psychological one. A parent's demands, expectations, and guilt trips can linger long after that parent has died.

No matter how toxic your parents might be, you still have a need to deify them. Even if you understand, on one level, that your father was wrong to beat you, you may still believe he was justified. Intellectual understanding is not enough to convince your emotions that you were not responsible.

If their children misbehave, they'll take away privileges, but they won't assault their dignity or value.

The only way emotional assaults or physical abuse can make sense to a child is if he or she accepts responsibility for the toxic parent's behavior.

In fact, not only have a good many formerly abused children grown into nonabusing adults, but a number of these parents have great difficulty with even modest, nonphysical methods of disciplining their children. In rebellion against the pain of their own childhoods, these parents shy away both from setting limits and from enforcing them. This, too, can have a negative impact on a child's development, because children need the security of boundaries.

Alla barn längtar att känna sig trygga, skyddade och älskade av sina föräldrar. De behöver också få lov att växa upp och bli oberoende. Paradoxalt nog kan människor bli oberoende vuxna bara om deras behov av beroende blev fyllt när de var barn. Om deras behov av beroende inte fylldes finns det en värkande tomhet inom dem, och den känslan bär de med sig in i vuxenlivet.

solid majority have suffered a damaged sense of self-worth because a parent had regularly hit them, or criticized them, or "joked" about how stupid or ugly or unwanted they were, or overwhelmed them with guilt, or sexually abused them, or forced too much responsibility on them, or desperately overprotected them.