Quotes About Parenting

Whether it's "they didn't mean to do any harm," or "they did the best they could," these apologies obscure the fact that these parents abdicated their responsibilities to their children.

What makes a controlling parent so insidious is that the domination usually comes in the guise of concern.

Positive humor is one of our most valuable tools for strengthening family bonds. But humor that belittles can be extremely damaging within the family. Children take sarcasm and humorous exaggeration at face value. They are not worldly enough to understand that a parent is joking when he says something like, "We're going to have to send you to preschool in China." Instead, the child may have nightmares about being abandoned in some frightening, distant land.

When a child isn't allowed to deal with his frustrations on his own—to cry, for instance, then to handle the situation, and then to go on playing—because his mother is always there to intervene and rescue him from any discomfort, in adulthood he will be unable to handle even the most minor setbacks.

For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate—in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them.

When you apologize to your children, you are teaching them to trust their feelings and perceptions. You are saying, "The things I did that you thought were unfair were unfair. You were right to feel that way.

the child becomes an emotional dumping ground, allowing the parents to relieve themselves of some of their discomfort without having to face the source of their problems.

When a parent forces parental responsibilities on a child, family roles become indistinct, distorted, or reversed. A child who is compelled to become his own parent, or even become a parent to his own parent, has no one to emulate, learn from, and look up to. Without a parental role model at this critical state of emotional development, a child's personal identity is set adrift in a hostile sea of confusion.

While every parental behavior sends out a message of some kind, it is only the repetitive themes that form the child's picture of the world. If a girl sees her mother accepting physical abuse as well as psychological abuse, she learns that there are no limits to what a man is allowed to do to a woman. A battered woman demonstrates to her daughter that a woman must tolerate anything in order to hold on to a man.

The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members, and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them. Most societies glorify mothers, as if the mere act of giving birth makes them inherently capable of nurturing. That's simply not true.

I tried to imagine her as the mother of a child, but simply could not. I felt sorry for any offspring she might produce.

How could parents endure to labour for years, to sacrifice themselves so that their children should have nothing but the best, and to discover in the end that it had all been for so little, for a quick visit on national holidays and a few hours spent in front of the television set in a silence neither side knew how to break?

I believe you have the heart of a lioness. You will protect your children with all you have. But sometimes the right thing to do is nothing. We have to let them grow and make their own mistakes.

It's an awe-filled, wonderful, terrifying act to have a child, for you suddenly wear your heart on the outside of your body. You risk a little more each day as he wanders from your arms into the world.

While onlies have no at-home experience fighting with other children, they have another skill that siblings may not have. Onlies learn to fight with their parents and consequently have excellent verbal skills.

The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow up to make their decisions, following the patterns of their own lives.

How easily a parent's motive could be misconstrued by an injured child.

There can be no fooling ourselves into thinking this is something other than what it is—the willful ejection of Molly from our nest. It's too late for second thoughts, anyway. She has to be moved into her dorm in time for freshman orientation. It's been marked on the kitchen calendar for weeks—the expiration date on her childhood.

she leaped down the porch steps to her car. There was no thought. No planning. Just action. When you get a call that your kid is in the ER, there can be no room for thinking. Just the deepest fear imaginable, the kind that gripped like a steel band around her chest.

But it's the nature—no, the duty—of a child to grow up and leave you. Doesn't seem fair, does it? The person you love most in the world is destined to leave you and break your heart.

Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children." —Mignon McLaughlin

It takes nothing to father a child. It takes everything to be a dad.

You're good at so many things," Camille said. "I'm a fat loser," Julie stated. "And don't say I'm not fat because I am." Camille felt ill. She'd been blind to what Julie wanted. Was she a terrible mother for being overprotective? Was she letting her own fears smother her daughter? By withholding her permission to take surf rescue, she'd forced Julie to go behind her back.

Although she knew her mom was right about kids getting different treatment for doing the same thing