Quotes About Parenting

Parents are blamed but not trained.

Parents can raise children who are responsible, self-disciplined, and cooperative without relying on the weapon of fear; they can learn how to influence children to behave out of genuine consideration for the needs of parents rather than out of fear of punishment or withdrawal of privileges.

Active Listening provides parents with a way of moving in and offering to help the child define the problem for herself, and starting up the process of problem-solving within the child.

Parents report that Active Listening when a child is hurt and cries vigorously frequently brings about a dramatic and instantaneous cessation of the crying, once the child is certain her parent knows and understands how badly she feels or how much she is afraid. For the child, getting this understanding of her feelings is what she needs most.

I often tell parents, "Don't want your child to become something in particular; just want him to become." With such an attitude parents will inevitably find themselves feeling more and more accepting of each child and experiencing joy and excitement watching each become.

Parents can modify themselves, and reduce the number of behaviors that are unacceptable to them, by coming to see that their children are not their children, not extensions of themselves, but separate, unique. A child has the right to become what he is capable of becoming, no matter how different from the parent or the parent's blueprint for the child. This is his inalienable right.

Parents who satisfy their own needs through independent productive effort not only accept themselves but also needn't seek gratification of their needs from the way their children behave. They don't need their children to turn out in a particular way. People with high self-esteem, resting on a firm foundation of their own independent achievement, are more accepting of their children and the way they behave.

An accepting parent is willing to let a child develop his own "program" for life; a less accepting parent feels a need to program the child's life for him.

If a parent has no other source of self-worth and self-esteem, which is unhappily true of many parents whose lives are limited to raising "good" children, the stage is set for a dependency on children that makes the parent overanxious and severely needful that the children behave in particular ways.

The lesson for parents is that they can be helpful consultants to their children—they can share their ideas, experience, wisdom—if they remember to act like an effective consultant so they do not get fired by the clients whom they wish to help.

Parents who want children to value nonviolence in human relations will seem like hypocrites when they use physical punishment to "discipline." I recall a poignant cartoon depicting a father spanking his son over his knee, shouting, "I hope this teaches you not to go around hitting your baby brother!

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?

The boy's face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these he had died.

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.

Baby needs a new pair of shoes,' he said. 'My baby doesn't need any shoes.

I wonder why my parents didn't kill me before I was old enough to fool them.

Victor wants his children to have a better life. He encourages them to spend many years in college. Victor wants his children to become physicians, lawyers, accountants, executives, and so on. But in so encouraging them, Victor essentially discourages his children from becoming entrepreneurs.

Stay out of your adult children's family matters. Please note, parents, that your vision of the ideal lifestyle may be diametrically opposed to that of your adult son or daughter, as well as that of your son-in-law or daughter-in-law. Adult children resent interference from their parents. Let them run their own lives; ask permission even to give advice. Ask permission also when contemplating giving significant gifts to your children.

More than 80 percent have been married couple with children in which the wife did not work full time. What message did this send to the daughters of such couples? pg 182

The role of enlightened parents is too strengthen the weak.

Most of these parents pay all or a significant portion of their sons' and daughters' tuition and fees for training. Their vote is with their hard-earned money.

When a hideous man becomes a father And a son is born to him In the middle of the night He trembles and lights a lamp And runs to look in anguish On that child's face To see whom he resembles.

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.

Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.