Quotes About Parenting

You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him.

Children begin by needing their parents. Over time, they reject them. Eventually, they become them.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them-a mother's approval, a fathers nod-are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done.

If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality—and, in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

Parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorb the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

Is it like Pope John XXIII once said, that it's easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father?

There is no experience like having children. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in deepest way, then you should have children.

Jack," she said, "I just spoke to our son." "Mr. Harding to see Ron Jennings.

He was pitching to me before I could walk. He gave me wooden bat before my mother let me use scissors. He said I could make the major leagues one day if I had a plan, and if I stuck to the plan Of course, when you're that young, you nest in your parents' plans, not your own.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives

I've thought a lot about that night. I believe my mother saved my life. I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.

Exceptional children are often the product of unremarkable parents. -Mr.Holmes

The arc of a child's life only appears for a while to match the arc of a parent's, in reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve. His arc now needed to curve lower while his son's still curved higher.

Too many times I'd left him reaching for me, from a babysitter's arms. Am I still a mother? I asked myself... What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough? Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad.

He thought about Lina saying she was like their mom. She was scared that it would happen to her. There was something tentative about his sister; he wasn't like that. His mother must have somehow given him a confidence that she didn't have herself. Still, Lina was an artist. That took courage. He'd made a bargain with life. He'd spend his time gaining the ease they'd once needed. His kids could be artists. He hoped they would be.

I hope that for my kids, too, success will be its own reward. That they'll do their best because they want to win for themselves and for their team, without even calculating my reaction, much less having it be the driving force. I don't think they'll care that I'm not always ...snapping pictures of everything they do, to be pasted up in the commemorative album of their lives.

Maybe, like my parents and grandparents, I can trust myself to be a mom without a reference library to tell me how. Maybe I don't need magazines, television of the internet to tell me how. And maybe most of all I don't need marketing campaigns designed to make money off my good intentions to tell me how. Maybe I know how. Or, by God, I'll figure it out.

I wonder if we're giving our children the chance to really perform, if we're giving them and ourselves enough credit, as we pore over our parenting magazines and reference manuals. I wonder if we're getting in the way rather than out of the way, as we get sucked into the trap of competing with other parents to raise the most exceptional child.

I've read articles by child psychologists who have identified lack of self-esteem as the evil at the root of so much bad, even criminal behavior. I don't know if that's right. But even if it is, I don't believe Belle and Joe will gain self-esteem by constantly being told they're special just for being there.

Discernment includes seeing that even as we attempt to see our children for who they are, we also cannot fully know who they are or where their lives will take them. We can only love them, and accept them, and honor the mystery of their being.

Like a relay race with a long overlap in which the baton is passed—lasting at least eighteen years and often longer—our job as parents is to position our children to run their solo laps effectively.

Our goal in raising you was not that you'd be happy, but that you'd behave. You've