Quotes About Parenting

Everything you've ever fed him," I say. "His whole self is made completely out of your love.

What it is like to be any parent. The way you ache when they ache, the way you experience their stomachaches or heartaches or fear in your very self. It's as if, having once been placentally connected to your beating heart, having once inhabited your actual body, your children continue to live there with you. For better and worse, you are never alone again. Parental love defies your apartness from another person.

Sometimes I suspect that everybody sleeps with their kids, and the only difference is the level of denial you're in.

There's two things you can do with a kid like that. Way I see it. You can burst his bubble. Or you can wait and let life burst it. Let life do the dirty work for you. If you burst it he'll hate you forever. And he'll never really believe he couldn't have made it. He'll always think it's your fault for standing in his way. For not having more faith in him. Now, life. When life bursts your bubble, well. It's a little harder to argue with life.

Every now and then my love for that child hit me so hard I felt bowled over. Like a turtle knocked upside down onto its shell, unable to right itself. This was one of those moments.

If there's one thing I learned growing up, it's that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell them the damn truth.

She learned so much from these little talks with her son. He always swore he'd learned it from her and was only mirroring it back, but somehow the wisdom of her own advice surprised her as it came out of his mouth, and left her wondering if she was wise enough to heed it.

multiple kids. They always need something, but everything is always happening at once. You know they need you, but there's never much time to follow through. And yet I was the one who'd wanted the big family. The bustling household. Because I'd been an only child, raised by parents who barely spoke, either to each other or to me. So I loved the commotion.

No," he said. "Go." He snapped the last snap of Maya's onesie and lifted her by her underarms, setting her on her freshly dry butt in her crib. Then he took me by both shoulders. "I'll take tomorrow off work. I'll call it in as a family emergency. I'll put the baby's car seat in my car, and Maya and I will drive out to Bakersfield and pick up your mom.

Kids do stupid things. Even kids with good parents do stupid things. They're kids. No matter how you raise them, they're going to take a cruise through Stupid Land.

I think the whole problem with this world is that we control our kids too much. What they naturally are just seems too darned inconvenient for us, so we get impatient with it, and we tell them not to be who they are. No good comes of it. Not in my opinion.

To be a good parent or a good Sunday school teacher of children, we do not need to be people who have arrived; God simply calls us to be on the way, seeking, finding, and rejoicing in what we find.

Danger lurks along the paths walked by our children and their parents. If they are to safely negotiate the journey with increasing strength and sensitivity and without suffering debilitating wounds, then wise, committed companions must join them on the way.

Some forms of instruction seem to assume that the concept of the parent or the teacher can be fully captured in words and then transplanted, through the ears of the hearers, into their minds. This view of instruction sets the stage for failure. As adults, we can give children content—information and experiences—as material with which they can build understandings, but each child must construct his or her own concepts.

God did not intend for a father and a mother to shoulder the full load of child rearing without the support of an extended family and a faith community. Will our faith communities connect with young people and become an extended family for them?

God's design is to work through the everyday relationships of parents and children to provide children with experiences that prepare them for faith.

Teaching children is important for adults as well as children. As we tell children the stories of the faith, talk with them about God, and answer their questions, we refocus on God.

After all, growing up is nothing but an argument with your parents on the topic of whether or not you are grown. You scream am so am so am so from the moment you're born, and they fire back are not are not are not from the moment they've got you, and on it goes until you can say it loudest.

I abandoned her. It's the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand different ways. A father's only job is: do not abandon this child.

Punishment doesn't mean you aren't loved. On the contrary. You can only punish someone you love.

I suppose if you have ten children one of them might go into government, which is the same as losing a child really.

So my name is Scout. Yeah, my mom read To Kill a Mockingbird. Leave it to her to think 5th grade required reading is totally deep.

Oscar Wilde said: 'Biography lends to death a new terror.' Well, memoir adds that same promise to parenting.

I can't decide if I want a baby. And my friends who have kids don't make very good salesmen. They're like, "Oh you learn all this great stuff, like how to survive on two hours' sleep." If I want to learn that I'll just become a political prisoner or something.