Quotes About Parenting

What happens to children of critical-eyed parents is that they begin avoiding criticism at all costs because it becomes too threatening. Rather than finish a task, they'll stop an inch short and start something else.

Every day your child is assaulted with the pressures of not feeling good enough, pretty enough, athletic enough, etc., to be part of a peer group. What does she get from you? Realistic encouragement, kind truth, and empathy? Or criticism, put-downs, and "you ought to know better than that"?

Who would judge you?" she asked. "Who do you know who's done a good job? Name one parent that you think made it through without fucking their kid up in some specific way.

This was how you did it, how you raised children. You built them a house that was impervious to danger and then you gave them every single thing that they could ever want, no matter how impossible. You read to them at night. Why couldn't people figure this out?

It seemed like anything more than two kids was resigning yourself to a life of food in bulk and lack of funds.

Who would judge you? Who do you know who's done a good job? Name one parent that you think made it through without fucking their kid up in some specific way.

A wicked child is the most beautiful thing in the world.

One morning, Carl showed up at the door. "We need to take the kids to the doctor," he said, and I knew that he had practiced how he would say this and had decided that a direct statement, like it wasn't up for debate, was the best way to proceed. I imagined him saying it to his reflection in the mirror.

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.

Being a father helps me be more responsible... you see more things than you've ever seen.

When I was younger, my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working, which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old, so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked, anyway - and I started to do other things.

What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?

You can find God, make as much money as God or be as good-looking as God, and you'll still need to figure out a way to pack the emotional baggage you were handed when you were a kid.

that is the way of life—people coming and going. A poor excuse for a father I would be if I held you back and kept you from blooming.

See, in the Bible it advises to train up a child in the way he should go. I have done that as best as I know how. My job . . . is done. Now your job begins—to seek God's will and stay in it. I trust you to do that.

Adult children of a BPD parent] may seem old before their time or like an old soul (and probably were that way as children too.) They may easily assume the role of fixer and nurturer. They're the ones friends lean on, the ones to whom people tell their problems. Helping others gives them a sense of purpose and worth.

your parent may actually have consciously or unconsciously reinforced you as the caretaker to meet his or her needs, to be the nurturer and provider of emotional support,

Mam had never been anything but angry. Even when she smiled, she always stayed angry inside. No sadness, no joy. Just anger.

When we'd settled ourselves on the bed in Jamie's room, he said quietly, "Mam was angry at everything too.

The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children.

Her good, solid, middle-class mother had tried so hard to iron out her rough edges—and blamed herself when she realized she hadn't succeeded. Those rough edges had rubbed quite a few people the wrong way. Somehow Jo had always sensed those weren't the kind of people she wanted around her. And as she grew older, she saw that those who wanted girls to be docile and disciplined were often the same people who took advantage of them.

I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?

On TV they keep their kids. Love them.

King Solomon wrote, "Behold, children are a gift of the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth" (Psalm 127:3–4, emphasis added).